the european atrocity you never heard about - the chronicle review - the chronicle of higher...

7/31/2019 The European Atrocity You Never Heard About - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

1/15

Home Opinion & Ideas The Chronicle Review

The Chronicle Review

June 11, 2012

The European Atrocity You Never Heard About

By R.M. Douglas

The screams that rang throughout the darkened cattle car crammed

with deportees, as it jolted across the icy Polish countryside five

nights before Christmas, were Dr. Loch's only means of locating his

patient. The doctor, formerly chief medical officer of a large urban

hospital, now found himself clambering over piles of baggage, fellow

passengers, and buckets used as toilets, only to find his path blocked

by an old woman who ignored his request to move aside. On closer

examination, he discovered that she had frozen to death.

Finally he located the source of the screams, a pregnant woman who

had gone into premature labor and was hemorrhaging profusely.

When he attempted to move her from where she lay into a more

comfortable position, he found that "she was frozen to the floor with

her own blood." Other than temporarily stanching the bleeding,

Loch was unable to do anything to help her, and he never learned

whether she had lived or died. When the train made its first stop,

after more than four days in transit, 16 frost-covered corpses were

pulled from the wagons before the remaining deportees were putback on board to continue their journey. A further 42 passengers

would later succumb to the effects of their ordeal, among them

Loch's wife.

European Atrocity You Never Heard About - The Chroni... http://chronicle.com/article/The-European-Atrocity-You

15 6/13/2012


2/15

Hoover Institution Archives

An estimated 500,000 people

died in the course of the

organized expulsions; survivors

were left in Allied-occupied

Germany to fend for themselves.

During the Second World War, tragic scenes like those were

commonplace, as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin moved around

entire populations like pieces on a chessboard, seeking to reshape

the demographic profile of Europe according to their own

preferences. What was different about the deportation of Loch andhis fellow passengers, however, was that it took place by order of the

United States and Britain as well as the Soviet Union, nearly two

years after the declaration of peace.

Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of

forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of

population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million

German-speaking civiliansthe overwhelming majority of whom

were women, old people, and children under 16were forcibly

ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary,Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of

Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the

number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few

months was about the same as the total number of all the

immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the

20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-

occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The

number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or


15 6/13/2012


3/15


4/15

members of a democratic country and not a fascist one with no free

press or parliament, were responsible individually as well as

collectively" for what was being done to noncombatants in the

Allies' name.

That the expulsions would inevitably cause death and hardship on a

very large scale had been fully recognized by those who set them in

motion. To a considerable extent, they were counting on it. For the

expelling countriesespecially Czechoslovakia and Polandthe use

of terror against their German-speaking populations was intended

not simply as revenge for their wartime victimization, but also as a

means of triggering a mass stampede across the borders and finally

achieving their governments' prewar ambition to create ethnically

homogeneous nation-states. (Before 1939, less than two-thirds of

Poland's population, and only a slightly larger proportion of

Czechoslovakia's, consisted of gentile Poles, Czechs, or Slovaks.)

For the Soviets, who had "compensated" Poland for its territorial

losses to the Soviet Union in 1939 by moving its western border

more than 100 miles inside German territory, the clearance of the

newly "Polish" western lands and the dumping of their millions of

displaced inhabitants amid the ruins of the former Reich served

Stalin's twin goals of impeding Germany's postwar recovery and

eliminating any possibility of a future Polish-German

rapprochement. The British viewed the widespread suffering that

would inevitably attend the expulsions as a salutary form of

re-education of the German population. "Everything that brings

home to the Germans the completeness and irrevocability of their

defeat," Deputy Prime Minister Clement Richard Attlee wrote in

1943, "is worthwhile in the end." And the Americans, as Laurence

Steinhardt, ambassador to Prague, recorded, hoped that by

displaying an "understanding" and cooperative attitude toward the

expelling countries' desire to be rid of their German populations, the

United States could demonstrate its sympathy for those countries'

national aspirations and prevent them from drifting into the

Communist orbit.

