Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (45 page)

Schools were banned from teaching the German history of areas like the Sudetenland or Silesia. Instead, Germans were portrayed as invaders on lands that had historically always been Polish or Czech. The new areas of Poland were referred to as the ‘Recovered Territories’, and Polish children there were taught nationalist slogans, such as ‘Here we were, here we are, here we stay’, and ‘These regions are reclaimed property’. Students in the border areas were not permitted to study German, even as a foreign language – in contrast to other parts of Poland where it was allowed.
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It was not only in schools that this new, nationalist mythology was taught – the adult population was also fed propaganda on a prodigious scale. In Wrocław, for example, an ‘Exhibition of the Recovered Territories’ was held, and was visited by some 1.5 million people. Amongst all the obligatory political exhibits stressing Polish-Soviet brotherhood there was a huge historical section, largely devoted to the relationship between Poland and Germany. This emphasized the thousand-year conflict between the two countries, the return of Poland to its ‘Piast Path’ (in reference to a medieval Polish dynasty who defied German kings to create an independent Poland centred around Silesia), and an exhibit entitled ‘Our Immemorial Right to the Recovered Territories’.
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This was not merely the claiming, or even the reclamation, of territory: it was the rewriting of history. In the new, nationalist Poland, any trace of an indigenous German culture had to be eradicated: this was to be a Poland for Poles only. As official policy at the time recognized, the reclamation of territory was the easy part: ‘We are aiming for a much harder and more complicated target: the removal of age-old traces of Germanization in these lands. It is more than just the removal of signs or memorials, it is purging the sap of Germanization from every part of life, the removal of Germanization from the people’s psyche.’
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The same was true in Czechoslovakia, where President Beneš called for not only ‘a definitive clearance of Germans’ but also of ‘German influence from our country’.
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In this way the return of Sudeten, Silesian, Pomeranian or Prussian Germans to their homelands was made not only more difficult, but ultimately quite pointless. The places they had left behind no longer existed. Their communities, their culture, their history, their language and sometimes even, given the destruction caused by the war, their very fabric had been entirely erased. All this had been replaced by something wholly alien: a new society peopled almost entirely by members of a different ethnic group.

It is easy to condemn the Poles or the Czechs for their racist attitudes towards their German minorities in 1945. One must remember, however, that these attitudes did not appear from nowhere: they were largely a reaction to the cruel treatment that they themselves had suffered under German racial policy during the war. While the methods used by Poles and Czechs were undeniably brutal, the ideology behind them was mild compared to the ideology of the Nazis. Neither country pursued a policy of genocide towards the German race, whatever some of the more extreme literature about the expulsions might claim: their purpose was only ever to remove the German minorities, not to annihilate them. Neither was the removal motivated purely by revenge: it was initially conceived as a practical measure to prevent future conflict arising between nationalities. Though today we would abhor the idea of uprooting millions of people for the sake of a flimsy nationalist ideology, in the aftermath of the war – when the deportation of huge numbers of people had become commonplace, and when the whole of Europe was teeming with millions of displaced persons – the idea was perhaps more acceptable than it ever was before, or has been since.

What happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia was not unique. A similar process would take place in other countries, particularly in Hungary and Romania, where the German-speaking Danubian Swabians were also ejected towards Germany and Austria. In Romania especially this was done with little enthusiasm – there was no real enmity towards Germans here.
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But the feelings of the people were irrelevant, since the expulsion of Germans was part of official policy. In the years after the war, the only place in Europe that welcomed Germans would be Germany itself.

A Cleansed Landscape

It was not only the German minorities who suffered such treatment in countries where they were not wanted. This was in effect the opposite of what was attempted in the aftermath of the First World War: rather than trying to move borders to suit the people who lived in the region, the governments of Europe now decided to move the people to suit the borders.

A typical example of what was happening all over Europe was the treatment of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia, who were hated just as much as the Germans. Slovaks could not forgive the way that Hungary had seized parts of their country in the run-up to the war; as soon as these lands were returned to Slovakia, therefore, they went about expelling all 31,780 Hungarians who had moved to the area since 1938.
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But for the majority of Slovaks this was not enough. Government officials called for the ‘total expulsion’ of Hungarians – all 600,000 of them.
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They spoke in chilling terms of finding a ‘final solution’ to the Hungarian problem, while stating baldly that ‘we do not recognize national minorities’. The popular press agreed: ‘Slovakia and its southern borderlands can only be Slovak and nothing else.’
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In 1946 government forces removed some 44,000 Hungarians from the Slovak borderlands and, in an operation that was similar to Poland’s forced assimilation programme, dispersed them around the rest of Czechoslovakia.
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Soon afterwards, some 70,000 Hungarians were sent to Hungary as part of a population exchange programme (which saw a similar number of Slovaks ‘repatriated’ to Czechoslovakia). And a further 6,000 Hungarians fled the country to avoid varying degrees of persecution.
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At the Paris Peace Conference the Czechoslovak delegation tried to finish the job, and requested the right to deport a further 200,000. On this occasion, perhaps having learned their lesson from the deportation of Germans, Britain and America refused to give their permission. As a consequence Czechoslovakia was not quite allowed to become the homogeneous nation-state it wanted to be. Their only other course of action was their policy of ’re-Slovakization’ — a programme that restored civil rights to Hungarians, but only on the condition that they renounced their Hungarian identity and declared themselves officially Slovaks. Needless to say, this programme did nothing to integrate Hungarians into Czechoslovakian society, and a great deal to alienate them further. They understandably began to see themselves as scapegoats whom the Slovaks were using to divert attention from their own collaborationist behaviour during the war.
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These were the kinds of actions that were taking place all across Europe. Hungarians were also expelled from Romania, and vice-versa. Albanian Chams were expelled from Greece; Romanians were expelled from Ukraine; Italians were expelled from Yugoslavia. A quarter of a million Finns were forced to leave western Karelia when the area was finally ceded to the Soviet Union at the end of the war. As late as 1950 Bulgaria began expelling some 140,000 Turks and Gypsies across their border with Turkey. And so the list goes on.
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As a result of all this forced population movement, eastern Europe became far less multicultural than it had been at any time in modern history. In the space of only one or two years, the proportion of national minorities more than halved. Gone were the old imperial melting pots where Jews, Germans, Magyars, Slavs and dozens of other races and nationalities intermarried, squabbled and rubbed along together as best they could. In their place was a collection of monocultural nation-states, whose populations were more or less ethnically homogeneous. Eastern Europe had cleansed itself on a massive scale.
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Europe in Microcosm: Yugoslavia

