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Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War
The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after “a major achievement” (New Republic). Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless. In this authoritative and objective account, historian R.M. Douglas examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the forced migrations were conceived, planned, and executed, and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The first comprehensive history of this immense manmade catastrophe, Orderly and Humane is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing." It may also be the most significant untold story of the World War II.
508 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 30, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
August 15, 2012
This is a readable but depressing book on the expulsion of German speaking citizens from Poland and Czechoslovakia just after the the Second World War. It was tantamount to ethic cleansing and was very similar to the ethnic cleansing practised by the German Nazis during World War 2. It was retribution on a massive scale to civilians of German descent. I strongly recommend this book about a little known affair.
July 7, 2014
Important, must-read history of the little known history of the massive, deadly expulsions of ethnic "Germans" -- mostly innocent women and children -- from Eastern Europe immediately after WW2 and extending to 1947 and beyond. Asks and answers lots of thought-provoking questions on guilt, morality, revenge, cynicism, and international law that are still relevant today. I for one didn't know that the Dachau concentration camp closed only in ... 1960, when the last ethnic Germans that were housed there immediately after the end of the war, left the camp. Some of the expellees were antifascists and escaped Jews from German descent. Their anti-Nazi activities during the war didn't save them from forced expulsion.
June 30, 2019
My brother's wife is half German. Her mother and family considered themselves German and were living peacefully in what was Czechoslovakia. Her mother and grandmother came to England just after WWII.
I never fully understood what they went through but this book has certainly opened my eyes. They were interned in a concentration camp and were starving when my sister in law's father arrived with the British force he was part of. He and others were appalled by what they saw. He married her and brought mother and daughter to England.
My question is this, why is this massive ethnic cleansing of German people, most being woman and children, hardly referred to in history books of the time? How many people today know of it?
I certainly didn't realise the scale.
I never fully understood what they went through but this book has certainly opened my eyes. They were interned in a concentration camp and were starving when my sister in law's father arrived with the British force he was part of. He and others were appalled by what they saw. He married her and brought mother and daughter to England.
My question is this, why is this massive ethnic cleansing of German people, most being woman and children, hardly referred to in history books of the time? How many people today know of it?
I certainly didn't realise the scale.
August 25, 2021
The expulsion of the ethnic Germans from eastern Europe after World War 2 makes for truly grim reading. While the author argues that it was not as bad as the Holocaust, it was anything but an "orderly and humane" movement of people (to quote Potsdam). The more I read about the Second World War and its aftermath, the less cause I see to celebrate it.
July 4, 2019
This book is shocking and horrifying but also amazing. Shocking that we haven't heard of these atrocities, horrifying that they occurred in Prague, amazing that R. M. Douglas has written about this subject. Not all Czechs were bad, though. Here is a quote of a Prague resident which "typified the mixture of exasperation and alarm felt by many Czechoslovaks:"
"Devil take the Germans! During the war, they decimated our nation and now, because of them, along comes a fresh scandal...
Let nobody fall back on the excuse that the Germans have done the same things. Either we are qualified to stand as their judges, in which case we cannot conduct ourselves as they do, or we are no different from them, and give up the right to judge them."
November 6, 2023
A WOW book about post-WW2 Europe
Orderly and Humane is one of those WOW, eye-opening books that come along only every now and then. It focuses on the aftermath of World War 2 in Europe and how countries brutally forced the repatriation of ethnic Germans back to Germany. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, all did this. The methods used were horribly brutal, nearly always, and resulted in the deaths of 100,000s of people, most of whom were women, children, and the elderly. They were forced to abandon their homes and property, often given only minutes notice. They were limited to about 1 small suitcase usually and were allowed very little money to start their new life in a country many of them didn’t even know directly. They often were put in camps, which were horribly violent and inhumane, while awaiting deportation, where many died. When they were deported it was usually in packed railcars where many died enroute. Upon arrival in Germany, those who survived were at the bottom of the social and economic heap, facing problems of poverty and economic opportunity even to this day for them and their families.
This book brings to mind Keith Lowe’s brilliant book, Savage Continent, which was also about the aftermath of World War 2. While Lowe looked at what happened in many countries on a broad scale, Douglas’s book looks at a very specific group of people, ethic Germans, who didn’t live in Germany.
Reading this book, Orderly and Humane, one realizes that World War 2 did not end in 1945, but actually it extended far more deeply into the 20th century. Some camps for ethnic Germans weren’t closed until the 1960s. Some of those deported still face the horrible after effects of deportation — endemic poverty, loss of property they have been legally excluded from recovering, and loss of citizenship. Even those areas that forced deportation faced long-term poverty due to the abandonment of their economy by the able-bodied ethnic Germans who were forced out. Those who replaced them were often there to exploit what remained behind and economically these areas didn’t recover.
