Silenced by Warsaw: How the Poles took revenge on the Germans after the departure of the Red Army
The Russian side has released archival documents testifying to massacres, bullying, looting and forced expulsion of the German population in Poland after the defeat of the Nazis.
Today people in Warsaw prefer not to remember these inconvenient facts, but they actively participate in the formation of various anti-Russian historical myths.
...At the final stage of the Second World War, at the conferences of the heads of the Anti-Hitler coalition Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, decisions were made to move the borders of Germany to the west and deport the Germans from Poland - with the goal of long-term and stable national-territorial demarcation in Central and Eastern Europe, and also the reconstruction of Poland as a mononational state.
It is known that the deportation of Germans from the territories transferred in 1945 to the control of the Polish administration (Silesia and Pomerania, part of East Prussia) was accompanied by real criminal lawlessness of the Poles against the German civilian population.
Archival documents published on September 17 by the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO) on the portal History.RF indicate that the leadership of the USSR was very concerned about the disregardful attitude of the Polish authorities towards the implementation of the decisions of the Potsdam Conference on the organized and humane resettlement of Germans.
Moreover, the “totalitarian” Stalinist government tried to encourage the Polish leadership to decisively suppress the flagrant practices of violence and lawlessness in its area of responsibility.
Background.
After the occupation of Poland in September 1939, the Germans divided the Polish lands into two territorial administrative units: Silesia and Pomerania, as part of East Prussia and the surrounding areas were included in the Third Reich, while the rest fell into the so-called "general" -governorate" with its center in Krakow.
The Nazis, in a short time, deported almost 900 thousand Poles from the lands included in Germany, and their houses and property were transferred to Germans who came from other European countries.
In the “General Government” itself, Poles were expelled en masse from rich rural areas, where they planned to resettle tens of thousands of German colonists and repatriates from the Balkans, Bessarabia and Bukovina.
In essence, the Nazis turned these Germans into a tool for the colonization of the occupied territories of the “new Europe”. However, already in 1944, many of the colonists fled westward in horror from the advancing Red Army.
Polish sources claim that even before the fall of the Third Reich, about 5 million Germans left the German lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers. When these territories came under the control of the Red Army and the Polish Army in 1945, 2,5 million Germans and 1,2 million Poles still lived there. In addition to them, more than a million Germans lived in that part of Pomerania, which became part of Poland.
Be that as it may, the German colonists brought by Hitler were in a clear minority, while the vast majority of Germans lived on these lands for hundreds of years.
The final decision to transfer the former German lands to Poland with the deportation of the German population was made at the Potsdam Conference on July 17 - August 2, 1945, although this issue was essentially raised and discussed by the leaders of the allied states in Tehran at the end of 1943.
Historians note that Roosevelt and Churchill were forced to come to terms with the fact of the transition of Western Ukraine and Belarus to the USSR, being also not against if the Poles “stepped on Germany’s several toes” to compensate for this loss.
The main initiator of compensation for Polish losses at the expense of Germany was Churchill, who announced this on the very first day of the Potsdam Conference.
Stalin also liked this idea, since thanks to it the border with the West was moved back many hundreds of kilometers, and for Germany this was an acceptable punishment.
The most interesting thing about this political process is that the “Polish question” was the most pressing in discussions about the future of Europe, starting with the Yalta Conference, held on February 11, 1945, so the leaders of the Big Three never made a final decision.
However, even before the start of the Yalta Conference, on February 5, 1945, the head of the National Council of Poland Bronislaw Bierut issued a decree on the transfer of German lands west of the Oder-Neisse line to Polish jurisdiction. And it was with him that the redrawing of the borders and ethnic composition of East Germany began.
The collapse of Hitler's Germany turned into a disaster not only for the cannibalistic Hitler regime, but also for millions of German civilians who overnight became stateless and without rights, like millions of people before who fell under Nazi occupation. He who sowed the wind reaped the storm.
The crux of the matter.
