holocaust: the ignored reality

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Holocaust: The Ignored Reality Timothy Snyder JULY 16, 2009 ISSUE Beehive Mapping/Mike King Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today’s confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of Holocaust: The Ignored Reality | by Timothy Snyd... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/07/16/holo... 1 of 18 01/29/2017 06:25 PM

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Page 1: Holocaust: The Ignored Reality

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality

Timothy Snyder JULY 16, 2009 ISSUE

Beehive Mapping/Mike King

Though Europe thrives, its writers andpoliticians are preoccupied with death. The masskillings of European civilians during the 1930sand 1940s are the reference of today’s confuseddiscussions of memory, and the touchstone ofwhatever common ethics Europeans may share.The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and theSoviet Union turned individual lives into massdeath, particular humans into quotas of those tobe killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings indark woods and falsified the records of regions inwhich they had starved people to death; theGermans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of

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their Jewish victims and burn them on giantgrates. Historians must, as best we can, cast lightinto these shadows and account for these people.This we have not done. Auschwitz, generallytaken to be an adequate or even a final symbol ofthe evil of mass killing, is in fact only thebeginning of knowledge, a hint of the truereckoning with the past still to come.The very reasons that we know something aboutAuschwitz warp our understanding of theHolocaust: we know about Auschwitz becausethere were survivors, and there were survivorsbecause Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as adeath factory. These survivors were largely WestEuropean Jews, because Auschwitz is where WestEuropean Jews were usually sent. After WorldWar II, West European Jewish survivors were freeto write and publish as they liked, whereas EastEuropean Jewish survivors, if caught behind theiron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs ofthe Holocaust could (although very slowly) enterinto historical writing and public consciousness.This form of survivors’ history, of which theworks of Primo Levi are the most famousexample, only inadequately captures the reality ofthe mass killing. The Diary of Anne Frankconcerns assimilated European Jewishcommunities, the Dutch and German, whosetragedy, though horrible, was a very small part ofthe Holocaust. By 1943 and 1944, when most ofthe killing of West European Jews took place, theHolocaust was in considerable measure complete.Two thirds of the Jews who would be killedduring the war were already dead by the end of1942. The main victims, the Polish and SovietJews, had been killed by bullets fired over deathpits or by carbon monoxide from internalcombustion engines pumped into gas chambers atTreblinka, Bełzec, and Sobibór in occupied

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Poland.Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludesthose who were at the center of the historicalevent. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speakingJews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuousGerman term, Ostjuden —were culturally alienfrom West Europeans, including West EuropeanJews. To some degree, they continue to bemarginalized from the memory of the Holocaust.The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau wasconstructed on territories that are today in Poland,although at the time they were part of the GermanReich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today’sPoland by anyone who visits, yet relatively fewPolish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there.The two largest groups of victims are nearlymissing from the memorial symbol.An adequate vision of the Holocaust would placeOperation Reinhardt, the murder of the PolishJews in 1942, at the center of its history. PolishJews were the largest Jewish community in theworld, Warsaw the most important Jewish city.This community was exterminated at Treblinka,Bełzec, and Sobibór. Some 1.5 million Jews werekilled at those three facilities, about 780,863 atTreblinka alone. Only a few dozen peoplesurvived these three death facilities. Bełzec,though the third most important killing site of theHolocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, ishardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished atthat death factory, and only two or three survived.About a million more Polish Jews were killed inother ways, some at Chelmno, Majdanek, orAuschwitz, many more shot in actions in theeastern half of the country.All in all, as many if not more Jews were killed bybullets as by gas, but they were killed by bullets ineasterly locations that are blurred in painful

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remembrance. The second most important part ofthe Holocaust is the mass murder by bullets ineastern Poland and the Soviet Union. It beganwith SS Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jewish menin June 1941, expanded to the murder of Jewishwomen and children in July, and extended to theextermination of entire Jewish communities thatAugust and September. By the end of 1941, theGermans (along with local auxiliaries andRomanian troops) had killed a million Jews in theSoviet Union and the Baltics. That is theequivalent of the total number of Jews killed atAuschwitz during the entire war. By the end of1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal oflocal assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews,and the Soviet Jewish populations under theircontrol had ceased to exist.

