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University of Toronto, 24 March 2010 - The Expulsion of the
Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, East Brandenburg,
Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary and Yugoslavia 1945-48: a crime
against humanity
More than four decades ago, as a high school student in Chicago,
college student in New York and graduate student at the Harvard
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, I knew absolutely nothing
about the expulsion of more than 14 million Germans at the end
of World War II, nor of the death, caused directly and
indirectly by this maelstrom, of more than two million of
them(1).
I first learned about this tragedy -- not in the various world
history courses and European history seminars that I had
attended -- but at a specialized workshop in international law
and refugee law at Harvard Law School, led by the late Professor
Richard Baxter. I was shocked. Not only by the magnitude of the
suffering, but by the fact that my history teachers had
evidently not considered it important to alert me to this
chapter of 20th century history. Had they deliberately avoided
the subject, and, if so, why? Nor had I ever read anything about
the expulsion of the Germans in the press, never seen any
documentary film, nor Hollywood drama based on it. And yet it
was undoubtedly a hugely important event in the twentieth
century that deserved serious study and reflection, particularly
in institutions of higher learning. Without a doubt the subject
matter provides hundreds of topics for history papers, master
theses, doctoral dissertations, and post-doctoral research
projects. As I came to realize, however, the subject was taboo.
Three decades later the phenomenon of forced population
transfer(2) came back to haunt us with a vengeance – decades
after the expulsion of the Germans -- in the form of what became
known as “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia.
I realized that the expulsion of the Germans had not only
economic and demographic consequences, but also important
ethical, legal, political, cultural, sociological, and
psychological implications.
When I started looking for relevant books on the subject, I
discovered the long forgotten essay Our Threatened Values by the
British publisher and human rights activist Victor Gollancz. On
page 96 of this book Gollancz wrote:
“If the conscience of mankind ever again becomes sensitive,
these expulsions will be remembered to the undying shame of all
who committed or connived at them… The Germans were expelled,
not just with an absence of overnice consideration, but with the
very maximum of brutality”.(3)
The book was compelling and very troubling. I felt that
Gollancz’s book should have been compulsory reading in every
school. Of course, much more research still had to be conducted
on the subject. I hoped that someone - better than me and with
greater experience -- would take it up and write an
interdisciplinary analysis of the expulsions, putting all the
events into the proper historical, legal and ethical context.
One thing that particularly amazed me was the realization that
we, the Allies, had fought a war against Hitler because of his
criminal policies and his inhuman methods, and then,
paradoxically, at the end of the war, we found ourselves
enmeshed in policies that completely negated the noble
principles of Wilson’s 14 Points, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and
the 1941 Allied Agreement known as the Atlantic Charter.
Thanks to a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship to Germany I was able
to commence my studies on the subject. I met and interviewed
hundreds of expellees from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia,
East Brandenburg, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Yugoslavia. I made
an effort to meet academic colleagues from Poland and
Czechoslovakia since I wanted to know their views and engage
them in dialogue, I wanted to hear all sides, see all the
evidence, consider all perspectives, applying the old Latin
maxim Audiatur et altera pars(hear all sides), that certainly
applies not only to lawyers, but also to historians. Admittedly,
I did not meet as many Poles and Czechs as I would have wanted,
but I did meet many, learned much from them, and made an honest
effort to read all the relevant literature to the extent that it
was available in the languages that I could read English,
French, Spanish and Russian.
I also carried out extensive research in the relevant archives
in Germany, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain
and the United States. I discovered many crucial and revealing
documents that other historians somehow had either missed or
ignored.
I interviewed key personalities who had lived through the
period, including George F. Kennan at Princeton, James
Riddleberger in Washington, who had been head of the German
Department at the US Department of State in the relevant period,
Sir Geoffrey Harrison (the author of the draft of article 13 of
the Potsdam Communiqué on the so-called “transfer” of the
Germans) in London, Sir Dennis Allen (the author of the draft of
article 9 of the Potsdam Communiqué on the provisional
Oder-Neisse frontier), and many other participants at the
Potsdam Conference. Gradually I thought I understood what had
happened and why it had happened.
