for what they suffered at the Germans’ hands. But the weakness of the laws regarding mass population transfers is troubling, for they are by no means a thing of the past. And, in fact, because ignorance of their disastrous European record is so pervasive, policy makers and pundits have actually begun to cite the postwar expulsions as an example of a painful but proven method of dealing with intractable minority problems existing today — in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Sudan, and elsewhere. Scholars like John J. Mearsheimer, Andrew BellFialkoff, Chaim Kaufmann, and others have attempted to introduce a distinction between “genocidal ethnic cleansing” on the one hand, and “preventive resettlement” on the other, with the expulsion of the Germans standing as a model of the latter. To be sure, the recent introduction in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (the most important legal treaty criminalizing grave human rights abuses) of a provision declaring forced population transfers to be an offense in international law impedes the general use of methods of this kind. But, as we have seen, such instruments offer little protection when the great powers agree on the necessity of making an exception. Indeed, the legal scholar Timothy Waters has argued that the fact of the postwar expulsions remaining unchallengeable in international law — even where their ongoing effects (i.e., continued denationalization and expropriation of surviving expellees) are concerned — has already done much to undermine the force of the Rome Statute. As Waters argues, if tribunals can continue to place German expellees beyond the scope of international law on the basis of their ethnicity, a precedent has been created for other disfavored minority groups to be treated in the same way. If the legal problems associated with the expulsions are thorny, the historical ones are no less so.
“What was I fighting for?” — injured U.S. veteran
Elderly expellees assisted onto German soil at Travemünde near Lübeck, under the supervision of a British soldier. Christopher Emmet Papers, box 29, Hoover Institution Archives.
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scene: Spring 2013
During the 1950s and 1960s, German complaints about the expulsions were internationally dismissed as attempts by chauvinists and “revisionists” to cover up their own misdeeds or even to regain Germany’s lost eastern territories. Frequent inflammatory and inconsiderate statements by German politicians helped to fan such suspicions. Later, partly in reaction to those attempts, as the country first began seriously to confront its dreadful wartime record, public opinion even in Germany itself (especially among the younger generation) grew harsher and more unsympathetic from the 1970s until the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the turn of the 21st century, what had already been a polarized debate became much more so as surviving expellees began to lobby for a memorial in Berlin to relatives who had lost their lives in the operation, as well as to press a variety of legal claims (virtually all of which proved futile) through the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations. This newfound assertiveness on their part aroused a furious reaction in Poland and the Czech Republic, which accused the expellees of turning history on its head in an attempt to make Germans into the true victims of the Second World War. The notion that any form of recognition, even symbolic, was due to any citizens of a nation that had treated its own peoples with such apocalyptic barbarity seemed completely bizarre to them. These are by no means unreasonable perspectives. In integrating the story of the expulsions into the narrative of modern European history, space must not be created for a self-pitying “victim” mentality in Germany that would obscure the infinitely blacker record of its wartime crimes. But this is not a zero-sum game. Nor is it naïve or anachronistic to question what I have called the “inevitability thesis”: the proposition that, because of the Nazis’ atrocities,
the victors could not have acted other than as they did. The Second World War, it must be recalled, was not simply a struggle between two rival power blocs fighting for supremacy. Rather, it had an explicit ideological component that was placed at the very forefront of Allied war aims — not least among them President Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” address to Congress in 1941, which emphasized that “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.” Perhaps the most important question the war attempted to settle was whose vision of the human person, and of human dignity, was to prevail — the murderous Nazi version, with its demented utopian schemes, collective and mechanistic attitude to personhood, and contempt for the entire concept of inalienable rights, or the Allies’ declared commitment to a world order founded on the notion of the individual as a creature of infinite value by virtue of his or her very humanity. It’s not unreasonable, then, for us to try to assess how fully that commitment, for which so many Allied servicemen and civilians sacrificed their lives, was lived up to in reality. This is an especially good moment to do so. Most of the countries involved in this episode have joined hands as partners within the European Union. With many (although far from all) of the relevant archives having been opened in recent years, the first professional and objective studies of how the expulsions were conducted are appearing in the expelling countries themselves, although an immense amount of painstaking research remains to be done. As the last surviving expellees pass from the scene, the time is surely ripe for this disturbing but significant chapter in Europe’s recent history at last to receive the attention it deserves.