here were articulate Soviet Jewish witnesses andchroniclers, such as Vassily Grossman. But he andothers were forbidden from presenting theHolocaust as a distinctly Jewish event. Grossmandiscovered Treblinka as a journalist with the RedArmy in September 1944. Perhaps because heknew what the Germans had done to Jews in hisnative Ukraine, he was able to guess what hadhappened there, and wrote a short book about it.He called Treblinka “hell,” and placed it at thecenter of the war and of the century. Yet forStalin, the mass murder of Jews had to be seen asthe suffering of “citizens.” Grossman helped tocompile a Black Book of German crimes againstSoviet Jews, which Soviet authorities latersuppressed. If any group suffered especially underthe Germans, Stalin maintained wrongly, it wasthe Russians. In this way Stalinism has preventedus from seeing Hitler’s mass killings in properperspective.In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order:Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets,

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Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest.Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: takentogether, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polishand Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jewskilled were Romanian, Hungarian, andCzechoslovak. If these people are considered, theEast European character of the Holocaustbecomes even clearer.)Yet even this corrected image of the Holocaustconveys an unacceptably incomplete sense of thescope of German mass killing policies in Europe.The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, wasoriginally only one of the exterminatory projectsto be implemented after a victorious war againstthe Soviet Union. Had things gone the way thatHitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, Germanforces would have implemented a Hunger Plan inthe Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. AsUkrainian and south Russian agricultural productswere diverted to Germany, some 30 millionpeople in Belarus, northern Russia, and Sovietcities were to be starved to death. The HungerPlan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, thecolonization plan for the western Soviet Union,which foresaw the elimination of some 50 millionpeople.The Germans did manage to carry out policiesthat bore some resemblance to these plans. Theyexpelled half a million non-Jewish Poles fromlands annexed to the Reich. An impatientHimmler ordered a first stage of Generalplan Ostimplemented in eastern Poland: ten thousandPolish children were killed and a hundredthousand adults expelled. The Wehrmachtpurposefully starved about one million people inthe siege of Leningrad, and about a hundredthousand more in planned famines in Ukrainian

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cities. Some three million captured Soviet soldiersdied of starvation or disease in German prisoner-of-war camps. These people were purposefullykilled: as with the siege of Leningrad, theknowledge and intention to starve people to deathwas present. Had the Holocaust not taken place,this would be recalled as the worst war crime inmodern history.In the guise of anti-partisan actions, the Germanskilled perhaps three quarters of a million people,about 350,000 in Belarus alone, and lower butcomparable numbers in Poland and Yugoslavia.The Germans killed more than a hundredthousand Poles when suppressing the WarsawUprising of 1944. Had the Holocaust nothappened, these “reprisals” too would be regardedas some of the greatest war crimes in history. Infact they, like the starvation of Soviet prisoners ofwar, are scarcely recalled at all beyond thecountries directly concerned. German occupationpolicies killed non-Jewish civilians in other waysas well, for example by hard labor in prisoncamps. Again: these were chiefly people fromPoland or the Soviet Union.The Germans killed somewhat more than tenmillion civilians in the major mass killing actions,about half of them Jews, about half of themnon-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostlycame from the same part of Europe. The projectto kill all Jews was substantially realized; theproject to destroy Slavic populations was onlyvery partially implemented.Auschwitz is only an introduction to theHolocaust, the Holocaust only a suggestion ofHitler’s final aims. Grossman’s novels ForeverFlowing and Life and Fate daringly recount bothNazi and Soviet terror, and remind us that even afull characterization of German policies of masskilling is incomplete as a history of atrocity in

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mid-century Europe. It omits the state that Hitlerwas chiefly concerned to destroy, the other statethat killed Europeans en masse in the middle ofthe century: the Soviet Union. In the entireStalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Sovietpolicies killed, in a conservative estimate, wellover five million Europeans. Thus when oneconsiders the total number of European civilianskilled by totalitarian powers in the middle of thetwentieth century, one should have in mind threegroups of roughly equal size: Jews killed byGermans, non-Jews killed by Germans, andSoviet citizens killed by the Soviet state. As ageneral rule, the German regime killed civilianswho were not German citizens, whereas theSoviet regime chiefly killed civilians who wereSoviet citizens.

oviet repressions are identified with the Gulag,much as Nazi repressions are identified withAuschwitz. The Gulag, for all of the horrors ofslave labor, was not a system of mass killing. Ifwe accept that mass killing of civilians is at thecenter of political, ethical, and legal concerns, thesame historical point applies to the Gulag as toAusch-witz. We know about the Gulag because itwas a system of labor camps, but not a set ofkilling facilities. The Gulag held about 30 millionpeople and shortened some three million lives.But a vast majority of those people who were sentto the camps returned alive. Precisely because wehave a literature of the Gulag, most famouslyAleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, wecan try to imagine its horrors—much as we cantry to imagine the horrors of Auschwitz.Yet as Auschwitz draws attention away from thestill greater horrors of Treblinka, the Gulagdistracts us from the Soviet policies that killedpeople directly and purposefully, by starvationand bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two