Douglas’s title of course is ironic as the treatment ethic Germans in Europe faced was neither orderly or humane. This irony is like how some refer to World War 2 as “The Good War”, as it’s hard to imagine how a war that brought about the deaths of 50 million people as good. The extreme horrors of the war itself were so profoundly felt by nearly every person in Europe (it seems) at that time. So psychologically, the years following the war could not be a simple return to “normal” life. That simpler era was dead. Instead people were forced into prolonged crisis mode during the war. In my view, psychologically they needed release after such prolonged trauma. So afterward, many wanted revenge, or at the least to find someone to blame. For many Europeans, ethnic Germans were those viewed as being at fault. Certainly many of the ethnic Germans supported Germany’s rise under Hitler as he rode roughshod over Europe in the later 1930s until war’s end, or at the least most didn’t oppose him. So with Allied victory, casting blame is logical. Allied occupiers (including the Americans, British, and Soviets) willingly supported and actually carried out the deportation of the ethnic Germans. The Allies themselves faced extreme suffering under the war and understandably didn’t see a reason for treating ethic Germans, who were viewed as part of a defeated enemy, with humanity and good will.
And of course the US had its own ethnic cleansing during the war when it forced Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona into detention camps with minutes notice where that lost their property and economic livelihoods, and could only take with them what they could individually carry. While the camps weren’t as horrible as those the ethic Germans lived in, Japanese Americans still faced a loss of freedom and dignity (but fortunately they weren’t routinely, physically mistreated or starved as the ethnic Germans were) and were thought to all be disloyal to the US, even though no evidence ever proved that.
As a trained historian, I have long viewed World War 2 era as the pivotal event of the 20th century. I have long contended that World War 1 was what led to it. But with somewhat under-developed thinking earlier in my teaching career, I simplistically saw the Cold War as its aftermath. After reading this book, I see that post-war Europe suffered from World War 2 far longer and much more deeply than I realized. If you read Lowe’s Savage Continent and then Douglas’s Orderly and Humane, you will never look at the devastating impact of World War 2 the same way again.
Orderly and Humane is one of those WOW, eye-opening books that come along only every now and then. It focuses on the aftermath of World War 2 in Europe and how countries brutally forced the repatriation of ethnic Germans back to Germany. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, all did this. The methods used were horribly brutal, nearly always, and resulted in the deaths of 100,000s of people, most of whom were women, children, and the elderly. They were forced to abandon their homes and property, often given only minutes notice. They were limited to about 1 small suitcase usually and were allowed very little money to start their new life in a country many of them didn’t even know directly. They often were put in camps, which were horribly violent and inhumane, while awaiting deportation, where many died. When they were deported it was usually in packed railcars where many died enroute. Upon arrival in Germany, those who survived were at the bottom of the social and economic heap, facing problems of poverty and economic opportunity even to this day for them and their families.
This book brings to mind Keith Lowe’s brilliant book, Savage Continent, which was also about the aftermath of World War 2. While Lowe looked at what happened in many countries on a broad scale, Douglas’s book looks at a very specific group of people, ethic Germans, who didn’t live in Germany.
Reading this book, Orderly and Humane, one realizes that World War 2 did not end in 1945, but actually it extended far more deeply into the 20th century. Some camps for ethnic Germans weren’t closed until the 1960s. Some of those deported still face the horrible after effects of deportation — endemic poverty, loss of property they have been legally excluded from recovering, and loss of citizenship. Even those areas that forced deportation faced long-term poverty due to the abandonment of their economy by the able-bodied ethnic Germans who were forced out. Those who replaced them were often there to exploit what remained behind and economically these areas didn’t recover.
Douglas’s title of course is ironic as the treatment ethic Germans in Europe faced was neither orderly or humane. This irony is like how some refer to World War 2 as “The Good War”, as it’s hard to imagine how a war that brought about the deaths of 50 million people as good. The extreme horrors of the war itself were so profoundly felt by nearly every person in Europe (it seems) at that time. So psychologically, the years following the war could not be a simple return to “normal” life. That simpler era was dead. Instead people were forced into prolonged crisis mode during the war. In my view, psychologically they needed release after such prolonged trauma. So afterward, many wanted revenge, or at the least to find someone to blame. For many Europeans, ethnic Germans were those viewed as being at fault. Certainly many of the ethnic Germans supported Germany’s rise under Hitler as he rode roughshod over Europe in the later 1930s until war’s end, or at the least most didn’t oppose him. So with Allied victory, casting blame is logical. Allied occupiers (including the Americans, British, and Soviets) willingly supported and actually carried out the deportation of the ethnic Germans. The Allies themselves faced extreme suffering under the war and understandably didn’t see a reason for treating ethic Germans, who were viewed as part of a defeated enemy, with humanity and good will.