The Allies, then, knowingly embarked on a course that, as the

British government was warned in 1944 by its own panel of experts,

was "bound to cause immense suffering and dislocation." That the

expulsions did not lead to the worst consequences that could be

expected from the chaotic cattle drive of millions of impoverished,

embittered, and rootless deportees into a war-devastated country

that had nowhere to put them was due to three main factors.

The first was the skill with which the postwar German chancellor,

Konrad Adenauer, drew the expellees into mainstream politics,


15 6/13/2012


5/15

defusing the threat of a potentially radical and disruptive bloc. The

second was the readiness of most expelleesthe occasionally crass

or undiplomatic statements of their leaders notwithstandingto

renounce the use or threat of force as a means of redressing their

grievances. The third, and by far the most important, was the

30-year-long "economic miracle" that made possible the housing,

feeding, and employment of the largest homeless population with

which any industrial country has ever had to contend. (In EastGermany, on the other hand, the fact that the standard of living for

the indigenous population was already so low meant that the

economic gap between it and the four million arriving expellees was

more easily bridged.)

The downside of "economic miracles," though, is that, as their name

suggests, they can't be relied upon to come along where and when

they are most needed. By extraordinary good fortune, the Allies

avoided reaping the harvest of their own recklessness. Nonetheless,

the expulsions have cast a long and baleful shadow over central andsoutheastern Europe, even to the present day. Their disruptive

demographic, economic, and evenas Eagle Glassheim has pointed

outenvironmental consequences continue to be felt more than 60

years later. The overnight transformation of some of the most

heterogeneous regions of the European continent into virtual ethnic

monoliths changed the trajectory of domestic politics in the

expelling countries in significant and unpredicted ways. Culturally,

the effort to eradicate every trace of hundreds of years of German

presence and to write it out of national and local histories produced

among the new Polish and Czech settler communities in the cleared

areas what Gregor Thum has described as a state of "amputated

memory." As Thum shows in his groundbreaking study of postwar

Wroclawuntil 1945 and the removal of its entire population, the

German city of Breslauthe challenge of confronting their

hometown's difficult past is one that post-Communist Wroclawites

have only recently taken up. In most other parts of Central Europe,

it has hardly even begun.

Still less so in the English-speaking world. It is important to note

that the expulsions are in no way to be compared to the genocidalNazi campaign that preceded them. But neither can the supreme

atrocity of our time become a yardstick by which gross abuses of

human rights are allowed to go unrecognized for what they are.

Contradicting Allied rhetoric that asserted that World War II had

been fought above all to uphold the dignity and worth of all people,

the Germans included, thousands of Western officials, servicemen,

and technocrats took a full part in carrying out a program that,

when perpetrated by their wartime enemies, they did not hesitate to


15 6/13/2012


6/15

denounce as contrary to all principles of humanity.

The degree of cognitive dissonance to which this led was

exemplified by the career of Colonel John Fye, chief U.S. liaison

officer for expulsion affairs to the Czechoslovak government. The

operation he had helped carry out, he acknowledged, drew in

"innocent people who had never raised so much as a word of protest

against the Czechoslovak people." To accomplish it, women and

children had been thrown into detention facilities, "many of which

were little better than the ex-German concentration camps." Yet

these stirrings of unease did not prevent Fye from accepting a

decoration from the Prague government for what the official citation

candidly described as his valuable services "in expelling Germans

from Czechoslovakia."

Today we have come not much further than Fye did in

acknowledging the pivotal role played by the Allies in conceiving

and executing an operation that exceeded in both scale and lethality

the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It is unnecessary to

attribute this to any "taboo" or "conspiracy of silence." Rather, what

is denied is not the fact of the expulsions themselves, but their

significance.

Many European commentators have maintained that to draw

attention to them runs the risk of diminishing the horror that ought

properly to be reserved for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities,

or giving rise to a self-pitying "victim" mentality among today's

generation of Germans, for whom the war is an increasingly distant

memory. Czechs, Poles, and citizens of other expelling states fearthe legal ramifications of a re-examination of the means by which

millions of erstwhile citizens of those countries were deprived of

their nationality, liberty, and property. To this day, the postwar

decrees expropriating and denationalizing Germans remain on the

statute book of the Czech Republic, and their legality has recently

been reaffirmed by the Czech constitutional court.