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Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Women in a cattle car en route to a death camp

were the mostsignificant: thecollectivization faminesof 1930–1933 and theGreat Terror of1937–1938. It remainsunclear whether theKazakh famine of1930–1932 wasintentional, although itis clear that over amillion Kazakhs diedof starvation. It isestablished beyondreasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starvedto death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series oforders of October–December 1932 with evidentmalice and intention to kill. By the end, morethan three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukrainehad died.What we read of the Great Terror also distracts usfrom its true nature. The great novel and the greatmemoir are Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noonand Alexander Weissberg’s The Accused. Bothfocus our attention on a small group of Stalin’svictims, urban Communist leaders, educatedpeople, sometimes known in the West. This imagedominates our understanding of the Great Terror,but it is incorrect. Taken together, purges ofCommunist Party elites, the security police, andmilitary officers claimed not more than 47,737lives.The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation00447, was aimed chiefly at “kulaks,” which is tosay peasants who had already been oppressedduring collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives.A few national minorities, representing togetherless than 2 percent of the Soviet population,

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yielded more than a third of the fatalities of theGreat Terror. In an operation aimed at ethnicPoles who were Soviet citizens, for example,111,091 people were shot. Of the 681,692executions carried out for alleged political crimesin 1937 and 1938, the kulak operation and thenational operations accounted for 633,955, morethan 90 percent of the total. These people wereshot in secret, buried in pits, and forgotten.The emphasis on Auschwitz and the Gulagunderstates the numbers of Europeans killed, andshifts the geographical focus of the killing to theGerman Reich and the Russian East. LikeAuschwitz, which draws our attention to theWestern European victims of the Nazi empire, theGulag, with its notorious Siberian camps, alsodistracts us from the geographical center of Sovietkilling policies. If we concentrate on Auschwitzand the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a periodof twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killingpolicies perished in a particular region of Europe,one defined more or less by today’s Belarus,Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. Moregenerally, when we contemplate Auschwitz andthe Gulag, we tend to think of the states that builtthem as systems, as modern tyrannies, ortotalitarian states. Yet such considerations ofthought and politics in Berlin and Moscow tend tooverlook the fact that mass killing happened,predominantly, in the parts of Europe betweenGermany and Russia, not in Germany and Russiathemselves.The geographic, moral, and political center of theEurope of mass killing is the Europe of the East,above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the BalticStates, lands that were subject to sustainedpolicies of atrocity by both regimes. The peoplesof Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not

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only, suffered the most, since these lands wereboth part of the Soviet Union during the terrible1930s and subject to the worst of the Germanrepressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as MarkMazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine andBelarus were the heart of darkness.Historical reckonings that can be seen asobjective, such as the counting of victims of masskilling actions, might help to restore a certain losthistorical balance. German suffering under Hitlerand during the war, though dreadful in scale, doesnot figure at the center of the history of masskilling. Even if the ethnic Germans killed duringflight from the Red Army, expulsion from Polandand Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and thefirebombings in Germany are included, the totalnumber of German civilians killed by state powerremains comparatively small (for more on that,see the box below).The main victims of direct killing policies amongGerman citizens were the 70,000 “euthanasia”patients and the 165,000 German Jews. The mainGerman victims of Stalin remain the womenraped by the Red Army and the prisoners of warheld in the Soviet Union. Some 363,000 Germanprisoners died of starvation and disease in Sovietcaptivity, as did perhaps 200,000 Hungarians. Ata time when German resistance to Hitler receivesattention in the mass media, it is worth recallingthat some participants in the July 1944 plot to killHitler were right at the center of mass killingpolicies: Arthur Nebe, for example, whocommanded Einsatzgruppe B in the killing fieldsof Belarus during the first wave of the Holocaustin 1941; or Eduard Wagner, the quartermastergeneral of the Wehrmacht, who wrote a cheeryletter to his wife about the need to deny food tothe starving millions of Leningrad.