And of course the US had its own ethnic cleansing during the war when it forced Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona into detention camps with minutes notice where that lost their property and economic livelihoods, and could only take with them what they could individually carry. While the camps weren’t as horrible as those the ethic Germans lived in, Japanese Americans still faced a loss of freedom and dignity (but fortunately they weren’t routinely, physically mistreated or starved as the ethnic Germans were) and were thought to all be disloyal to the US, even though no evidence ever proved that.
As a trained historian, I have long viewed World War 2 era as the pivotal event of the 20th century. I have long contended that World War 1 was what led to it. But with somewhat under-developed thinking earlier in my teaching career, I simplistically saw the Cold War as its aftermath. After reading this book, I see that post-war Europe suffered from World War 2 far longer and much more deeply than I realized. If you read Lowe’s Savage Continent and then Douglas’s Orderly and Humane, you will never look at the devastating impact of World War 2 the same way again.
February 28, 2016
Very thorough and fair book - certainly in the UK this is a part of history few people are aware of. I thought Douglas's decision not to focus on personal stories was good (other books have done this already). It is a tremendously relevant book at the moment as we live through a time with mass movements of people in Europe (for different reasons than post 1945). I found it a terrifically interesting book.
March 24, 2025
A well-written scholarly work. I really enjoyed reading this orderly and faithful account of a part of history I didn't know existed. It seems that post-WW2, German nationals living in other parts of Europe were treated little better than the Jews.
September 19, 2012
This is a great book of a little publicized event at the end of World War II. The horrors of Nazi crimes shadowed the abuse the German people withstood after the war. They suffered much, but, of course, less than those oppressed by the Nazis including the Holocaust. However, suffer they did and this expulsion of over 12 million people and its excesses are a lesson for the world in the future. Ove one million died in the moving of Germans primarily from Poland and Czechoslovakia but also Austria, Yugoslavia, and Romania.
May 23, 2014
A good comprehensive history of the expulsion of Germans following World War Two. Douglas depicts the decisions and the consequences fairly without ever losing sight of what this followed. (See for exampler Mazower's Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe.) I would have liked more coverage of the problems of accommodating the expellees within Occupied Germany but it's hard to really say more than Douglas did.
January 13, 2013
A thorough panorama of the biggest example of ethnic cleansing in history, when the ethnic German population in Poland and Czechoslovakia was (understandably?) forcibly sent to Germany following WWII. These horrible episodes are fairly unknown and constitute an essential link between WWII and the German economic miracle of the 50s and 60s.
December 19, 2020
It tells the so far untold complex story of the expulsion of Germans from other countries after the war. It touched me deeply. I am Jewish, and my book about emigration and Holocaust is gooing to be published in September 2021, but I don't believe in collective guilt or punishment. Two wrongs do not make a right. And I think this is an important book.
April 27, 2016
The condition of German citizens during and after the war is a subject I'm very interested in; but unfortunately, the presentation in this book is from a political/big picture standpoint. I am looking for something more personal, with individual stories.
July 26, 2016
I had family members who went through this. Relieved to finally read about it. My mom's memories were confusing and emotional. I needed to see the big picture and I sure didn't get it through my school years.
June 1, 2013
The cover photo is a novel waiting to be written. The winners get to write--or in this case suppress--history. I suspect that I am like many readers who thought they knew the "big stories" of World War II but I had no inkling of this, the most massive ethnic cleansing in history. War is a very, very blunt instrument
August 23, 2012
Compellingly told (I love the way each chapter begins with a quiet biographical moment), scrupulously researched and balanced. It's fantastic that something like this has come out in English - the whole episode is one unknown continent. Fascinating.
April 7, 2021
A clear a detailed account of the expulsion of the Volksdeutsch from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The detailed handling of the expulsions, the collection and storage of the human ciphers to be deposited on the other side of the border are covered in some detail. The reactions of the Allied officers and officials tasked with the oversight and recorded. The effect of the expulsions on the expelling countries, impact on economics, loss of skilled workers, loss of productive capacity etc is also addressed.
The justifications for the expulsions are examined and dismissed one by one. This was a political action not a spontaneous expression of the animus of the populations.
Finally some attempt is made to explain the official silence in the expelling countries and well as the receiving country is made. Current attitudes in the expelling countries are examined and discussed at length, and the history of the relationship between Germany both as FRG and BRG and the expelling countries, primarily Poland and Czechia are dealt with.