Some notable exceptions aside, like T. David Curp, Matthew Frank,

and David Gerlach, English-speaking historiansout of either

understandable sympathy for Germany's victims or reluctance tocomplicate the narrative of what is still justifiably considered a

"good war"have also not been overeager to delve into the history

of a messy, complex, morally ambiguous, and politically sensitive

episode, in which few if any of those involved appear in a creditable

light.

By no means are all of these concerns unworthy ones. But neither

are they valid reasons for failing to engage seriously with an episode

of such obvious importance, and to integrate it within the broader


15 6/13/2012


7/15

narrative of modern European history. For historians to writeand,

still worse, to teachas though the expulsions had never taken place

or, having occurred, are of no particular significance to the societies

affected by them, is both intellectually and pedagogically

unsustainable.

The fact that population transfers are currently making a comeback

on the scholarly and policy agenda also suggests that we should

scrutinize with particular care the most extensive experiment made

with them to date. Despite the gruesome history, enthusiasts

continue to chase the mirage of "humane" mass deportations as a

means of resolving intractable ethnic problems. Andrew

Bell-Fialkoff, in a much-cited study, has advocated population

transfers as a valuable tool so long as they are "conducted in a

humane, well-organized manner, like the transfer of Germans from

Czechoslovakia by the Allies in 1945-47." John Mearsheimer, Chaim

Kaufmann, Michael Mann and others have done likewise.

Few wars today, whether within or between states, do not feature an

attempt by one or both sides to create facts on the ground by

forcibly displacing minority populations perceived as alien to the

national community. And although the Rome Statute of the

International Criminal Court has attempted to restrain this

tendency by prohibiting mass deportations, Elazar Barkan

maintains that such proscriptions are far from absolute, and that

"today there is no single code of international law that explicitly

outlaws population transfers either in terms of group or individual

rights protections."

The expulsion of the ethnic Germans is thus of contemporary as well

as historical relevance. At present, though, the study of many vital

elements of this topic is still in its earliest stages. Innumerable

questionsabout the archipelago of camps and detention centers,

the precise number and location of which are still undetermined;

the sexual victimization of female expellees, which was on a scale to

rival the mass rapes perpetrated by Red Army soldiers in occupied

Germany; the full part played by the Soviet and U.S. governments in

planning and executing the expulsionsremain to be fully

answered. At a moment when the surviving expellees are passing

away and many, though far from all, of the relevant archives have

been opened, the time has come for this painful but pivotal chapter

in Europe's recent history to receive at last the scholarly attention it

deserves.

R.M. Douglas is an associate professor of history at Colgate

University. This essay is adapted from his new book, published by

Yale University Press, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the


15 6/13/2012


8/15

with your Chronicle account: Don't have an account? Create one now.

Or log in using one of these alternatives:

Log in to post

Thank you for this article. I remember, as a child, unable to believe my father's story about Dresden- which I learned was true many years later. Likewise this is all true - and horrifying, especially theindividual stories which for me have the most emotional impact - and have received even lessattention than Dresden. So, again, thank you.

32 people liked this.

A very enlightening article!


Unfamiliarity with these facts can be attributed to either a profound lack of curiosity--how didPoland's borders shift so radically?--or a lack of interest. I suspect that most who were peripherallyaware at the time simply chose not to think very much on it, just the ultimate in the str ing of horrors

that had encompassed Europe for the previous five to ten years. There's only so much horror themind can take in. Allied troops were not dying as a result of it and that, at the time, was the mostimportant factor.

The displacement of Poles from what is now western Ukraine is mentioned, but displaced Germansare the focus of the article. The thousands who died in the process of replacing the Germans inSilesia should also be noted.

Not mentioned, or only in passing, are those who, due to the war, found themselves in territoriesoccupied by the western Allies, but who were forcibly repatriated due to the demands of the SovietUnion. Tens of thousands who were involuntarily returned were shipped off to Soviet labor campsnever to be heard of again.


I was unaware of this until I watched an engrossing documentary on the History Channel, _TheLast Days of World War II_. It's a fascinating piece of history that's tragically overlooked. Here'smore information if anyone is interested in learning more < http://www.amazon.com/Last-Day... >.