From the very beginning, the Polish government took the “disloyal population” of the Polish Republic with a tight rein, introducing for them distinctive signs (bandages), restrictions on movement, a ban on choosing a place of residence, forced labor, curfews, checks and other analogues of Ausweiss and work cards. Any disobedience was punishable by immediate arrest and imprisonment.
The Poles quickly got used to the new conditions, opening a season of mass robberies and violence against the German population, which was denied the rights and freedoms. Already in the spring of 1945, residents of Polish villages organized “self-defense units” that were engaged in pogroms and the “squeezing out” of German property.
Polish settlers who came to the lands west of the Oder and Neisse, who had nothing but a document from the authorities, quickly drove the German townspeople and Bauers under the bunk, taking away housing and property, forcing the Germans to huddle in basements and sheds, dooming them to cold and hunger.
Silesian Germans felt a particularly strong difference after the transfer of the region by the Soviet occupation authorities to Polish “democratic” rule.
Many Germans noted that the Russian-Soviet did not seek to make the civilian population scapegoats for all the crimes of the Nazi regime. The Russians, having seen enough of German life, constantly asked the same question: “Why?” - Why do you, Germans, living in abundance and in the water closet, eating your sausages and cabbage from porcelain plates, with a glass of good beer, came to rob and kill us, who are just getting back on our feet after centuries of poverty and squalor?
True, the Germans did not have an answer to this question, but they saw perfectly well that with the arrival of the Red Army, law and order were restored as soon as possible, and the population, in accordance with international conventions of warfare, was provided with medical and food assistance.
Polish repressions against the Germans were officially legalized on May 2, 1945 by another decree of Bronislaw Bierut, who decided to consider any German property in the territory of Silesia and Pomerania as Polish. The German population, at the same time, was placed in former Nazi concentration camps, supposedly “for testing.” The security of the camps was transferred to the responsibility of the Polish “people's militia”.
Even German anti-fascists liberated from Hitler’s camps by Red Army soldiers were forced to undergo “testing.” Survivors of the two regimes recalled that there was no difference between the camp administration with a skull and crossbones or the Polish eagle on their caps - both of them acted with demonstrative cruelty.
There was some difference, though. The Poles placed only the adult German population behind barbed wire. But the children of those “inspected” were alienated from their families, they were transferred either to orphanages or to Polish families, with the sole goal of Polishization. However, the Nazis also practiced similar methods in the occupied territories with children of “Aryan appearance.”
And, since the territory of East Germany was severely destroyed during the fighting, the Polish administration sought from the Germans “payment of reparations through labor.”
In Breslau, Stettin, Danzig, where there was a large layer of wealthy population, the Poles drove the Germans into ghettos in order to clean their apartments without noise and dust, and in June 1945, the deportation of Germans from these cities to border cities (Cottbus, Görlitz and others) began, 15 - 20 thousand people a day. The settlers were lined up in columns and sent on foot under the escort of Polish soldiers. The “totalitarian” Soviet experience, when the exiles were given subsistence allowances, rations and medical assistance, both on the way and on the ground, was ignored by the Poles, leaving the deportees without any support at their destination.
On the way to the west, the deportees ate pasture; hunger and disease raged in their columns, claiming the lives of thousands of the weak and children.
Unlike Dzhemilev’s fairy tales, the corpses of dead Germans in ditches and on roadsides are not the invention of an idle scoundrel, but a historical fact.
It is noteworthy that the excesses of the Polish administration were accompanied by rumors that anti-German actions were sanctioned by the command of the Red Army. Witnesses, however, reported that the Polish leadership unofficially advised Polish settlers to “do to the Germans the same way they did to us.” An eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth.
Inside Poland, the deportation of Germans was presented by propaganda as “their own desire to return to their homeland,” with the indispensable assurances: “we do not seek revenge for the policies of the occupiers and the use of Hitler’s methods during the repatriation of the German population.”
Having experienced the Polish lawlessness, the Germans sought protection and refuge in the places where Soviet troops were stationed. There were cases when the Germans voluntarily handed over livestock and property to Soviet soldiers so that they would not fall into the hands of the Poles.
