Orderly and Humane Quotes

“In the end, however, he found himself “not so much concerned regarding what is happening to the German population as I am regarding our own standard of conduct, because I feel that if we are willing to compromise on certain principles in respect of the Germans or any other people, progressively it may become too easy for us to sacrifice those same principles in regard to our own people.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“for”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“a residents’ building cooperative managed to construct enough dwelling units to enable most of the original camp cohort to leave.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“the final closure of Dachau as an ethnic German housing facility took place only in 1965.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“It was not until 1953, however, that a residents’ building cooperative managed to construct enough dwelling units to enable most of the original camp cohort to leave. Their places were taken by more recent arrivals from Czechoslovakia, the remnants of the German minority allowed to stay in 1948 by the Prague government, so the final closure of Dachau as an ethnic German housing facility took place only in 1965.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Demoralization and despair turned out to be a function not of camp residence as such, but of lengthy stays in remote establishments like Burlagsberg where there were no prospects of employment or self-improvement.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“A great deal of official concern was expressed about the demoralizing effects of extended sojourns in camp environments, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung feared would lead to the appearance of a pathological sociological subtype, Homo barackensis: “Homo barackensis has taught humankind in the twentieth century a dreadful truth: progress, humanity, and self-esteem exist only in the context of an unbroken world. When law and order disintegrate, the camp arises—that most gruesome and cruel expression of human capabilities—and with it rises a breeding ground of nihilism.”33”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“A great deal of official concern was expressed about the demoralizing effects of extended sojourns in camp environments, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung feared would lead to the appearance of a pathological sociological subtype, Homo barackensis: “Homo barackensis has taught humankind in the twentieth century a dreadful truth: progress, humanity, and self-esteem exist only in the context of an unbroken world.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“military government in all three zones was “anxious to do everything possible to get the Germans to accept persons coming from the East as their own people, and not to regard them as foreigners foisted upon them.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“At the suggestion of Walter Mann, State Commissioner for Refugees in Greater Hesse, part of Adolf Hitler’s complex at Berchtesgaden was used to provide housing for Sudetendeutsche.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“In Düsseldorf, one of the most heavily bombed cities, 93 percent of houses and apartments were uninhabitable at the end of the war.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Overcoming the housing crisis was by far the most urgent task—inasmuch as food supplies could be imported but houses could not,”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“CAME was opposed, however, by the staunchly Germanophobic Society for the Prevention of World War III, headed by the novelist Rex Stout and including Eleanor Roosevelt, the CBS broadcaster William Shirer (future author of the bestselling Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), and Senator Harley Kilgore (Democrat of West Virginia) among its collaborators.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Moreover, the lesson of the expulsion pointed inescapably to the fact that mass population transfers could not be accomplished without massive abuse of human rights, something for which the Allies as well as the expelling countries bore a full share of responsibility.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“After a hellish journey lasting more than a month, the Sobków family was set down at Brochów near Wrocław, only to find that previous arrivals had already helped themselves to all the ex-German properties worth having.64”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“all that the clearance of the German population achieved, as the Gorzów branch of the State Repatriation Office in Wielkopolska ruefully noted in retrospect, was to result in “all moveable German property in Gorzów becoming booty for Soviet soldiers,” as well as leaving the harvest of East Brandenburg to rot in the fields.59 Likewise, a disillusioned local branch secretary of the Communist Party complained that as soon as incoming Poles succeeded in licking an ex-German farm into shape the Red Army would turn up and expropriate it.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“In the long run, though, mainstream Christian churches in both countries would have cause to regret the uprooting of long-settled communities with their vibrant religious traditions and practices. These proved to be far easier to destroy than to recreate. Especially in Czechoslovakia, religious observance among the settlers was much less visible than had been the case with the displaced populations; in the years to come, shrines and monuments were often valued by their new parishioners chiefly as convenient sources of building materials.53”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Their removal was thus, in the view of the Czechoslovak Protestant churches, “with all due respect for Christianity,” a practical and moral imperative. “The continued presence of the German population in Czechoslovakia would in the future have endangered the spiritual state of the nation.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Even in this sphere, he remarked, the lure of easy money was becoming “a moral temptation, and the scramble for German property has been not unlike a Californian gold rush, or the distribution of the spoils which followed Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Czechoslovakia also emerged from the war with a larger capital stock than in 1939, thanks to the Germans’ decision to locate many industries there where they would be beyond the reach of most Allied bombing.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“expellees would be issued with a receipt by the Czechoslovak government stating the value of the possessions taken from them. Czechoslovakia’s demand for reparations from Germany would be reduced by an equivalent sum; the expellees could then use the receipts to claim compensation from the postwar German government.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“A “progressive” redistribution of national wealth, Beneš believed, would at once weaken the social classes on which the National Socialist and Peasant parties relied for their support, and reduce the appeal of communism, leaving the president of the Republic, standing above politics, in a position to dictate the national agenda.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“In much the same way that the wartime cooperation of ordinary Germans (and, indeed, Poles, Ukrainians, and other nationalities) in the persecution and removal of Jews had been obtained by the opportunity it provided to appropriate Holocaust victims’ property, Czechoslovak, Polish, and Hungarian citizens’ enthusiasm for the expulsions owed a great deal to the prospect that they would profit from the confiscation of their German neighbors’ wealth.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Material rather than ideological considerations, Frommer suggests, best accounts for the insubordination of the national committees in this matter. To exempt mixed-marriage families from expulsion was to forego the opportunity to seize and redistribute their property.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Appealing still more directly to raison d’étât, the Ministry of the Interior warned the following year, “Many hundreds of children are being gratuitously delivered, thoughtlessly or maliciously, to certain Germanization and are thereby being consciously consigned to the ranks of the greatest enemies of the Czech nation—for these children will be turned into German janissaries. While impoverishing our own nation, we are enriching a foreign nation inimical to us.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Obzory argued that so inhumane and short-sighted a policy would leave a legacy of bitterness with which the next generation of Czechoslovaks would have to deal. “It is in the republic’s interest to keep these children within the State and within the nation inasmuch as they are—or at the very least half of them are—Czech children who, once expelled from the land of their birth, will detest it with all their strength for the manner in which their mothers were treated!”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“one embittered Czech man rhetorically inquired, “Are we now supposed to leave our German women and spit on our children?”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“forced to wear armbands identifying them as German, and undergoing the death-by-inches punishment of “German rations” troubled an increasing number of Czechoslovak consciences. The newspaper Nová doba, for example, carried a series of articles in the summer of 1946 devoted to the plight of ethnic Czechs who were “condemned by Czechs and the Czech Republic for taking their German partner at a time when that was no treason.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Thus a postwar statute in Norway declared that Norwegian women who married German men after April 9, 1940, the date of the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Scandinavia, were deemed to have forfeited their citizenship by virtue of that act (predictably, the law remained silent about those Norwegian men who married German women). A considerable proportion of these women, together with their Norwegian-born children, were interned in camps and later expelled to Germany; not until 1989 was this statute rescinded”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“More stringent racial criteria adopted in 1941, requiring the Czech partner inter alia to submit a nude photograph of him- or herself to the authorities for evaluation, caused this number to diminish, as did the tendency of many Czechoslovaks during the occupation to regard mixed marriages, especially those entered into by women, as a form of “horizontal collaboration”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War