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Europe’s National Traumas. The latest arrogant and haughty outbursts from the Trump administration toward European leaders, NATO, and individual countries demand an answer to the question: On what basis do the United States believe such a tone is permissible? When did this begin, how did it become the norm, and who is responsible for it? And here, the clock of history needs to be wound back again to #AfterTheWar, writes Ukrainian journalist Vitalii Haidukevych.
And first of all, it should be noted that the Europe between the great wars and the Europe after WWII are completely different ethnically — before the Second World War, the settlement of peoples was different. “Between 1939 and 1943, Stalin and Hitler together uprooted, resettled, expelled, deported, and dispersed about 30 million people. When the Nazi coalition began to retreat, the reverse process began.” (c) Tony Judt.
Here, Judt emphasizes that the Germans, riding the wave of the Reich’s offensive, had only just managed to replenish the old German settlements scattered across Eastern Europe, but when the USSR’s offensive began, the Germans themselves became the main wave of refugees fleeing the red “liberators.”But they were not the only ones leaving their homes…
“From the east came Balts, Poles, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Hungarians, Romanians, and other peoples: some were driven by the horrors of war, others fled west to escape communist rule…
From the Balkans came not only ethnic Germans but also over 100,000 Croats — supporters of the deposed fascist military regime of Ante Pavelić — fleeing the wrath of Tito’s partisans.” (c) T.J.
By the war’s end, on the territory of Germany and Austria, besides millions of captured Wehrmacht soldiers, there were soldiers of allied armies who had been liberated from German POW camps, representatives of various nationalities who had fought on the side of the Reich: russians from General Vlasov’s anti-Soviet army, French, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, Ukrainians — volunteers from Waffen-SS structures, those who collaborated with the Nazi regime in one capacity or another — existed in every country of Eastern Europe, and they sought refuge from Soviet vengeance.
Then there was the forced labor force of German industry, or the 280,000 Italians forcibly relocated to Germany after Italy capitulated and left its alliance with the Third Reich. But besides those brought by force, there were also voluntary workers in Germany who had been working there since before 1939 and simply remained. Among the Ostarbeiters lucky enough not to end up in concentration camps, some had a better situation in Germany than in the USSR. These people were not supporters of the Nazi regime, but they were not happy about the advance of the “liberators” either.
A separate group were the liberated concentration camp prisoners. Among them — the Jews, who fared the worst.
“Of those liberated, four out of ten (!) died within several weeks of the arrival of the Allied armies: Western medicine was unable to help these people. … But the Jews who survived, like many other homeless Europeans, made their way to Germany. It was in Germany that Allied offices and camps were to be located, and in any case, Jews did not feel safe in Eastern Europe. After a series of POSTWAR (!) pogroms in Poland (!), many Jews who had managed to escape left forever: 63,387 people from Poland to Germany alone between July and September 1946.” (c) T.J.
“Everything that happened in 1945 and continued for at least a year was an unprecedented experiment in ethnic cleansing and population migration. Partly it was the result of ‘voluntary’ ethnic separation — as in the case of Jews leaving Poland, where they felt threatened and unwanted, or Italians who preferred to leave the Istrian peninsula rather than live under Yugoslav rule.
From 1939 onward, there were resettlements of Romanians and Hungarians in the disputed territories of Transylvania. Soviet authorities carried out a series of forced population exchanges between Poland and Ukraine in 1944-46. Bulgaria resettled 160,000 Turks to Turkey, Czechoslovakia… in 1946 exchanged 120,000 Slovaks living in Hungary for an equal number of Hungarians living north of the Danube in Slovakia. Similar exchanges took place between Poland and Lithuania, between Czechoslovakia and the USSR. 400,000 people from southern Yugoslavia were resettled in the northern part of the country to replace Germans and Italians who had left those territories. Here, as everywhere else, people were not asked for their consent. The largest resettlement affected the Germans.” (c) T.J.
German communities, even quite ancient ones, in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic region, and the western part of the USSR (Ukraine and Belarus), were doomed and knew it.
As early as 1942, Britain agreed to the Czech demand regarding the postwar expulsion of the German population from the Sudetenland. In 1943, moscow and Washington agreed. In 1945, Edvard Beneš declared they had “decided to eliminate the German problem … in the republic once and for all.” Germans and Hungarians had to turn over all their property to the state. In June 1945, their land was confiscated; on August 2 of that year, they lost their citizenship. Over the next 18 months, 3 million Germans were expelled from the Sudetenland. 267,000 people died during the expulsions.
623,000 Germans were expelled from Hungary, 768,000 from Romania, nearly 500,000 from Yugoslavia, and 1.3 million from Poland. The largest number of Germans fled from German territories that were decided to be handed over to Poland.
A new reality emerged — Eastern Europe had been forcibly cleansed of its German population. On paper, the resettlements were to be carried out humanely, but in reality… the New York Times wrote in October 1946: “The scale of this resettlement and the conditions under which it took place are unprecedented in history. No eyewitness to these horrors doubts that these are crimes against humanity for which history will demand a terrible price.”
“After the end of the First World War, borders were changed and redrawn, while people generally remained in place. After 1945, the opposite happened… With some exceptions, the result was a Europe of nation-states that were more ethnically homogeneous than ever before.” (c) T.J.
“The USSR remained a multinational empire; diversity persisted in Yugoslavia and Romania (Transylvania). … Poland, by contrast — in 1938 only 68% of its population were Poles, but by 1946 they were the absolute majority. Czechoslovakia before the Munich Agreement had 22% German population, 5% Hungarian, 3% Ukrainian, and 1.5% Jewish — after the war, mostly Czechs and Slovaks remained. … Of 55,000 Czechoslovak Jews, by 1950 (!) only 16,000 remained.
Ancient European diasporas — Greeks and Turks in the Southern Balkans and around the Black Sea, Italians in Dalmatia, Hungarians in Transylvania and the northern Balkans, Poles in Ukraine and Lithuania, Germans from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the Rhine to the Volga, Jews throughout Europe — shrank and disappeared. A new, ‘more orderly’ Europe was born.” (c) T.J.
And these changes were partly an unavoidable consequence of the war — the inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic relations of supporters and opponents of one war camp or another. But to a large extent, the redrawing of Europe occurred with the blessing of the victors. The US, the USSR, and Britain — carved up maps, fully aware that in the ashes of the Second World War, the primary concern was not national interests or the rebuilding of peoples, but the construction of two new hostile camps.
Europe did not have sufficient resources to cope with the migration of millions; the burden of settling refugees in camps, feeding them, and sending them home (or to a new home) in an orderly fashion fell largely on the United States. After Lend-Lease, this was another stone in the foundation of American superiority over the Old World. And for Europe — one of the traumatic reasons for its subsequent weakness and consciously second-place position in dealings with Washington. And also — a painful migrant experience, albeit intracontinental and predominantly monoreligious, but…
To be continued…
