The Trials and Tribulations of Germans After World War II (1945 - 1949)

The Big Three, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union worked together for years with one common goal in mind: the defeat of Nazi Germany. In February of 1945, these Ally forces met at Yalta for the second of three conferences regarding World War II. Yalta was the pivotal conference that decided the fate of post-war Europe. Three main decisions were made, which applied to the dismemberment of Germany after the war ended on May 8, 1945: Germany had to surrender unconditionally, had to give the Soviet Union huge

reprimands for their great losses during the war, and France would become the fourth power with control over one of the four parts of the divided Germany. During the occupation of Germany, a double standard was evident in the way the four powers treated the Germans and committed crimes against humanity. The atrocities committed by the Allies raised the question of whether they were any better than the Nazis. By looking at the food rations, expulsions, internment camps, and denazification acts, it is apparent that the Allies held a double standard and had much in common with the Nazis in the way they treated people.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the definition of "expel" is, "to force or drive out; eject forcefully" (462). This is exactly what was done to the ethnic Germans following World War II. Although it may be hard to believe, these expulsions were a pre-meditated genocide. Dr. Eduard Benes "first put this idea forward as a serious policy in 1941 when he proposed the German minority should be expelled form Czechoslovakia after the war. The British backed this idea and in 1943 the Americans and Russians also gave their approval" (Botting 180). The Soviets, aided by the Poles and Czechs, forced millions of Germans from their homes. These acts were later seen as the "greatest ethnic displacement- or involuntary migration- of human beings in modern times, and perhaps even in the history of the human race" (Botting 179). This means that they even exceeded the Jews being forced from their homes by the Nazis. Besides being literally driven form their homes and homeland, there were unthinkable crimes committed against many of these Germans solely because of their ethnicity. Stalin used propaganda in order to stir up more hatred towards the Germans. Pamphlets were distributed encouraging murder. For example, one such flier said, "We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day . . . If you kill one German, kill another-for us there is nothing more joyful than a heap of German corpses" (de Zayas 34). These types of encouragement for mass violence and massacres no doubt caused the Red Armies to go crazy when they crossed into German territory, and that to rape, murder, crucify, and torture Germans in order to pay them back for their actions was acceptable.

Some Germans tried to escape form their homes before the Red Army got to them out of fear for what would happen if the Russians were given that opportunity. The Soviets still hunted the refugees down and attempted to kill as many as they could. In the East, the Soviets had blocked off all land routes to the West, so that crossing the frozen K?nigsberg Bay was the only option left for escape. The Soviets could not allow these Germans to simply cross the bay, but they instead had "planes executing low-level assaults, mercilessly mowing down refugees with machine guns or bombing the ice to crack and weaken it causing many wagons to sink" (de Zayas 63). This again demonstrated the unnecessary and horrid acts of violence against the ethnic Germans. They were simply trying to escape before the Russians got to their land, but that was not good enough. The Russian had to exterminate these Germans because their people had suffered at the hands of the Nazi Armies.

Trials were held in Nuremberg for the crimes that the Nazis committed. Some of the leaders were accused of forced expulsion. Article 6(b) defined war crimes as "murder, ill treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose" and article 6(c) stated crimes against humanity to be "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population" (de Zayas 29). These definitions could be easily applied to the expulsions forced upon the ethnic Germans. Therefore, the expulsions performed by the Soviet Union were just as unjustifiable as those were by the Nazis. It may be even worse that the Soviets did this after the war was over, rather than during the war. De Zayas summarized these events very well when he said that, "The anomaly remains that while the Nuremberg trials were in progress, millions of Germans were being driven from their homelands, based on decrees, or at least under the sanction, of the same powers whose prosecutors and judges were condemning the mass deportations perpetrated by the Nazis" (31).

When the Russians forcefully moved these ethnic Germans from their homes, many were placed in slave labor and former concentration camps, left to die. As de Zayas described, "Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were uprooted, and tens of thousands were killed. They were evicted from their homes and sent off to slave labor camps in the Soviet Union; the women were raped and the old people and children too young to work were interned in starvation camps" (99). This showed that the Soviets shipped these Germans to the Soviet Union for slave labor, and were able to justify it as part of their reprimands for the war. Also, the mass murders and rapes could be explained because the Germans surrendered unconditionally, which gave them no rights under the control of their occupiers. The imprisonment of these victims in the camps was a popular solution. Why not leave them in the former concentration camps to die? At least they would be out of the way, so that the occupiers could do what they wanted with the land.

The American forces also participated in these crimes. They put people in internment camps for having connections with the Nazi party. Questionnaires were handed out to all adults and asked all sorts of questions related to Nazi organizations and all other aspects of the person's life. The purpose of these questionnaires was "to determine whether the person concerned had been associated with the Nazi Party or its supporters and adherents and, if so, to what degree" (Botting 261). Penalties for association varied according to how involved one was with the Nazis. Of the four Occupation powers, the "Americans were by far the most zealous denazifiers" (Botting 262). During their imprisonment, the people were mistreated by officers who felt that it was part of their job to give the Nazis a taste of their own medicine (Botting 263). This further shows that the Allies held a double standard because they could punish the Nazis for their crimes, while they committed the exact same ones. These actions destroyed the confidence that the Germans had in the occupying forces. The Germans were relieved to have the Allies take over because they would no longer be under Nazi control. They "had been told that the Allies would restore justice to Germany after the tyranny of the Nazi era. What the saw of denazification under the Occupation gave them no confidence that this would happen" (Botting 262).

World War II was a very deadly and horrible war for all of those involved. However, the post-war era was extremely brutal also. Not only were the Germans at the mercy of the Allies, but they were often times mistreated as a form of punishment for their ethnicity. Botting described the Germans as "defeated, disillusioned, demoralized. They were saddled with a history of which they were ashamed and treated as barbarians whether they had been Nazis or not" (123). Not only was the ethnic Germans expelled from their homelands, but also they were assaulted, tortured, murdered and starved. Those who survived initial contacts with the Armies suffered through denazification and were sent to internment camps. In Germany, the cities were over-crowded and food was scarce, but only for the Germans. The occupying forces ate like kings. These examples demonstrate that there indeed was a double standard by which the Allied forces lived. The crimes that they committed against the Germans were unthinkable crimes, which equaled and sometimes exceeded those committed by the Nazis. This was a frightening truth that people have tried to hide over the years, but has recently come out into the open in eyewitness accounts.

Works Cited

Botting, Douglas. From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949. Pp. 121-315.

de Zayas, Alfred-Maurice. A Terrible Revenge. St. Martin's Press: New York, 1986.

Morris, William, ed. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1976.