My personal reaction was that this explains a lot about current Czech politics - why else would President Zeman be so popular if he had not promised those who stole the farms and businesses that he would protect them against restitution and the same is true in Poland.
The justifications for the expulsions are examined and dismissed one by one. This was a political action not a spontaneous expression of the animus of the populations.
Finally some attempt is made to explain the official silence in the expelling countries and well as the receiving country is made. Current attitudes in the expelling countries are examined and discussed at length, and the history of the relationship between Germany both as FRG and BRG and the expelling countries, primarily Poland and Czechia are dealt with.
My personal reaction was that this explains a lot about current Czech politics - why else would President Zeman be so popular if he had not promised those who stole the farms and businesses that he would protect them against restitution and the same is true in Poland.
August 28, 2019
In his beautifully written and incisive portrait of the post WW II Volksdeutsche of Central and East Europe, R. M. Douglas captures the plight of populations thrown on the "losing" side of history as written by the victors. Though there are parallels with other forced "losers" - Serbs, Afrikaaners, ethnic Russians in former Soviet republics - no other European group has yet followed the full, tragic trajectory of those German communities caught on the wrong side of not just the Iron Curtain, but of "The Good War" itself. The victors did much to tarnish their own moral mantle by applying the same standards of collective guilt for which criminals against humanity were judged and hanged at Nuremburg.
Douglas avoids the pitfalls of ethnic special pleading and political axe-grinding by emphasizing that pro-Western "democrats", and Allied powers, were as facilitating of this forced transfer as the conveniently evil Stalin. He demonstrates that the true atrocity was not in the scattered acts of gross violence accompanying the transfer, but in the uprooting process itself and the mentality behind it. Not that it was "clean" by any means - graphic illustrations of deported children approach Auschwitz standards. If one judges that these volk "had it coming," then that must apply to these children; and if so, when is "yours" coming to get you?
The author also emphasizes that the state, and not popular wrath, enforced the expulsions. That may be so, but the deep national animosities already close to the surface before the war were stripped to the bone afterward. The ethnic Germans of these regions had fewer friends than Jews under Nazi occupation, and fewer that would defend or shelter them.
One ironic and lasting legacy was the precedent set for other "transfers" and expulsions of "reactionary" peoples" - specifically the Arabs of Palestine. So many of the incoming postwar Zionist immigrants originated in the very nations expelling its ethnic Germans - Poland in particular - that the example was consciously copied. Czechoslovakia was a major arms source for the Haganah; and if enemies of postwar victory deserved to be treated as such in Europe, the same law of retribution obviously applied elsewhere as far as those arms could reach.
Douglas takes the leaders of Poland and Czechoslovakia to task for seeing the "Recovered Lands" as fresh field for socialist planning. The sorry state of Silesia and the Sudetenland after their "cleansing" attests, rather, to the *lack* of serious state planning and more to political expediency via scapegoating a vulnerable, despised minority. Douglas is spot-on, however, in rejecting Elazar Barkan's self-serving classification of victims as "deserving" vs. "undeserving." No coherent framework of human rights is possible through such relativism. Barkan's apparent motive in such typology - despite his "human rights professorship" - was to deligitimize Palestinian claims toward Israel, with the Volksdeutsche expulsions as precedent. (Again reinforcing the context of Haganah actions.) This typology of "expendable peoples" who suffer "necessarily" for the greater good (as always defined by others) is *exactly* the fascist, genocidal rationale that the likes of Barkan claim to oppose.
One must also wonder if the demonizing of Slobodan Milosevic, for applying the same legacy of Allied-endorsed transfer he witnessed as a child in Yugoslavia, wasn't a case of conscience coming home to roost; while Americans endorsing this policy were of the generation who remembered "bulldozing" at home, by which local communities were rendered "Negro free." An excellent work whose implications, lessons - and consequences - travel beyond the confines of its time and place.
Douglas avoids the pitfalls of ethnic special pleading and political axe-grinding by emphasizing that pro-Western "democrats", and Allied powers, were as facilitating of this forced transfer as the conveniently evil Stalin. He demonstrates that the true atrocity was not in the scattered acts of gross violence accompanying the transfer, but in the uprooting process itself and the mentality behind it. Not that it was "clean" by any means - graphic illustrations of deported children approach Auschwitz standards. If one judges that these volk "had it coming," then that must apply to these children; and if so, when is "yours" coming to get you?
The author also emphasizes that the state, and not popular wrath, enforced the expulsions. That may be so, but the deep national animosities already close to the surface before the war were stripped to the bone afterward. The ethnic Germans of these regions had fewer friends than Jews under Nazi occupation, and fewer that would defend or shelter them.