By the end of 1976 the
manuscript of my book “Nemesis at Potsdam” was finished. I chose
the title “Nemesis” because of the Greek goddess of revenge.
Needless to say, I rejected the morally corrupt doctrine of
collective guilt. I did not accept the idea that revenge was in
any way acceptable behaviour for civilized peoples and nations.
But I was realistic enough to know that this unethical doctrine
had, in fact, played a significant role in making the expulsions
plausible or even palatable to many, and that in the decades
following the war the concept of collective guilt had been
politically instrumentalized to justify the expulsion and
spoliation of millions of innocent human beings.
It was clear to me that because the Nazis had committed grave
crimes during the war, there was no sympathy for the Germans in
general.
The personal guilt of Hans Frank, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm
Frick, Otto Ohlendorff and many others was established at the
Nuremberg trials, and many government officials and military
were found guilty of having committed war crimes and crimes
against humanity. But why should the entire German people be
treated as collectively guilty? Could we possibly hold all
Russians collectively guilty for the crimes of Stalin? The
Chinese for the crimes of Mao? The Cambodians for the crimes of
Pol Pot? The Iraqis for the crimes of Saddam Hussein?
I conducted careful research into many aspects of the collective
guilt paradigm. I looked for a nexus or causal link between the
crimes of the German leaders and the expulsion of the German
population of Central and Eastern Europe. In all the unpublished
documents I consulted at the Public Record Office in London, at
the US National Archives in Washington, including recently
released documents of the US State Department and Department of
the Army, in all the transcripts of the Conferences of Teheran,
Yalta and Potsdam, NEVER, I repeat, never, was there a link made
between the expulsion of the ethnic Germans and Nazi crimes.
The historical record reveals that the expulsions were not
primarily a matter of punishment, but most certainly of
reparations, natural resources, shifting of frontiers, and other
geopolitical considerations. Only after the war – and even more
so after German reunification in 1990 – has the legend of a
causal link between Nazi crimes and the expulsion emerged.
Some of today’s lesser historians, particularly in Germany,
commit the freshman-year error post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or
cum hoc, ergo propter hoc – meaning because A follows B, then B
must be the cause of A, or because A and B happened in a
generally related context, then either A caused B or B caused A.
Obviously these are rather primitive logical fallacies. I should
not think so little of German historians like Wolfgang Benz or
Götz Aly as not being aware of the fundamental rules of logic.
Nevertheless, this does not stop them from postulating a causal
link between Nazi crimes and the expulsion. We read about the
non implemented Generalplan Ost, which foresaw mass expulsions
of Slavs from Russia and the Ukraine, we know that Hitler
deported 650,000 Poles from the annexed Warthegau into the
so/called Generalgouvernement in inner Poland. We are led to
believe that the Allies decided to expel millions of Germans as
a direct consequence of these Hitlerian policies.
Now, had there been such a causal link, historians would have
found the documents to prove it long ago. But there was no such
link. There is, alas, a more recent political dimension to this
historical aberration, because already since some twenty years
the German government and media – CDU, SPD, FDP and Die Linke --
do not want to risk destabilizing relations with their Eastern
neighbours by raising the spectre of the Second World War and
its sequels, including the Vertreibung. Thus, they arrived at a
schoolboy paradigm – they simply dump all responsibility on
Hitler, including responsibility for the Vertreibung , as if
Hitler had been the only player in this ghastly killing game.