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It is hard to forget Anna Akhmatova: “It lovesblood, the Russian earth.” Yet Russian martyrdomand heroism, now loudly proclaimed in Putin’sRussia, must be placed against the largerhistorical background. Soviet Russians, like otherSoviet citizens, were indeed victims of Stalinistpolicy: but they were much less likely to be killedthan Soviet Ukrainians or Soviet Poles, ormembers of other national minorities. DuringWorld War II several terror actions were extendedto eastern Poland and the Baltic states, territoriesabsorbed by the Soviet Union. In the most famouscase, 22,000 Polish citizens were shot in 1940 atKatyn and four other sites; tens of thousandsmore Poles and Balts died during or shortly afterdeportations to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Duringthe war, many Soviet Russians were killed by theGermans, but far fewer proportionately thanBelarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews.Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15million. About one in twenty-five civilians inRussia was killed by the Germans during the war,as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (orPoland) or about one in five in Belarus.Belarus and Ukraine were occupied for much ofthe war, with both German and Soviet armiespassing through their entire territory twice, inattack and retreat. German armies never occupiedmore than a small portion of Russia proper, andthat for shorter periods. Even taking into accountthe siege of Leningrad and the destruction ofStalingrad, the toll taken on Russian civilians wasmuch less than that on Belarusians, Ukrainians,and Jews. Exaggerated Russian claims aboutnumbers of deaths treat Belarus and Ukraine asRussia, and Jews, Belarusians, and Ukrainians asRussians: this amounts to an imperialism ofmartyrdom, implicitly claiming territory byexplicitly claiming victims. This will likely be theline propounded by the new historical committee

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appointed by President Dmitri Medvedev toprevent “falsifications” of the Russian past. Underlegislation currently debated in Russia, statementssuch as those contained in this paragraph wouldbe a criminal offense.Ukrainian politicians counter Russia’smonopolization of common suffering, andrespond to Western European stereotypes ofUkrainians as Holocaust collaborators, by puttingforward a narrative of suffering of their own: thatmillions of Ukrainians were deliberately starvedby Stalin. President Viktor Yushchenko does hiscountry a grave disservice by claiming ten milliondeaths, thus exaggerating the number ofUkrainians killed by a factor of three; but it istrue that the famine in Ukraine of 1932–1933 wasa result of purposeful political decisions, andkilled about three million people. With theexception of the Holocaust, the collectivizationfamines were the greatest political disaster of theEuropean twentieth century. Collectivizationnevertheless remained the central element of theSoviet model of development, and was copiedlater by the Chinese Communist regime, with thepredictable consequence: tens of millions dead bystarvation in Mao’s Great Leap Forward.The preoccupation with Ukraine as a source offood was shared by Hitler and Stalin. Both wishedto control and exploit the Ukrainian breadbasket,and both caused political famines: Stalin in thecountry as a whole, Hitler in the cities and theprisoner-of-war camps. Some of the Ukrainianprisoners who endured starvation in those campsin 1941 had survived the famine in 1933. Germanpolicies of starvation, incidentally, are partiallyresponsible for the notion that Ukrainians werewilling collaborators in the Holocaust. The mostnotorious Ukrainian collaborators were the guardsat the death facilities at Treblinka, Bełzec, and

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Sobibór. What is rarely recalled is that theGermans recruited the first cadres of such men,captured Soviet soldiers, from their own prisoner-of-war camps. They rescued some people frommass starvation, one great crime in the east, inorder to make them collaborators in another, theHolocaust.Poland’s history is the source of endlessconfusion. Poland was attacked and occupied notby one but by both totalitarian states between1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the SovietUnion, then allies, exploited its territories andexterminated much of its intelligentsia at thattime. Poland’s capital was the site of not one buttwo of the major uprisings against German powerduring World War II: the ghetto uprising ofWarsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto wasleveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the PolishHome Army in 1944, after which the rest of thecity was destroyed. These two central examples ofresistance and mass killing were confused in theGerman mass media in August 1994, 1999, and2004, on all the recent five-year anniversaries ofthe Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and will be again inAugust 2009.

f any European country seems out of place intoday’s Europe, stranded in another historicalmoment, it is Belarus under the dictatorship ofAleksandr Lukashenko. Yet while Lukashenkoprefers to ignore the Soviet killing fields in hiscountry, wishing to build a highway over the deathpits at Kuropaty, in some respects Lukashenkoremembers European history better than hiscritics. By starving Soviet prisoners of war,shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civiliansin anti-partisan actions, German forces madeBelarus the deadliest place in the world between1941 and 1944. Half of the population of SovietBelarus was either killed or forcibly displaced