One ironic and lasting legacy was the precedent set for other "transfers" and expulsions of "reactionary" peoples" - specifically the Arabs of Palestine. So many of the incoming postwar Zionist immigrants originated in the very nations expelling its ethnic Germans - Poland in particular - that the example was consciously copied. Czechoslovakia was a major arms source for the Haganah; and if enemies of postwar victory deserved to be treated as such in Europe, the same law of retribution obviously applied elsewhere as far as those arms could reach.
Douglas takes the leaders of Poland and Czechoslovakia to task for seeing the "Recovered Lands" as fresh field for socialist planning. The sorry state of Silesia and the Sudetenland after their "cleansing" attests, rather, to the *lack* of serious state planning and more to political expediency via scapegoating a vulnerable, despised minority. Douglas is spot-on, however, in rejecting Elazar Barkan's self-serving classification of victims as "deserving" vs. "undeserving." No coherent framework of human rights is possible through such relativism. Barkan's apparent motive in such typology - despite his "human rights professorship" - was to deligitimize Palestinian claims toward Israel, with the Volksdeutsche expulsions as precedent. (Again reinforcing the context of Haganah actions.) This typology of "expendable peoples" who suffer "necessarily" for the greater good (as always defined by others) is *exactly* the fascist, genocidal rationale that the likes of Barkan claim to oppose.
One must also wonder if the demonizing of Slobodan Milosevic, for applying the same legacy of Allied-endorsed transfer he witnessed as a child in Yugoslavia, wasn't a case of conscience coming home to roost; while Americans endorsing this policy were of the generation who remembered "bulldozing" at home, by which local communities were rendered "Negro free." An excellent work whose implications, lessons - and consequences - travel beyond the confines of its time and place.
September 5, 2020
The author, Raymond M. Douglas does an amazing job presenting the available information of his sensitive subject regarding the expulsion of Ethnic Germans after WWII. It appears he has “left no stone unturned”, he separates himself and that as of his opinion, leaving solely the facts, as well as presenting throughly “two sides of the same coin”. Douglas’s Bibliography and section on notes per chapter alone, is enough evidence to his careful and thorough investigation and research of all areas in question: 65 pages of notes & a 27 page bibliography.
I think it is important to note, however, so that one does not become discouraged with this read, this book is purely historical in nature, omitting “first-person testimonies of the expellees”, who succumbed to such cruel and barbaric torture. This was purposeful on Douglas’s part. He did not want to bring in possible controversy that can come from personal testimonies, he wanted the backing of verifiable sources.
This is not to say his historical account is not void of emotion. Douglas still touches on the barbaric way expellees were treated and does so in a manner that voids controversy and bias. There are also times in the book that his words evoke emotion from the reader:
“Focus of any historical or commemorative treatment of the expulsions, .... must remain squarely on the human person, which both in 1939-45 & 1945-47 was reduced to an abstract category rather than recognized as an all too vulnerable individual”. The closer to thoughts of “reconciliation & forgiveness” as well as opposing “a culture built around mutual recrimination and one sided interpretations of the past,” “the more likely it is to do justice to all those who were treated by the governments”.. “not as a person”... “but merely as an instrument.. or proxies of the collectivities to which they were declared to belong to.” Pg362
I think it is important to note, however, so that one does not become discouraged with this read, this book is purely historical in nature, omitting “first-person testimonies of the expellees”, who succumbed to such cruel and barbaric torture. This was purposeful on Douglas’s part. He did not want to bring in possible controversy that can come from personal testimonies, he wanted the backing of verifiable sources.
This is not to say his historical account is not void of emotion. Douglas still touches on the barbaric way expellees were treated and does so in a manner that voids controversy and bias. There are also times in the book that his words evoke emotion from the reader:
“Focus of any historical or commemorative treatment of the expulsions, .... must remain squarely on the human person, which both in 1939-45 & 1945-47 was reduced to an abstract category rather than recognized as an all too vulnerable individual”. The closer to thoughts of “reconciliation & forgiveness” as well as opposing “a culture built around mutual recrimination and one sided interpretations of the past,” “the more likely it is to do justice to all those who were treated by the governments”.. “not as a person”... “but merely as an instrument.. or proxies of the collectivities to which they were declared to belong to.” Pg362
April 2, 2015
Politically and socially factual account of one of the greatest tragedies in human history.
December 8, 2023
Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies carried out the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples—in human history.
So begins this, an epochally important and definitive chronicle of a great historic crime. Poland and Czechoslovakia, and in smaller numbers Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, expelled 12-14 million people, mostly women and children, for the crime of being ethnic Germans from 1945 to 1950, with most expulsions happening in the immediate postwar years. In some cases, like the Sudetendeutsche of Czechoslovakia, this was an ethnostate ridding itself of a meddlesome minority, one that had been unwillingly dragged into the state after Versailles and then used as a pretext by Hitler to dismember the country.
