The Perils of Potsdam: American Quaker Relief Workers and the Post-World War II Expulsions of Germans Danny Rothschild Senior Thesis Department of History, Haverford College Advisors: Professor Linda Gerstein, Professor Andrew Friedman April 24, 2015 Rothschild i ABSTRACT Between the final months of World War II and the end of the 1940s, about 13 million ethnic Germans fled and were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Although the expulsions had already begun, at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Big Three sanctioned further “population transfers” of Germans from Eastern Europe, provided they were carried out in an “orderly and humane manner.” Helping to aid the expellees’ integration into Germany were relief workers of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). These American Quaker relief workers were strong critics of the expulsions, not only because they were not, in fact, “orderly and humane”— the American government agreed on that point by the end of 1947—but because, according to the AFSC workers, of the dangerous ethnic nationalist tendencies behind them. As both critics of the United States and, through their role in America’s postwar reconstruction of Europe, agents of its global reach, the Quaker relief workers developed a critique of nationalism that was deeply imbedded in the American expansionist imagination and a vision of a world structured by international organizations and reconciled by transnational encounters. Relying on research in Quaker archives in the Philadelphia area, this thesis shows that for AFSC relief workers, the word “Potsdam”—by which they meant the United States’ sanctioning of the expulsions at the Potsdam Conference—encapsulated both this critique and this vision. Rothschild ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The seed of this thesis was planted in one of Professor Linda Gerstein’s lectures two years ago, when I first learned of the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. I continued to tackle the subject through coursework in the classes of Professor Andrew Friedman and Professor Alex Kitroeff, as well as during my time in Berlin, where I had the opportunity to visit Cecilienhof, the palace that housed the Potsdam Conference. By the time I got started with the project itself this year, then, much of the groundwork had already been laid. Along the way was a team of very smart and very thoughtful people giving me smart and thoughtful feedback. Professor Friedman, and my fellow students in his thesis seminar, pushed me deep into the textures of the documents from the Quaker archives. Professor Gerstein, with her unrivaled breadth of knowledge—and her just as impressive reading list—pulled me back out. I had, in addition, the benefit of an unofficial third reader: my friend Neilay Shah, former Haverford College Writing Center peer tutor extraordinaire. To all of them I am grateful. Thanks, too, to the librarians and archivists who guided me through an always growing maze of primary and secondary materials, especially Haverford’s Ann Upton, Margaret Schaus, and Rob Haley, and Don Davis, archivist at the American Friends Service Committee, who put up with me for the thirty hours or so I spent poring over documents in the basement of the Friends Center in Philadelphia. Finally, and of course, thanks to my family. Rothschild iii CONTENTS ABSTRACT i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: "REPORTS ON CONDITIONS" 12 CHAPTER 2: ALTERNATIVE SERVICE 23 CHAPTER 3: CRITIQUING NATIONALISM, CRITIQUING POTSDAM 32 CHAPTER 4: BEYOND THE NATION-STATE 42 CONCLUSION 49 BIBLIOGRAPHY 51 Rothschild 1 INTRODUCTION When American Quakers told this story, they began with Potsdam. Harry Truman, Josef Stalin, and Winston Churchill had planned to divvy up Germany and set the postwar order with a conference in Berlin, the capital of the Reich, but the Allies had leveled the city to such a degree that no suitable location could be found that could safely and comfortably hold the Big Three and their large staffs in the summer of 1945. They settled on Berlin’s comparatively intact suburb of Potsdam, more amenable to their logistical needs and still sufficiently laden with symbolism of German hubris and defeat. Potsdam had been the traditional residence of the Hohenzollern ruling family of Prussia and the German Empire, and the last palace they built was Cecilienhof, a Tudor-style mansion for Crown Prince Wilhelm constructed between 1914 and 1917. The royal family was only able to live there briefly; they lost the palace after the Kaiser’s abdication in 1918. It was at Cecilienhof from July 17 through August 2, 1945 that Truman, Stalin, and Churchill—replaced July 26 by his victorious opponent in the U.K. elections, Clement Attlee—met to decide Europe’s future. Among the decisions agreed upon at Potsdam were three major resolutions that quite literally shaped Germany’s place in Central Europe. First, the Allied leaders decided to split up Germany into four occupation zones—one each for the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France—with the city of Berlin as a special case, itself divided into four zones. But this was not the same Germany as had existed in 1938, before its territorial aggression under Adolf Hitler. It was decided at Potsdam to compensate for Russian gains in eastern Poland by moving the Polish-German border 150 miles to the west, to a line formed by the Oder and Neisse Rivers.1 Finally, the Allies sanctioned the “transfers” of German populations from Poland 1 Because the war in Europe was mainly fought—and won—on the Eastern Front, Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted Stalin's gains into eastern Poland at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Rothschild 