Fascinating and tragic. Thank you for publishing this, Chronicle editor.

Germans After the Second World War.

CommentsPowered by DISQUS

Add a comment

Showing 40 of 81 comments

Sort by Follow comments: by e-mail by RSS

Real-time updating is paused. (Resume)

elsaiselsa 2 days ago

hlsimmons 2 days ago

jfb1138 2 days ago

outskiing 2 days ago

camillameek 2 days ago


15 6/13/2012


9/15


thank you.


War is hell, and the aftermath as well.


War is hell if we make it. We always have choice.


Having grown up with this story, I am fully aware both of the horrors of that period, and also thelack of attention it has received in histories of, and discussions about, the end of World War II. ButI have two critical clarifications to make: language does not equal ethnicity, and ethnicity is rarelyhomogeneous, particularly in a heterogeneous country such as the former Czechoslovakia. In somepoints of the article, Mr. Douglas refers to the deportees as "German-speaking" but then conflatesthat with being ethnically German or just German. German-speaking is also conflated with beingsympathetic to the political cause of the state of Germany during the war, and, by association, theHolocaust. Neither characterization is true.

Taking my own family as an example, while primarily German-speaking (family members spokeboth German and Czech) genealogy traced back to the 15th century shows both Slavic and Germanicheritage, along with a variety of other ethnicities. The labelling of any group of individuals, as onesingular ethnicity based on their language, hair color, or any other aspect is a slippery slope, as DNAtesting is increasingly showing.

Politics loves simplicity, so by characterizing a group of individuals based on their language, it iseasy to set one group against a recognizable "other." But historical analysis, in striving to clarify thethe wrongs of policy and in an attempt to prevent it from happening again, should strive for clarity.Deportations and executions during the periods of mass expulsion were cloaked in "German-ness"but were really an excuse for the political forces in power to rid themselves of those they felt weundesirable in one way or another. Many citizens, with only a tenuous link to "German-ness" or

really no link at all, were either executed or expelled in those post-war years when combat hadceased and peace supposedly reigned.

I thank Mr. Douglass for presenting the horrors of the expulsions, horrors that attend all forcedmigrations, and should never be condoned in a modern world. But I would ask for clarity indescribing the excuses for the expulsions - for that is what they were. Excuses. That is the onlypossibility we have for ensuring that the same excuses will not be used again, in another place, bythe "righteous" victors of war.


Also. let's not forget the forced repatriation of Eastern Europeans andRussian prisoners back to the clutches of Stalin's workers' paradise -onhis demand. Lives are always the battering chips of the high stakespoker game of diplomacy.

This makes Longfellow's indictment of the British in his saccharine poem "Evangeline" seem tame.History is full of such acts which usually just fall short of "ethnic cleansing". Still, from a lesspassionate perspective, I have to wonder how many of Canada's Quebec difficulties would not existtoday if a humane and equitable displacement had been properly co-ordinated. This may soundcallous but over a hundred years of friction have proven we just can't get along. It seems indeed thatlanguage is the backbone of culture and culture is the mother of identification, differentiation andeven race.-Brian Cowan


Hank Stevens 2 days ago graylibrary 2 days ago

janssen86 5 hours ago

ebrabec 2 days ago

mpowley 2 days ago


15 6/13/2012


10/15

To be clear, the "British" in Longfellow's poem were neither fictional nor British in today'sterms, although we continue to use that term today in this case, in another instance of avoidingculpability in our own history.

Those were British Americans, from Massachusetts colony, who conducted what historianJohn Mack Faragher in his fine recent work calls the first genocide. And those were myancestors in lovely, lost Acadia, which the Americans wanted from pure greed.


It is important to note that while this happened and it is well documented, NO ONE ASKED THEGERMANS TO START THE WAR. And the German peoples were just as guilty as their leadershipfor perpetrating countless horrors on the innocent peoples of other lands. So that, the episode whiletragic PALES in comparison to the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and was just punishment forthe crime committed by the German Peoples.