But the large majority of expulsions were from historic German land annexed by Poland after the war, principally because the Soviet Union did not want to give up the land it stole from Poland in 1939 and so instead offered it the bulk of East Prussia, Pomerania, and other territories that had been German for centuries. And so Stolp became Słupsk, Breslau became Wrocław, and Stettin became Szczecin, and the German majorities in all these places (and in Danzig/Gdańsk, which had been made quasi-independent by Versailles) were violently forced out.
These events barely register in the national memory of the great powers that orchestrated them, in part because they were swamped in scale and brutality by crimes immediately preceding them. Douglas is crystal-clear that there can be no equating the German expulsions with the Nazi plan to exterminate or enslave the entire Jewish and Slavic populations of Eastern Europe, and the 10-20 million people it killed in partial fulfillment of the Generalplan Ost. The expulsions were not part of an intentional, industrial-scale policy of extermination. They killed from 500,000 to 1.5 million Germans, mostly through disease and starvation, one or two orders of magnitude fewer than the civilian death toll from the Nazi rampage through the East, including the Holocaust.
But if Douglas is clear on this point, he is equally clear that our attitude toward historical crimes cannot be "well, at least it wasn't the Holocaust!" "A frame of reference that measures acts of violence and injustice against the supreme atrocity of our time," he writes, "and assesses the former as being unworthy of notice in comparison with the latter, makes such violations more rather than less likely to be repeated."
This is particularly so for a crime like the German expulsions, which was in many ways a kind of bizarre echo of the atrocities that preceded it. It feels almost too neat a historical fact that the expulsions were carried out using ex-Nazi concentration camps — but it's true: "Many ex-Nazi concentration camps like Majdanek or Theresienstadt—and even the camp at Auschwitz—never went out of business, but were retained in operation as detention facilities for ethnic Germans for years after the war." Camps inside Germany, like Dachau, were reopened for use as receiving sites for Germans expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia.
If not meant to exterminate, these camps were certainly good at starving and torturing people. “Many of the Sudeten German Social Democrats who were put in concentration camps by the Germans for being anti-Nazi when liberation came were transferred to Czech labor camps merely because they were of German origin,” the Labour MP Richard Stokes reported in a dispatch to the Guardian from the Hagibor camp, whose daily food ration was “750 calories a day, which is below the Belsen level.” Přemysl Pitter, a social worker later honored as Righteous Among the Nations for rescuing Jewish children in Czech territory during the war, reported seeing scores of emaciated children on the verge of death: "Our physician, Dr. E. Vogl, himself a Jew who had gone though the hell of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, almost wept when he saw these little bodies." The British reporter Eric Gedye reported seeing a "mother holding a shrunken bundle of skin and bones, smaller than a normal two-month-old baby. I stared incredulously when she told me it was 14 months old."
At Potulice, a Polish camp, the torture was often sexual in nature:
In the penal gangs, male detainees were occasionally forced to simulate sexual intercourse with the females for the amusement of camp guards. Some of the punishments could result in horrific injuries. A male inmate of Potulice witnessed one procedure in which the victim was forced to perch in a sitting position on the leg of an upturned stool in such a way that the full weight of her body fell upon her perineum. Serious physical harm, including genital and anal lacerations, often resulted.
Josef Neubauer, a Czech Catholic priest, received this punishment in his camp pre-expulsion for administering last rites to another inmate:
I was made to strip completely naked and was beaten with sticks and fists. As a result, one of my ribs was broken and my teeth were knocked out. I then received at the hands of my two tormenters another 50 strokes with a length of steel cable, the thickness of my thumb, on my stomach, back, chest and buttocks. I was made to count the blows myself. At the end of this beating, my entire body was bleeding.
These were not merely improvised crimes by nations reeling from five-plus years of brutal Nazi oppression. The Potsdam Declaration of 1945 officially committed the US, UK, and Soviets to support the expulsions, on the provision that they be "orderly and humane" (the origin of the book's title). This had been all three powers' position for years. As FDR told the Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile in 1944, "the United States Government will raise no objections and as far as practicable will facilitate such transfer.” Winston Churchill was a particularly avid supporter of transfers throughout the war, though was not above shamelessly denouncing them once Clement Attlee succeeded him and he could use the issue as a bludgeon.
In practice, US, British, and Soviet soldiers were present, organizing the trains and overseeing the expulsions, from late 1945 onward. Some public figures, like Dorothy Thompson and Anne McCormick, raised objections, with support of liberal intellectuals like John Dewey and A. Philip Randolph, not that this changed the expulsions' course at all.