These pseudo-historians essentially absolve the Russians, the
Poles, the Czechs, the Yugoslavs of any wrongdoing. This is, of
course, historically untenable, because the political interests
of all parties involved were at the very centre of negotiations
at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam –
THAT is what the documents tell us. But this trivialization of
complex processes, this Geschichtsklitterung has actually been
gaining ground, as it serves concrete political interests and is
aimed no less than at providing a justification for the
Vertreibung and turning the page without doing anything to
rehabilitate the honour and reputation of the Vertriebene,
without the least intent to offer them any kind of restitution
or compensation for broken lives, two million deaths, the loss
of a 700-year old homeland, and traumata that last to our days
down to the succeeding generations. Alas, such is the miserable
state of contemporary history writing on the expulsion of the
Germans in Germany -- and in Austria. It reflects a breakdown in
scholarly methodology and an alarming level of intellectual
dishonesty. The fear of career disadvantages for stepping out of
line plagues the approach to Zeitgeschichte.
For any neutral observer, the fact remains that it was the more
than 14 million Eastern Germans, whose ancestors had settled on
the Baltic coast, in Silesia, in Bohemia in the 12th and 13th
centuries, who were to suffer the most at the hands of their
rapacious neighbours – not because of their personal conduct,
but because of their status – because they were Germans in
territories that the Allies had decided, in contravention of the
principle of self-determination and the Atlantic Charter, simply
to steal and give away to Poland and Czechoslovakia.
As euphemisms go, the expulsions, of course, were not supposed
to be expulsions, but merely “transfers of population”, which
were to take place in “orderly and humane” manner, if we believe
the language of Article XIII of the Potsdam communiqué. Yet, as
we know from 50,000 Erlebnisberichte in the Ostdokumentation of
the Bundesarchiv, as we know from the confidential reports of
British and American diplomats and members of the military
government, the expulsions were worse than brutal. This was also
the conclusion of the 1950 US Congressional Commission to
investigate all aspects of the expulsion of the Germans and the
monumental Walter Report of the US Congress.
General Dwight Eisenhower’s political advisor, Ambassador Robert
Murphy, was a great American and a man of solid moral values. I
had the honour of corresponding with him extensively and twice
visiting him in New York. He delivered the preface for my book,
Nemesis at Potsdam, observing in part:
“There is no doubt that many of us in the West were indifferent,
or actually uninformed and casual about the flight of these
millions of Germans. It was advertised that the transfers should
be made under ‘humane’ conditions. There were no controls or
authoritative supervision, so that the individual refugee had no
recourse or protection. It is true that the United States State
Department voiced proper regard for the humanities, but its
voice was not vigorous or even heard in Eastern Europe at the
time of the expulsion. Few Americans dreamt of a brutal
expulsion affecting perhaps 16 million persons.”(4)
I was unable to interview General Eisenhower himself, who had
already passed away in 1969, when I was still a young student at
Harvard and knew nothing at all about the crime of the
expulsion. But at the National Archives in Washington D.C. I
discovered a revealing telegram by Eisenhower to the State
Department, dated 18 October 1945:
“In Silesia, Polish administration and methods are causing a
mass exodus westward of German inhabitants. ... Many unable to
move are placed in camps on meagre rations and under poor
sanitary conditions. Death and disease rate in camps extremely
high… Methods used by Poles definitely do not conform to Potsdam
agreement. Breslau death rate increased tenfold and death rate
reported to be 75% of all births. Typhoid, typhus, dysentery and
diphtheria are spreading… serious danger of epidemic of such
great proportion as to menace all Europe, including our troops,
and probably of mass starvation on an unprecedented scale.”(5)
In this context it is important to recall that the deportations
that the Third Reich had carried out during the Second World War
were considered war crimes and crimes against humanity, as
reflected in articles 6b and 6c of the Nuremberg indictment, and
as confirmed in the Nuremberg judgment of 1946. Applying the
same criteria used to judge the German officials at Nuremberg,
the expulsion of the Eastern Germans by Poles, Czechs and
Yugoslavs similarly constituted war crimes and crimes against
humanity. Or do such deportations constitute crimes only if
committed by one side, but not if they are committed by the
other?