May the German People never forget the horrors of war such that they do not inflict their horrors onother in the future.


I believe you miss the point completely. And no, it was not just in any sense of the word.


Absolutely correct, dmutchler, and concisely stated.


> was just punishment for the crime committed by the German Peoples.

Relocating hundreds of thousands of non-Germans who never voted for Hitler and likely inmany cases fought against his invasion of their countries is justice to you?

I pray I never be judged by your likes.


It's collectivist thinking like this that gives rise to so many atrocities under discussion. TheGerman government started the war. That is far from saying the German people started thewar.


This is the kind of collectivist thinking that is responsible for war. Would you hold regularAmericans guilty of the hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq by saying "Did anybody ask

proftowanda 2 days ago

artshell 2 days ago

dmutchler 2 days ago

lawilson 2 days ago

gwern0 1 day ago

Paul Bonneau 1 day ago

findout 1 day ago


f 15 6/13/2012


11/15

the US to start the war on Iraq?"

War happens because of wickedness of the few and the collective ignorance of the masses.


So well put. A perfect analogy.


"May the German People never forget the horrors of war. .."

Now there's a shallow conclusion. Surely the rest of us can learn from atrocities committed byothers? Isn't that the point of studying history?


Hear hear.


The German people are actually doing a better job than most of both remembering the horrorsof war and acknowledging their own role in those horrors; hence the extensive terrain in thehistorical museums both in Bonn and Berlin devoted to the Holocaust and other legacies ofWWII (to say nothing of Berlin's separate Holocaust museum and memorials, etc.). The leastwe can do is acknowledge "our" own role in similar atrocities.


You are wrong in many ways but I would argue the "victors" of WWI essentially did ask theGermans to (re)start war in Europe. The onerous economic and political conditions forced onthe Germans at the Treaty of Versailles basically insured a "war to end all wars" sequel. TheGerman people were just as guilty as their leadership? Really, small German children underthe age of 10 were responsible for Germany's actions in WWII? I will need to remember thatethnic/racial theory of guilt for further use. And indiscriminate and arbitrary cr uelty is "justpunishment" for people who simply lived in the wrong place at the wrong time? I am justtaking a wild stab here, but are you an evangelical Christian living in Mississippi? Of coursepeople forget the horrors of war, it only takes about 3 generations. How many Americansactively reflect and ponder on the horrors of some of the US military adventures over the pastfew centuries? Look at the Civil War, that conflict tore this country apart and yet today mostAmericans can barely guess within 50 years when the Civil War took place and most would behard pressed to name a major battle. So, while your quasi-biological theory of of warculpability is predictable (I am surprised it took 10 comments to get there!) it is not particularyinteresting or just.


So, the gang-rape of an 11-year old and her subsequent bestial murder while trying to reach thewest is justified by the like crimes of an SS guard whom the girl never even knew, just becauseyou choose to categorise both into the same "guilty" collective? With this moral code, what

maryfraser 1 day ago

fortysomethingprof 23 hours ago

anon1972 21 hours ago

anon1972 21 hours ago

Socratease2 18 hours ago

janssen86 6 hours ago


f 15 6/13/2012


12/15

crimes could one not justify?

The German people keep the memories of the horrors alive - not the ones perpetrated againstthemselves, but the ones perpetrated by Germans against other people. They do so that theynever again fall into the trap of collectivist amorality. I fail to see how your stance wouldachieve likewise.

And for a bit of historic background: We know from enough sources that quite a lot ofGermans looked at the start of the war with a feeling of foreboding - do not forget that WWIand the horrors of its aftermath was still fresh in people's minds. But if the a country's leadersare bound on warfare, war is going to happen. As none other than Hermann Goering so aptlyput it: "Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm wantto risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one

piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor forthat matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country whodetermine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is ademocracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or novoice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders."

Furthermore, it was not just the German leadership that started the war: The attack on Polandand so WWII was started together with the Soviets - whom the US and British governmentslater chose as allies.


How were Germans who never had the opportunity to vote for or against Hitler guilty of whatHitler did? To punish an ethic German (and who after hundreds of years who can tell if theyare or aren't?) in Poland for something that not only didn't do, but that he wasn't in thecountry to do is obscene. It's guilt by (centuries old) bloodline, exactly what justified hatred ofthe Jews.