This is, obviously, not a pleasurable book to read, but it feels obligatory. This is one of the worst, and most easily forgotten, crimes to which the United States has been a party. One of its lessons is that collective guilt and punishment are toxic, deadly ideas, and so I hesitate from concluding that we as Americans should feel great shame about it. But we should certainly know about it, if for no other reason than prevention.
As Douglas notes in his conclusion, the idea of forced population transfer has not lost its popularity in some quarters as a "solution" to ethnic conflict. I began reading the book a month after the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh was forced by the Azeri military to vacate their land, on the same day Pakistan began deporting hundreds of thousands of Afghans back to Taliban rule, and amid the IDF's efforts to force Gazans out of the northern half of the Strip. This is an old idea. It's a seductive idea. It's a grotesque idea, and we owe it to ourselves to know what it actually entails.
October 3, 2022
If you're looking for an easy read, this isn't it. The fact that it's published by Yale University Press should be a hint: this is a scholarly, well-documented factual account of a part of the history of WW II which is virtually ignored.
The horrific conditions suffered by millions at the hands of the Germans is well-known. The horrific conditions many German civilians (mostly elderly, women, and children) suffered when they were expelled from the countries they were living in at the end of the war is not widely known. Worse, when people hear about it--when I told people what I was reading--the reaction was, "Serves them right."
Unfortunately, the people who were expelled, often forcibly with little or no notice and withno provisions and brutal conditions, were rarely people who were responsible for German atrocities during the war. Often they were undesirables, the people who could not contribute to the reconstruction after the war, who would instead be a drain on the economy. In truth, the able-bodied men were NOT sent back, the people who were more likely to have had anything to do with German oppression. They were kept for forced labor.
The story of who these people were, the countries they were living in and being expelled from and why, is fascinating. However, as I said, this isn't an easy read. It is a thorough documentation, and while a historian might care about each and every instance, most casual readers will find themselves scanning the details.
Nevertheless, well worth the read.
The horrific conditions suffered by millions at the hands of the Germans is well-known. The horrific conditions many German civilians (mostly elderly, women, and children) suffered when they were expelled from the countries they were living in at the end of the war is not widely known. Worse, when people hear about it--when I told people what I was reading--the reaction was, "Serves them right."
Unfortunately, the people who were expelled, often forcibly with little or no notice and withno provisions and brutal conditions, were rarely people who were responsible for German atrocities during the war. Often they were undesirables, the people who could not contribute to the reconstruction after the war, who would instead be a drain on the economy. In truth, the able-bodied men were NOT sent back, the people who were more likely to have had anything to do with German oppression. They were kept for forced labor.
The story of who these people were, the countries they were living in and being expelled from and why, is fascinating. However, as I said, this isn't an easy read. It is a thorough documentation, and while a historian might care about each and every instance, most casual readers will find themselves scanning the details.
Nevertheless, well worth the read.
August 2, 2021
Hard Read, but Worth the Effort
The story of the brutal ethnic cleansing of Germans from Southern Europe, Prussia and the Baltic states after WW2. The story needs told. The merit of understanding the past is to do better in the future. Because of Geneology, I knew of the ethnic cleansing after WW2. I had thought it was a emotional knee jerk response at the end of the war. A response to the horrors perpetrated by the Germans during the war. Surprisingly, the Allies had started discussing ethnic cleansing as a after the war strategy as early as 1941. Unfortunately, the inept implementation turned out to be as brutal as the Nazi’s program.
The book gets 5 stars for research and information. I gave it 4 stars because the endless stream of facts and examples became overwhelming. It’s hard to discuss the book with others because of the lack of a larger framework. But if your interested in real history, it’s definitely worth the effort to read.
The story of the brutal ethnic cleansing of Germans from Southern Europe, Prussia and the Baltic states after WW2. The story needs told. The merit of understanding the past is to do better in the future. Because of Geneology, I knew of the ethnic cleansing after WW2. I had thought it was a emotional knee jerk response at the end of the war. A response to the horrors perpetrated by the Germans during the war. Surprisingly, the Allies had started discussing ethnic cleansing as a after the war strategy as early as 1941. Unfortunately, the inept implementation turned out to be as brutal as the Nazi’s program.
The book gets 5 stars for research and information. I gave it 4 stars because the endless stream of facts and examples became overwhelming. It’s hard to discuss the book with others because of the lack of a larger framework. But if your interested in real history, it’s definitely worth the effort to read.
July 2, 2021
This is an excellent book on post world war II border changes and the subsequent expulsion of Ethnic Germans from Eastern countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia).
Most of the books on the second world war do not cover the border changes and population expulsion.
