the nationality of all inhabitants of the czech provinces and ...

Chapter V
against the wishes of the army leadership
– a massive withdrawal of German
citizens from the front to the centre of
the Reich was initiated. Already by then
(to some extent possibly following the
Russian example), the Nazis had started
their tactic of leaving the enemy nothing
but scorched earth.
It is symptomatic that Hitler’s orders
formulated in this spirit conflicted with
the attempts of the regional Gauleiters
to prevent a timely evacuation of the
civilian population and to organise them
for a militia-type defence of German
territory. The spontaneous mass exodus
to the West, motivated by propaganda
and true stories about the behaviour of
the Russians, often took place at the last
moment, just ahead of the advancing
Red Army. The columns of refugees
blocked communications and
complicated the life of the fighting units
of the Wehrmacht. The fate of the mass
of refugees was mainly tragic, but the e
inhabitants, usually farmers, who stayed
behind in the Russian occupied territory
ignoring all the so-called “scorched
earth” commands, fared hardly better.
The suicidal, methodical “scorched
earth” policy culminated at the very end
of the “total war” in Hitler’s “Nero order”
of March 20, 1945, under which no one
was allowed to remain, on pain of
summary execution, on territories taken
over by the Allies, and under which all
buildings and equipment had to be
completely destroyed before the
evacuation. This order – Nazi terror
turned against the majority of the
German people – was also brutally
complied with on almost all remaining
territory of the Third Reich. In a sense,
the systematic Nazi destruction of
Warsaw after the defeat of the Polish
uprising of August and September, 1944,
(carried out, moreover, as the Red Army
looked on) was a precursor of this
concept of general apocalypse.
It was one of the ironies of the period
that the western Allies, who had finally
brought the war onto the territory of the
German Reich, started, at approximately
the same time, in the winter of 1944-45,
to alter their relatively benevolent
The International Framework for the
Transfer of the Sudeten Germans
204
policies, even in the matter of
compulsory transfers. (The British, for
instance, had refused for a long time to
consider the compulsory transfer of
German nationals from the Sudetenland
as a form of “punishment” – they voiced
concern that such punishment, if
inflicted only on true Nazi activists and
war criminals, would make the volume of
the transfers insignificant). It turned out,
however, that even though Germany had
mercilessly conquered and occupied,
great effort was needed in order to
stabilise the situation in housing, health
care and supplies in the often completely
devastated occupied territories. The
floods of physically exhausted and
demoralised refugees made the situation
even worse, and became an enormous
burden and destabilising element for the
occupying authorities.
More pragmatic voices therefore
called for rational limitations on
compulsory repatriation, demanding
above all limits on the compulsory
evacuations of Germans from their
homes, and better organised, humane
and administratively less demanding,
smaller-scale repatriations spread over
longer periods of time (the western
Allies were considering a time frame of
up to five years). Aside from the refugees
and expelled people, it was also necessary
to take into account and take care of an
enormous mass of liberated and, in the
majority of cases, terribly devastated, sick
and undernourished prisoners and
concentration camp inmates or POWs
from a number of European countries,
and to regulate the desperate efforts of
millions of people sent to Germany as
forced labour to return home as fast as
possible. In the meantime, in this chaotic
situation, German prisoners of war were
being sent overseas en masse by the
Western Allies to labour camps in the
USA and Canada, and by the Soviet
command into forced labour for the
renovation of war-damaged areas and to
Siberia. However, it was not until the
Potsdam Conference between July and
August, 1945 that “orderly and humane”
procedures for the compulsory
repatriation of German minorities from