Somewhat better known (thanks to Nicholas Bethell and Nikolai Tolstoy) but even less edifying, wasthe forcible repatriation of some 50,000 Cossacks and Russians to the Soviet Union by the British in1944-47. Shameful!


Or how about what Stalin did in the Ukraine? I have read reports that Stalin enacted policies toessentially starve non-Russians in the the Ukraine which resulted in millions dying. Therehave been many holocausts, but most focus on the brand name one prominently displayed ontop of the shelf.


In fact I have read about this in 1978 when I first arrived in the GDR (DDR) from official EastGerman literature. the Sudetendetsche were treated just as criminals by the new inhabitants ofPoland and former CSSR. Ironically the Western allies kept quite about this while they talked aboutupset when some few criminals in the former East block were punished for criminal acts!


The reason for taking the Sudetenland and then the whole of Czechoslovakia was precisely the fact

Michael Price 5 hours ago

dschimme 2 days ago

Socratease2 18 hours ago

L ng Phng 2 days ago

pxfragonard 2 days ago


f 15 6/13/2012


13/15

that ethnic Germans lived there and therefore it was part of the Third Reich.

You don't get to call the game, initiate it and make your opponents' moves as well as your own.

My downstairs neighbor complains about the noise of washing pots in my sink. Now I just throwthem in. He called the game: it's called Pavlov. I have an option whether to be the dog or Pavlov. Hecalled it.

"the supreme atrocity of our time" ???? Hardly. Mao announced that he was willing to "sacrifice" 5million to nationalize the farms of China. Some estimates have the death toll (don't forget the "GreatLeap Forward") at 30 million murders.

But then they're just Chinese and don't offer us a purifying Augustinian confession.


"The reason for taking the Sudetenland and then the whole ofCzechoslovakia was precisely the fact that ethnic Germans lived thereand therefore it was part of the Third Reich." That was the propaganda, not the reason. Hitlerand his gang cooked up false flag atrocities against Sudeten Germans to justify his actions.There was no actual reason to grab the Sudetenland, outside of Hitler's lust for lebensraum - ifyou want to call that a reason.


When people are forgotten, policy fails.


Thank you for a very enlightening article.


Amazing and very disturbing...


By golly the descendants of the perpetrators have now come to power here in the USA!Only now they don't use loaded cattle cars but only a few at a time, usually on planes tosome unknown distant locations beside the Gitmo atrocity. Last I hear they have left children andwomen, pregnant or otherwise mostly alone. But Japanese-Americans know we are quite familiarwith the techniques.


This tragic wrong needs to be put in the context of the millions of Germans who voluntarily fled theSoviets from the east, for good reason, into western occupied Germany. And the situation in theformer Yugoslavia also adds context. There the west refused to tolerate "ethnic cleansing" in theform of moving populations. Instead the people took things into their own hands and slaughteredthe undesirable group as a way to force them to flee. Who knows what would have happened to theGerman populations left behind to live among those they had so grievously wronged.


Paul Bonneau 1 day ago

Michael Godey 2 days ago swygant 2 days ago

Denise Berg 2 days ago

awegweiser 2 days ago

citizenwhy 2 days ago

dloewy 1 day ago


f 15 6/13/2012


14/15

You seem to assume collective guilt. The German refugees (mostly women, children, and oldmen) were hardly the slaughterers who committed the Nazi atrocities that are so welldocumented. Since when is it just to take revenge on the most vulnerable of noncombatants?Also, not all Sudeten Germans were Nazis or Nazi sympathizers.The long-overdue attention given to the post-war atrocities perpetrated against Germancivilians or the destruction of cities such as Dresden does not mean that we are forgetting whounleashed WWII and systematically exterminated millions of Jews and other "undesirable"people. But rather than resting assured that all that evil was perpetrated exclusively by aparticular generation of inherently war-hungry Germans, it's much harder to acknowledge thatthere is something universal in the human capacity for brutality and inhumanity. It's muchmore disturbing to assume that unspeakable evil could happen again--anytime and possiblyanywhere.