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during World War II: nothing of the kind can besaid of any other European country.Belarusian memories of this experience,cultivated by the current dictatorial regime, helpto explain suspicions of initiatives coming fromthe West. Yet West Europeans would generally besurprised to learn that Belarus was both theepicenter of European mass killing and the baseof operations of anti-Nazi partisans who actuallycontributed to the victory of the Allies. It isstriking that such a country can be entirelydisplaced from European remembrance. Theabsence of Belarus from discussions of the past isthe clearest sign of the difference betweenmemory and history.Just as disturbing is the absence of economics.Although the history of mass killing has much todo with economic calculation, memory shunsanything that might seem to make murder appearrational. Both Nazi Germany and the SovietUnion followed a path to economicself-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balanceindustry with an agrarian utopia in the East, theUSSR wishing to overcome its agrarianbackwardness with rapid industrialization andurbanization. Both regimes were aiming foreconomic autarky in a large empire, in which bothsought to control Eastern Europe. Both of themsaw the Polish state as a historical aberration;both saw Ukraine and its rich soil asindispensable. They defined different groups asthe enemies of their designs, although the Germanplan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Sovietpolicy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial isthat the ideology that legitimated mass death wasalso a vision of economic develop-ment. In aworld of scarcity, particularly of food supplies,both regimes integrated mass murder witheconomic planning.

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They did so in ways that seem appalling andobscene to us today, but which were sufficientlyplausible to motivate large numbers of believers atthe time. Food is no longer scarce, at least in theWest; but other resources are, or will be soon. Inthe twenty-first century, we will face shortages ofpotable water, clean air, and affordable energy.Climate change may bring a renewed threat ofhunger.If there is a general political lesson of the historyof mass killing, it is the need to be wary of whatmight be called privileged development: attemptsby states to realize a form of economic expansionthat designates victims, that motivates prosperityby mortality. The possibility cannot be excludedthat the murder of one group can benefit another,or at least can be seen to do so. That is a versionof politics that Europe has in fact witnessed andmay witness again. The only sufficient answer isan ethical commitment to the individual, such thatthe individual counts in life rather than in death,and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.The Europe of today is remarkable precisely in itsunity of prosperity with social justice and humanrights. Probably more than any other part of theworld, it is immune, at least for the time being, tosuch heartlessly instrumental pursuits ofeconomic growth. Yet memory has made someodd departures from history, at a time whenhistory is needed more than ever. The recentEuropean past may resemble the near future ofthe rest of the world. This is one more reason forgetting the reckonings right.

### The Expulsion of Germans from the EastOf the 12 million or so Germans who fled orwere expelled from Eastern Europe at the endof the war, the vast majority came from

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Czechoslovakia (3.5 million) or Poland (7.8million). Most of the second group came fromlands taken from the defeated Reich andassigned to Poland by the Allies. About half ofthe 12 million fled, and about half weredeported—though a neat division is impossible,since some of those who fled later returned andwere then deported.In late 1944 and early 1945 some six millionGermans fled before the Red Army; it was thenthat most of the 600,000 or so fatalities amongGerman refugees took place. Many of thesewere simply people who were caught betweenarmies; some were purposefully massacred bySoviet soldiers or died in Soviet camps.Murders were also committed by Czechs andPoles. Hitler shares responsibility for thesedeaths, since German authorities failed toorganize timely evacuations.The postwar deportations of Germans, a directresult of Hitler’s war, were a Czechoslovak-Polish-Soviet-British-American project. Duringthe war, the exiled leaders of occupied Polandand Czechoslovakia expressed their wish tokeep their postwar German populations small,and the Allies agreed that German populationswould be removed after victory. WinstonChurchill recommended a “clean sweep,” andthe Allied Control Council issued the officialplan for the transfer of six million Germans.The (non-Communist) Czechoslovakgovernment had Stalin’s approval to expel itsGermans, but also Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s.Poland was under Soviet control, though anyPolish government would have expelledGermans. Polish Communists accepted Stalin’sproposal that Poland should be moved very farto the west, which implied expelling moreGermans than democratic Polish politicians

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would have wished. (It also entailed thedeportation of Poles from the eastern half ofpre-war Poland, which the Soviets annexed.About a million of these Polish expellees settledthe lands from which Germans were expelled.)From May to December 1945 Polish andCzechoslovak authorities dumped about twomillion Germans over their borders. FromJanuary 1946, Polish and Czechoslovakauthorities continued to force Germans to leave,while British, Soviet, and American forcesarranged their reception in their occupationzones in Germany. In 1946 and 1947, theSoviets received slightly more than two millionGermans in their zone, the British some 1.2million, and the Americans some 1.4 million.Deportations continued at a slower pacethereafter.Although the expulsions were a case ofcollective responsibility, and involved hideoustreatment, mortality rates among Germancivilians—some 600,000 out of 12million—were relatively low when compared tothe other events discussed here. Caught up inthe end of a horrible war fought in their name,and then by an Allied consensus in favor ofborder changes and deportation, these Germanswere not victims of a calculated Stalinist killingpolicy comparable to the Terror or the famine.

Letters

'Holocaust: The Ignored Reality': An ExchangeAugust 13, 2009

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