There were often cases when the Germans, leaving their acquired places, burned houses and property. “So don’t let anyone get you!”
The final plan for the resettlement of Germans in Germany was approved by representatives of the victorious states only on November 20, 1945 at the Allied Control Council.
It was assumed that within a year, 2 million people would be resettled from the new Polish territories in Germany to the Soviet occupation zone and another 1,5 million to the British one. The Germans could not choose the place of settlement.
The plan obliged the Polish side to carry out the deportation of Germans “in an orderly and humane manner”, according to established rules, which stated that unaccompanied children, elderly and sick people should be deported in the summer months by trains with medical assistance. Late pregnant women were not allowed to travel until they had a safe delivery. German-speaking medical personnel were required to accompany each transport, and repatriates were required to be provided with sufficient food and water. For security purposes, ten Polish guards were assigned to the train.
The plan was adopted as a reaction to an avalanche of reports in the international press in the summer of 1945, accusing the Polish authorities of urgently deporting hospital patients and residents of orphanages to the west on special trains without medical escort or food supplies.
On February 4, 1946, in Warsaw, an agreement was signed between the National Council of Poland and the command of the British Army of the Rhine on the rules and procedures for the eviction of Germans from Poland into the British occupation zone. This date is considered in Poland to be the day of the beginning of the mass deportation of Germans from German lands transferred to Warsaw.
The Germans themselves, without prodding or coercion, tried to leave Poland, but even here the Polish authorities presented them with a “surprise”, continuing to detain able-bodied and qualified Germans, sending children, the sick and the elderly on a difficult journey not only in summer, but also in winter, in a crowded carriages full of people.
But even getting on the train did not guarantee the Germans crossing the border and finding a safe haven. Polish border guards detained trains at the border for two to three weeks, during which people were scorched by the heat or tormented by pouring rain, and the contingent's suitcases were regularly combed through by all sorts of inspectors in search of anything more or less valuable.
The case of the German repatriates began to take on the nasty shade of an international scandal with the increased interest of the American State Department, which issued instructions to “intervene and stop” its embassies in Poland and Czechoslovakia (where lawlessness was also happening in relation to the Germans).
However, US diplomatic services on the ground chose to wash their hands and not intervene, fearing accusations of “pro-German sentiments.”
The fate of the German exiles changed for the better only after the intervention of the Soviet command and the mission of the International Red Cross, which carried out an inspection in the camp for displaced persons in Szczecin (Stettin).
The Soviet side, which received tens of thousands of Germans every day, was forced to stop accepting refugees and force the Poles to renew agreements on the rules and conditions for sending repatriates.
As a result, the Poles were forced to change the practices of the Nazi occupiers and colonialists to more civilized methods and organize transit camps with decent living conditions, equip cars with heating and repair railway tracks.
According to the military commandant of the American occupation zone, General Lucius Clay, the influx of settlers increased the population of the English and American zones of Germany by more than 23%. In East Germany, according to its first head, Wilhelm Pieck, population growth was 25%.
It should be noted here that those Germans were luckier that they ended up living in the future GDR, where they were met and treated properly, in contrast to the Western occupation zones, where forced migrants, impoverished and speaking some other German language, were looked upon as on recent “ostarbeiters”. It took decades for the contradictions between the “locals” and the “natives” to smooth out.
Not all Germans accepted the deportation and many, tens of thousands, returned to their native ashes by hook or by crook.
The dream of East Germans to return to their native land has not faded to this day, but no one is interested in helping them. And most of all - the Polish leadership, which will be forced under restitution laws to pay huge compensation and return property to the deportees or their direct descendants.
It is for this reason that the exodus of East Germans from Poland in 1945 - 1947 in Poland is remembered extremely reluctantly, preferring to hysteria, comb and greatly exaggerate their own grievances in order to force the opponent to admit guilt, “pay and repent” until the end of time.
We don’t need anything from the Poles other than good neighborliness. But since we got an inadequate neighbor, then we are ready, in response to the fabricated claims, to put in front of him a mirror in the form of documents, which will be difficult for him to blame.
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