If the transfer and exchange of ethnic populations across eastern Europe was often brutal, it was not the worst that could happen. Indeed, the reason such movements were endorsed by so many governments, including the governments of the Western Allies, was that it was so widely regarded as the
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worst option. At the beginning of the war, the Germans had used their minorities in other countries as an excuse for invasion: removing those minorities was considered the only practical way to prevent future conflicts from breaking out. In those areas where the war had had a particularly racist flavour, population transfer was considered – not always from cynical motives – as the best method of removing vulnerable populations from harm’s way. Even those who were forced to leave their homelands often accepted flight as their only option. Their lives had been made so unbearable that they regarded their successful transfer to another country as a lucky escape.

However, population transfers were by no means the answer to every ethnic question after the war. Some groups could not be driven out, no matter how unpopular they were, because they did not have their ‘own’ country to go to – Gypsies, for instance, who everywhere were almost as unwelcome as the Jews. Some countries were obliged to integrate separate communities in an effort to cover up the internal splits that had burst open during the war – the Czechs and the Slovaks, for example, or, to a lesser degree, the Flemings and Walloons of Belgium. In the most extreme cases, governments were forced to pretend that ethnic problems did not exist at all, because to acknowledge them would be politically impossible. This was the case in the USSR and Yugoslavia, where the authorities struggled to convince the population that the violence of the war had been the result of class differences rather than ethnic ones.

Yugoslavia requires special mention because it encompasses all these problems and more. Since most of the groups who had been responsible for the violence during the war were not ‘outsiders’, they could not be expelled – indeed, when some tried to flee the country they were prevented from leaving. Nor could they be separated from one another within the country. There were suggestions at the time that this should be done: ‘Some individuals are asking why Serbs shouldn’t have their own federal Slavonia’, stated one report by Odjel za zaštitu narodna, the Yugoslav intelligence service, ‘or why Croats shouldn’t move to Croatia and Serbs to Serbia.’
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But the whole purpose of re-establishing the Yugoslavian federation was to hold these separate nations together under a single banner. How would Marshal Tito be able to speak of ‘brotherhood and unity’ while at the same time banishing each nationality to separate corners of the country? And how could he allow such nationalist tendencies to thrive while he continued to preach the internationalism of Communist Party doctrine? The different ethnic groups were therefore obliged to continue living side by side despite the fact that each regarded the others with undisguised hatred.

Yugoslavia was the site of some of the worst violence in Europe, both during and after the war. What makes the situation here unique is the many layers that made up the conflict. Yugoslav resistance groups fought not only against foreign aggressors in a war of national liberation, but also against troops of their own government in a war of revolution, against alternative resistance groups in a war of ideology, and against gangs of bandits in a battle to impose law and order. These different strands were so intertwined that they were often indistinguishable from one another. But there was one thread in this tapestry of violence that stood out amongst all the others: the issue of ethnic hatred. The power of this hatred was harnessed by all sides in the war, whatever their alternative agendas. Almost half a century before the civil war that would give the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the world, Yugoslavia was embroiled in the closing stages of one of the most vicious ethnic conflicts of the twentieth century.

Historical Background

The Second World War in Yugoslavia and its aftermath is one of the most complex fields in twentieth-century history, and one strewn with moral and historical booby traps. As in other countries where local atrocities occurred, accounts from the former Yugoslavia itself tend to be extremely biased, with each ethnic group competing for the right to victimhood. Many original documents have been doctored to suit the national or ideological outlook of those who took possession of them. Even without such pitfalls there remain areas of real controversy which even impartial historians of the period find impossible to unravel.
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To begin with, the whole concept of ‘Yugoslavia’ is one that was controversial at the time, and continues to be so today. The country had only existed since 1918, when it was constructed out of the ruins of the First World War. It lay across the fault lines between the remnants of three great nineteenth-century powers – Russia, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. It was therefore the meeting point of three great religions – Christian Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Islam (or indeed four, if one also includes the small Jewish minority that was all but wiped out by the war). It was home to more than half a dozen large national and ethnic minorities, all of whom had nursed petty rivalries and jealousies for generations. The two strongest political groups in the interwar period – the Serb monarchists and the Croat Peasant Party – had argued endlessly over whether Yugoslavia should remain a single kingdom, and if so, how much autonomy should be granted to each region.