2 (including the territories newly “recovered” from Germany), Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, provided they were done in an “orderly and humane manner.” The Potsdam Agreement did not only define a rump-German nationhood; by sanctioning the expulsions, it also endorsed the principle of “population transfer” in the name of creating ethnically homogeneous Eastern and Central European nation-states.2 Actually, the mass movement of Germans from the East had begun months before the Potsdam Conference. Between October 1944 and January 1945, 3.5 million Germans fled from East Prussia, Pomerania, and the Neumark in anticipation of the Red Army’s advance.3 Then, in the spring of 1945, the new governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia, which were still reestablishing themselves, began to expel ethnic Germans; these pre-Potsdam “transfers” are now known as the “wild expulsions.” By the time of the Potsdam Conference, the job was half done; by 1950, 13 million ethnic Germans had fled or been expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Between 500,000 and 1,500,000 had died, mostly “through ill-treatment, starvation…hypothermia, malnutrition, and other effects of their ordeal.”4 While the Allied victors were, according to the Potsdam Agreement, supposed to oversee and organize the expulsions to keep them “orderly and humane,” the expellees’ “reception and integration were regarded as internal German matters”—a job for which German regional 2 This is of course not to say that every state—or even any state—was in reality fully homogenous: Czechoslovakia, of course, was a binational state, and every state continued to have ethnic minorities. But, as Tony Judt puts it, “the outcome was a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogeneous than ever before. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 27. 3 Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 111. 4 R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 1. Rothschild 3 authorities (even under the supervision of the Allies) were not prepared.5 Eight million expellees ended up in the Western Zones, where I situate my study, making up “20 percent of the nascent Federal Republic” (FRG), which was founded in 1949.6 Many expellees lived in refugee camps, where conditions were often desperate, into the 1950s. Still, the integration of ethnic German expellees in the Western Zones is “generally regarded as one of the great success stories of Germany’s postwar history.”7 To the extent that that is true, it is largely a result of the FRG’s reaffirmation of jus sanguinis, citizenship by blood or descent, after the war. Jus sanguinis was first codified into the imperial citizenship law (Reichs- und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz) in 1913 for the very purpose of “keeping ties to the German diaspora in Eastern Europe” and elsewhere.8 From the outset, Allied and German authorities decided that, whether they came from the former German territories “lost” to Poland or were Yugoslavian Germans who had never set foot in Germany (in any of its forms), “expellees were to be treated not as a distinct minority but as citizens with equal rights.”9 The automatic citizenship of the expellees was enshrined in the 1949 Basic Law (Grundgesetz), the initially provisional but still-active constitution of the Federal Republic.10 In a way that did not happen with later waves of immigrants into Germany from Southern Europe and Turkey, the expellees very quickly became part of the FRG polity. 5 Rainer Schulze, “Forced Migration of German Populations During and After the Second World War: History and Memory,” in Jessica Reinisch and Elizbeth White, eds., The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944-9 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 57. “The responsibility for concrete day-to-day policies was delegated to German zonal authorities, while the [Americans and British] occupation powers retained overall control and supervision, including the right to intervene whenever corrective action seemed necessary.” Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 25. 6 Daniel Levy, “Integrating Ethnic Germans in West Germany: The Early Postwar Period,” in David Rock and Stefan Wolff, eds., Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic (New York: Berghahn, 2002), 20. 7 Rainer Schulze, “The Politics of Memory: Flight and Expulsion of German Populations after the Second World War and German Collective Memory,” National Identities 8 (2006), 368. 8 Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995, trans. Brandon Hunziker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 240. 9 Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 25. 10 Daniel Levy, “Integrating Ethnic Germans,” 21. Rothschild 4 Easing some of the burden on the German and occupation authorities, and later those of the FRG, were nongovernmental relief organizations, such as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the leading Quaker group in the U.S., whose agents organized drives for goods, met with American military personnel, and aided expellees in refugee camps. AFSC agents registered their unceasing outrage at the expulsions throughout the expulsion years. On a practical level, they were frustrated that the Allied governments and international bodies, such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)—where many postwar relief workers who would join the AFSC were employed during the war years—and later the International Refugee Organization (IRO), left the problem to German officials by explicitly excluding Germans from aid and from the aid-receiving category of “displaced persons.”11 Yet even criticism of the Allies’ initial refusal to deal with the expellee problem was framed in terms of broader, ideological outrage: they should be responsible, the Quakers often argued, because they had sanctioned the expulsions. Moreover, according to many Quakers, the expulsions themselves affirmed a dangerous nationalist ideology that had no place in the postwar world. The American Quakers had a long tradition of envisioning alternate, internationalist utopias. In 1681, as a “holy experiment” in peaceful government, the British Quaker William Penn founded Pennsylvania Colony, which he hoped would provide a model for Europe. Twelve years later, he laid out his political vision in his Essay toward the Present and Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment of an European Diet, Parliament or Estates. The AFSC’s involvement “in the internationalist and anti-intervention campaigns of the thirties,” and further 11 Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 240; Judt, Postwar, 28-9. “The constitution of the IRO stipulated that the…ethnic German expellees from East-Central Europe who flooded the occupation zones of Germany at the end of the war were not entitled to international care. As a result, displaced persons and expellees formed two distinct categories of refugees simultaneously living on German soil, with rare points of contacts between them,” Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 44. Rothschild 5 internationalist invocations I will discuss in my thesis, thus had deep roots.12 But so did the organization’s sense of being American. The American Friends Service Committee was founded in Philadelphia in April 1917 “to give young Friends of draft age an opportunity to serve their country in ways not requiring violence.”13 As such, the AFSC’s stance was from its inception both a rejection of American state violence and a commitment to “service” to that state. By the end of World War II, when the AFSC was at its moment of greatest international renown—it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947—this type of service was as crucial to the pursuit of American expansion as military service.14 The AFSC’s goals had come to coincide with the American strategy to rebuild postwar Europe. Yet the Quakers remained often-staunch critics of U.S. policy, including the policy of sanctioning the expulsions of ethnic Germans. To critique the expulsions was to critique the very fundamentals of the Western conception of nation-state that had governed the previous century of political thought and had, with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, become the chief posture of American foreign policy. As they voiced those critiques, while moving through a Germany that was a crucible of transnational engagement even as it was divided among the Allied victors, these American Quaker relief workers began to articulate a vision of internationalism that renounced the nation-state while at the same time was deeply embedded in the postwar, expansionist, American imagination. My work relies on previous scholarship that generally falls within two main fields: the first provides a history of the expulsions; the second contextualizes the AFSC’s role in postwar 12 Ira Chernus, American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 17; Charles DeBenedetti, with Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 22. 13 H. Larry Ingle, “The American Friends Service Committee, 1947-49: The Cold War’s Effect,” in Peace & Change 23, no. 1 (January, 1998), 28. 14 See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Rothschild 6 Europe. Generally, when historians talk about the “expulsions” of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II, they actually include the flight that preceded both the “wild expulsions” and the later forced movement sanctioned at Potsdam. In a study of the experience of flight and expulsion, this conflation could gloss over the varied experiences of German refugees from Eastern Europe. For my purposes, however, such slippery language actually reveals much about the German refugees the AFSC encountered. To begin with, the distinction between “flight” and “expulsion” is far more complicated than it may at first seem. Fleeing from the Red Army was often not a voluntary act in any meaningful sense; Stalin had told the Polish Communists to “create such conditions for the Germans that they will want to escape themselves,” and indeed many did.15 As the Red Army moved in, the Wehrmacht ordered the evacuation of Germans from the eastern reaches of the Reich.16 In his spectacular study of post-World War II Europe, the British historian Tony Judt observes that “[t]he Germans of eastern Europe would probably have fled west in any case.”17 I would argue the contrary: the near totality with which the expulsions were carried out—they were nearly complete by the end of 1947—meant that those who fled before they could be expelled would have likely soon been expelled anyway. Finally, although the AFSC made an effort to distinguish between categories of Eastern European German refugees, Quaker relief workers on the ground were often unconcerned with whether they were dealing with refugees who fled before September 1945 or the later expellees who were forced to leave at gunpoint: to AFSC workers, they were all victims of Potsdam.18 15 Quoted in Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 321. 16 Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wroclaw during the Century of Expulsions, trans. Tom Lampert and Allison Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 62. 17 Judt, Postwar, 25. 18 Both expellees and those who fled were refugees, but, when used in conjunction with “expellees,” “refugees” often meant ethnic Germans who fled from the East.