The question also arises whether the expulsion could also
qualify as genocide? Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention
stipulates:/ " genocide means any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a)
Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the group;
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part …“
Surely the expulsion of the Germans entailed the killing of
hundreds of thousands of human beings, causing serious bodily
and mental harm to members of the group, and deliberately
inflicted on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part. For the
lawyer the question that arises is that of “intent”. Several
professors of international law, among them Professors Felix
Ermacora, Dietrich Blumenwitz, Gilbert Gornig and myself, are
convinced that aspects of the expulsion of the Germans do fall
under article II of the Genocide Convention, and that the
genocidal “intent” is provable. The orders and speeches of
Polish and Czechoslovak political and military leaders in 1945
attest to this intent. Benes Decrees 12, 33 and 108 constitute
pretty strong evidence of genocidal intent. A fortiori, all the
more so because these Decrees were implemented at a huge cost in
human life.
It is also important to recall the 1992 United Nations General
Assembly resolution 47/121 which described the policy of ethnic
cleansing in the former Yugoslavia as constituting “a form of
genocide”. Bearing in mind that the expulsion of the Germans was
MUCH wider in scope and claimed many more lives than the
Yugoslav ethnic cleansing, it becomes evident that at least
certain aspects of the expulsion of the Germans can be referred
to as genocide.
Moreover, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice have both held
that the Bosnian-Serb massacre perpetrated in Srebenica against
Bosnian-Muslims constituted genocide. Applying the same
criteria, it would seem that many of the massacres of ethnic
Germans – in Nemmersdorf, Metgethen, Marienburg, Brünn, Aussig,
Postelberg, Rann, as well as the mass deaths in concentration
camps such as Lamsdorff, Swientochlowice, Gakowo, and
Rudolfsgnad would similarly qualify as manifestations of
genocide.
Nor should we forget the fate of more than a million and a half
ethnic Germans who were deported to slave labour in the Soviet
Union, some 35% of whom perished of exhaustion, disease and
malnutrition, according to the Red Cross statistics. These
unfortunates were deported pursuant to the Allied agreement of
11 February 1945 at the Yalta Conference, signed by Winston
Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin,
stipulating that German labour constituted as they themselves
called it, “reparations in kind”. Pursuant to this signed
agreement more than a million and a half German civilians were
deported indefinitely to forced labour camps.(6) This
constituted an official approval of slavery in the 20th century,
a disgrace just as grave and morally corrupt as the GULAGs
described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel prize winning
book GULAG Archipelago.
Of course, slave labour was not invented in the Soviet Union,
nor was ethnic cleansing a Serbian phenomenon, nor was the
Holocaust the only genocide in the long history of mankind. We
all should bow our heads to the victims of all of these
barbarities, but remember that there are many “unsung victims”
that await a chance to tell their story. Surely the First
Nations of the Americas, the indigenous populations of North and
South America suffered genocide, the Armenians were subjected to
many pogroms in the Ottoman Empire, especially toward the end of
the nineteenth century, at the beginning of the twentieth
century and eventually during the great genocide of 1915 to
1923. The Greeks of Pontos and Smyrna, the Assyrian Christians
of the Ottoman Empire all were victims of genocide. The Kurds
have suffered a consistent denial of their right to
self-determination and have been the victims of countless
massacres over one hundred years.
Alas, the denial of human rights, the pogroms and massacres did
not end there. The Ukrainians suffered the Golodomor in the
1930s, a deliberate Soviet policy to decimate them through Golod
//the great famine imposed on them. Many Europeans Powers
committed gravest massacres against colonial peoples in Africa
and Asia. And recently the internal wars in Africa have seen
genocide unfold // not only in Rwanda, but also in Burundi , in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Liberia and Ivory
Coast, against the Ibos of Biafra and against so many other
unsung victims. The people of Cambodia suffered what might be
termed democide under the Khmer Rouge. Nearly two million of
them perished in the course of the killing fields. The list can
be prolonged.