Well said!


The "trail of tears" on our own soil was awful too; however it seems to me nothing will ever equalthe magnitude and level of evil perpetrated by Hitler against people who he was simply taught tohate.


Professor Douglas, thank you for this much-needed research. I was also heartened to read thecomments, which overwhelmingly were posted by people who understood the point of this articleand the underlying book, which I will be sure to read.The point certainly is not to deflect attention from German atrocities or somehow try to diminishtheir horror, but 67 years after WWII it must be possible to look at ALL of the unspeakable injusticeand suffering caused by it. It's not about comparing who suffered more or the most. The fact is that

once unleashed, war consumes everything in its path, tends to turn even good people into savages,and becomes "messy" so that good and evil cannot always be neatly distinguished. War is a terriblecrucible in which some humans assert their humanity whereas others may lose theirs.My father's family was Jewish-German living in the Sudetenland. Most of his relatives ended up inAuschwitz via Theresienstadt. Only two survived. Two managed to flee. I grew up with accounts ofthe German occupation, the holocaust, but also of the post-war atrocities in the Sudetenland andelsewhere that were not spontaneous acts of revenge but well-orchestrated, planned opportunitiesto ethnically cleanse the German population from the Czech lands--a population of roughly 3million who had lived there for 8 centuries. Most Czechs living today don't know this and other suchunpleasant facts and few care. Some Czech historians (I'm thinking of Petr Pithart and Vclavern) were bold enough to speak out and caused a storm of outrage in their homeland. As youpointed out, the shameful Bene decrees are still in effect today and most Czechs believe that theywere and are only fair.The roots of the tragedy in the Sudetenland specifically can be traced in part back to the crumblingof the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when crafty and ambitious politicians such as the subsequent firstCzech president Tom Garrigue Masaryk and his eventual successor Edvard Bene were activelyworking to precipitate the Empire's demise. Even before Czechoslovakia emerged as an independent

state from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the two and others were making plans toeliminate the German population. In their support of the independence movement, ThomasWoodrow Wilson and his administration apparently didn't realize or care that Czechoslovakia had asizable German population. Three million Germans were conveniently forgotten, their rightsdenied. Later, the "fog of war" served as a convenient cloak under which the violent expulsion of theGermans could be orchestrated. In the article and I am sure even more so in your book, you havedescribed so eloquently the evils perpetrated even as the "just war" was finally over.My father told me that it was common knowledge in Prague that systematic mass rapes wereperpetrated on German women held captive in the Prague Strahov stadium in the aftermath of thewar. Every night, hordes of Czech nationalists and--no doubt--even the occasional "ordinary" citizentook revenge on those least capable of defending themselves. When the Germans were sent packingand headed for the German border with meager belongings, many of them were beaten, raped,tortured, and killed. The recent find and subsequent excavation of a mass grave containing theremains of Sudeten Germans revealed that these refugees were beaten to death with shovels andother crude agricultural implements. I apologize if I am telling you what you know so much betterthan I, but as a Czech-born 52-year-old I regret that to this day my former compatriots have not

manoflamancha 1 day ago

candidcamera 2 days ago

dloewy 1 day ago


f 15 6/13/2012


15/15

honestly confronted their past. They also continue to venerate both Masaryk and Bene as if theywere saints. The tragedy is that of forgetting. We must not forget. Thank you for keeping thememory alive and for educating the world.


This article points out a problem with the human condition - at our core there is somethingdesperately wrong. We, as intellectuals, like to point out these types of atrocities as isolatedincidents of an individual gone wrong (e.g. Hitler and Stalin). When in reality we see these types ofevents perpetrated throughout history by individuals and given assent by the populace who did littleor nothing to stop them.

My question is what does this tell us of the human condition? What will we learn from what we haveborn witness?


Nothing. If history proves or teaches us anything, it is that we learn nothing. The samemistakes will be made, the same crimes against humanity will repeat and repeat all the worldover.


The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.

cmorton001 1 day ago

Sarah Stanton 1 day ago


the european atrocity you never heard about - the chronicle review - the chronicle of higher...

Documents