Leseprobe

133 Still, the Nazi’s war of conquest and extermination displaces people on an unprecedented scale. Since the war began, massive expulsions have been part of daily life. The Generalplan Ost strategy for Central and Eastern Europe offers a glimpse into the long-term consequences of Nazi race policy. Mass murder is carried out on an industrial scale; millions perish; the ability to sustain human life is damaged across an entire continent. The number of people who are displaced, deported or turned into refugees during the Second World War is estimated between 50 and 60 million—one tenth of the European population. We must add to those another 25 million refugees and displaced persons after the war ends. The war puts all of Europe into massive flux. Countless people from all different backgrounds are in transit: soldiers, POWs, emigrants, civilians, evacuees, deportees, settlers, refugees, the displaced, the exiled. Götz Aly and Karl Schlögel call the first half of the twentieth century “Europe’s marshalling yard”. 6 “After 1945, Europe went from a marshalling yard under wartime conditions to a marshalling yard in the absence of war”, according to historian Mathias Beer, but it still persisted “under the conditions bequeathed to it: existing borders, destruction, deracination, death”. 7 “Orderly transfer” is the term used in the Potsdam Agreement to describe the displacement of millions of Germans from Central Europe. Stalin, Truman and Attlee (who had replaced Churchill) agree on 2 August 1945 in Cecilienhof Palace to redraw the map of Central Europe. The goal of their post-war planning is to ensure greater ethnic homogeneity. To achieve this end, Germans must clear out of the east. Churchill had already given a speech in Parliament (15 December 1944) advocating the expulsion of the Germans, since this method would be “the most satisfactory and lasting”. “A clean sweep will be made”, he promised. The writer George Orwell admon- ishes these plans from the left wing of the spectrum: “This is equiva- lent to uprooting and transplanting the entire population of Australia, or the combined populations of Scotland and Ireland. ... I fancy ... that this enormous crime cannot actually be carried through, though it might be started, with confusion, suffering and the sowing of irrec- oncilable hatreds as a result. Meanwhile, the British people should be made to understand, with as much concrete detail as possible, what kind of policies their statesmen are committing them too.” 8 “Orderly transfer”. That is the euphemism the Allies bestow on their decision of summer 1945. Yet no matter what name we use, there will never be anything “orderly and humane” about displace- ment, ethnic cleansing or forced migration. This is quite obvious. By ordering the removals, the Potsdam Agreement is trying to hold back a tide that has actually been rising for some time. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, so-called “wild expulsions” at the end of the war (but before the Potsdam Conference) were already setting brutal prece- dents. According to historian Raymond Douglas, these expulsions represented “the eruption of a massive state-sponsored carnival of