In addressing all of these tragedies, schools and universities
should endeavour to analyze the commonalities of these crimes
against humanity. In so doing, all should endeavour to identify
common denominators so as to try to understand the root causes
of the murderous behaviour. Indeed, at the source of all
conflicts we find a fundamental absence of belief in the equal
dignity of all human beings. In other words, the ethnic
cleansing carried out by the Nazis, by the Czechs, by the Poles,
by the Yugoslavs, by the Turks -- all reveal racism and
religious hatred, based on generalizations, stereotypes,
demonization and theories of collective guilt. All these savage
policies deny the dignity and the individuality of the human
person. Victims were victimized not because of their conduct but
because of their status: The Jews were murdered because they
were Jews; the Germans were murdered because they were Germans;
the Bosnian-Muslims were murdered because they were
Bosnian-Muslims; the 200,000 Greek-Cypriots of Northern Cyprus
were expelled 1974 by Turkey from their 4 thousand year old
homelands – just because they were Greek Cypriots and Orthodox;
the Tutsis of Rwanda were murdered – just because they were
Tutsis.
The first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Dr.
Jose Ayala Lasso, devoted much of his term of office to
advancing the over/arching principle of equality, including the
equality in dignity of all victims. He was one of the first
public figures to give the German expellees recognition as
victims of gross violations of human rights. Already on 28 May
1995 he addressed the following statement to the German
expellees assembled at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main:
“I submit that if in the years following the Second World War
the States had reflected more on the implications of the
enforced flight and the expulsion of the Germans, today's
demographic catastrophes, particularly those referred to as
‘ethnic cleansing’, would, perhaps, not have occurred to the
same extent. In this context I should like to refer to the
Charter of the German Expellees. It is good that men and women
who have suffered injustice are prepared to break the vicious
circle of revenge and reprisals and devote themselves in
peaceful ways to seek the recognition of the right to the
homeland and work toward reconstruction and integration in
Europe. One day this peaceful approach will receive the
recognition it deserves.
“There is no doubt that during the Nazi occupation the people of
Central and Eastern Europe suffered enormous injustices that
cannot be forgotten. Accordingly they had a legitimate claim for
reparation. However, legitimate claims ought not to be enforced
through collective punishment on the basis of general
discrimination and without a determination of personal guilt. In
the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials the crucial principle of personal
responsibility for crimes was wisely applied. It is worthwhile
to reread the Nuremberg protocols and judgment.”(7)
Again on 6 August 2005 the retired High Commissioner addressed
the Expellees in Berlin, in the presence of Chancellor Angela
Merkel, and said:
“I believe that the example of the German expellees is
particularly telling. While we acknowledge the magnitude of the
expulsion and the sorrow over the loss of provinces that had
been the homeland of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Johann
Gottfried Herder, Joseph von Eichendorff, Gerhart Hauptmann and
others, we must also recognize the considerable sacrifice made
by the expellees in choosing the path of peaceful integration.
We cannot but admire the moral fibre of these people, the wisdom
of their leaders, who renounced any and all forms of violence,
who decided to build a new homeland in the West, without,
however, abandoning their love for their origins, for the
landscapes where they grew up, the churches and temples where
they worshiped, the cemeteries where their ancestors are
buried.”(8)
It is in this human rights perspective that schools and
universities should inform and teach about genocide and crimes
against humanity, including the expulsion of the Germans. What
is needed is a new human rights paradigm that recognizes that
all victims of violence and injustice have a right to our
compassion -- and to our time.
We must reject the
concept of politically correct victims, and those unfortunate
non-consensus or unpopular victims whose suffering can be safely
ignored.
Finally, we must agree that all victims have a right to truth,
rehabilitation, reparation and reconciliation, equally, without
any discrimination -- because all victims share the same
dignitas humana. The United Nations General Assembly, the
Commission on Human Rights, the new Human Rights Council all
recognize the right to truth, the right to one’s cultural
heritage, the right to one’s identity.
Discrimination among victims is not acceptable. Neither is
competition among victims. We are all in the same boat. What we
need is mutual respect and what the Germans call Pietät, and
Demut.