This book discusses at length about the ethical, moral, and legal justifications for expulsion. Was it a collective punishment or revenge on the German people for the Nazi atrocities? Was it done to avoid any subsequent border claims by Germany or internal minority issues within Czech/Poland? Was it to protect Ethnic Germans from the persecution by the native population in Poland/Czech after 1945?
It also covers the impact of expelees on the internal politics and foreign policies of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
What was the reaction of the Western world towards this population expulsion?
Most of the books on the second world war do not cover the border changes and population expulsion.
This book discusses at length about the ethical, moral, and legal justifications for expulsion. Was it a collective punishment or revenge on the German people for the Nazi atrocities? Was it done to avoid any subsequent border claims by Germany or internal minority issues within Czech/Poland? Was it to protect Ethnic Germans from the persecution by the native population in Poland/Czech after 1945?
It also covers the impact of expelees on the internal politics and foreign policies of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
What was the reaction of the Western world towards this population expulsion?
July 22, 2022
I was a high school history teacher for many years, now I'm retired, and for me, this book memorialized the stories of the people I never taught about. This book is about the Germans who were moved around like pawns by their leaders. They were subjected to the whims and avarices of the leaders of their countries. As usual, the women and children and especially old women suffered the most. Humans will never learn to leave war alone. It is extremely well researched, well documented, but you don't have to worry that the author will leave you feeling sorry for the Germans. He clearly states in several places in the book, that their suffering would not have happened had the Nazis not occupied their countries so brutally in the first place. This is a must read for anyone wanting to know the full story of what happened in Europe at the conclusion of WWII.
May 1, 2021
A very compelling reminder of the extreme cruelty that can be exercised under the guise of nationalism and love of country. Under German nationals under the pretense of racial superiority inflicted untold misery unto neighboring nationalities and minorities; once Nazi Germany was defeated, immense suffering came down on millions of ethnic Germans in Central Europe, who were dumped into the reduced German geography as it exists now. The evidence, as gathered and exposed by the author, is that we, the ‘civilized westerners’ can be as savage and cruel as the worst, when given the opportunity. Let’s hope that the world is never again placed under the same circumstances, so that we never repeat the same atrocities.
October 14, 2021
This is the appalling story of what happened to those Germans left behind (that is, outside of a reduced Germany and Austria) after the fall of the Nazi Empire. The countries they were left in, themselves shaken by years of trauma, didn’t want them (and did want their homes, businesses, and possessions). The three Great Powers, Britain, the USSR, and the USA tended to see them as guilty of aiding Hitler. So they were driven, with minimal belongings, from their homes.
But inside Germany, split among the victors, there was no place for them to go. Germany was devastated, local governments were broke, and there was minimal food. So tens of thousands died.
While, as the author points out, the Germans had done worse, this was an unnecessary and brutal revenge.
But inside Germany, split among the victors, there was no place for them to go. Germany was devastated, local governments were broke, and there was minimal food. So tens of thousands died.
While, as the author points out, the Germans had done worse, this was an unnecessary and brutal revenge.
March 12, 2021
Well researched and the author does a good job illustrating the tragedy by highlighting personal stories of the expellees and the (primarily US and UK) authorities who tried with limited success to deal with the flood of people coming into their zones. The book focuses primarily on Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary - with limited attention spent on Germans coming in from the Soviet Union or the Balkans (or France for that matter). The prose at times is not very succinct - many overly *long* sentences which does not make it for easy reading.
August 29, 2021
Tedious
I was initially intrigued by the subject matter as I had heard nothing about this before seeing this title. However, as I slogged through all the political shenanigans in chapter one, I could hardly stay awake. Gave up at that point. Reading the author's introduction gave me all the information I really needed on the subject. Too bad. For those with greater fortitude and academic interest than I have, you only have to read 65% of the book. The last large bit is extensive notes, bibliography and some photos.
I was initially intrigued by the subject matter as I had heard nothing about this before seeing this title. However, as I slogged through all the political shenanigans in chapter one, I could hardly stay awake. Gave up at that point. Reading the author's introduction gave me all the information I really needed on the subject. Too bad. For those with greater fortitude and academic interest than I have, you only have to read 65% of the book. The last large bit is extensive notes, bibliography and some photos.
December 26, 2017
Ray Douglas has done a good job of an even handed overview of this whole terrible era of history. Many books of this nature are threaded through with American exceptionalism, not worth finishing. I was vaguely aware of the tensions caused by large ethnic minorities acting as fifth columns within sovereign nations, this book has really brought it home. It also connects with the current state of the Potsdam countries, Poland and Hungary sliding into fascism, economic malaise and large areas of depopulated inactivity, much like the Scottish Highlands and West Coast of Ireland.
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