Indeed, no moral person can accept the theory that the world is
neatly divided into victims and perpetrators, into the good guys
and the bad guys. Life is somewhat more complex than that. And
we all know that victims can also become victimizers, that
underdogs can become top-dogs and behave as cruelly as the
top-dogs. History gives us plenty of examples.
We do need a change of perspective, because many victims of
horrendous injustice are still being denied a hearing. The media
just does not want to take them into account. I ask you to
ponder on the following question – are we acting ethically, are
we being fair when we devote attention exclusively to one
category of victims at the expense of all the others? Does this
constitute a form of negationism? Does this not entail the
denial of the very real suffering of other victims? Does this
not entail a form of aggression against the human dignity of
these ignored victims? How can we justify our refusal to give
them commensurate time and attention?
Let us therefore hear the indigenous victims of North America,
let us here the Armenian victims, the Greek victims of Pontos
and Smyrna, the victims of the hardly known Istanbul Pogrom of
6/7 September 1955 about which I wrote a long article in
Genocide Studies and Prevention, published here by the
University of Toronto. Let us hear the Greek-Cypriot victims,
the Ukrainian victims, the Kurdish victims, the Roma and Sinti,
the Palestinian victims, the Sri Lankan victims, -- and, why
not? -- the German victims as well.
There are many German expellees from East Prussia, Pomerania,
Silesia, Bohemia, Yugoslavia who migrated to Canada and the
United States and have become Canadian and American citizens.
High schools and colleges should welcome them to their lasses.
There is much to learn from these “unsung victims”.
Education is a right – but also a responsibility. As Alexander
Pope (1688-1744) observed in his Essay on Criticism:
A little learning is a dangerous thing
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
the shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again. (Part ii. Lines 215-218)
Thus, ladies and gentlemen, I propose that all genocides be
studied thoroughly, in the right historical, political and
social context // and with human compassion,
I propose that the expulsion of the Germans be recognized as
both a crime against humanity, and as a " form or genocide", as
the General Assembly specifically defined the policy of ethnic
cleansing to be.
Let us break the academic and media blackout on the expulsion of
the Germans. Let us reject the attempts by Polish and Czech
historians to trivialize the expulsion, or even to shift the
blame on the Allies by referring to article XIII of the Potsdam
Communique.
The record shows without any room for doubt that the Western
Allies did NOT want to condone the barbarity of the expulsion in
its extent, in its timing and in the form of its execution.
Article XIII of the Potsdam Communique was not a blank check nor
a green light to the expelling States, but a moratorium on
expulsions and an effort, albeit unsuccessful, to limit the
harm, because by the time the Potsdam Conference started on 17
July 1945, already millions of Germans had been expelled from
the old German provinces east of the Oder-Neisse and from the
Bohemian and Moravian Sudetenland. The Western Allies were not
the initiators of the idea, but they had to react in some way to
the atrocities happening before their very eyes. Allow me to
cite from Sir Geoffrey Harrison’s revealing memo to the Foreign
Office, dated 1 August 1945, one day before publication of the
Potsdam communiqué:
“The Sub-Committee met three times, taking as a basis of
discussion a draft which I circulated … We had a great struggle
which had to be taken up in the Plenary Meeting…The soviet
member Sobolev took the view that the Polish and Czechoslovak
wish to expel their German populations was the fulfilment of an
historic mission which the Soviet government were unwilling to
try to impede …The American subcommittee member Cavendish Cannon
and I naturally strongly opposed this view. We made it clear
that we did not like the idea of mass transfers anyway. As
however, we could not prevent them, we wished to ensure that
they were carried out in as orderly and humane manner as
possible.”)(9)
Similarly, US Secretary of State James Byrnes stated on 19
October 1945: “We recognized that certain transfers were
unavoidable, but we did not intend at Potsdam to encourage or
commit ourselves to transfers in cases where other means of
adjustment were practicable.”(10)
Let me recall a reflection by Eisenhower’s political advisor
Robert Murphy, in a memo to the State Department dated 12
October 1945:
“In the Lehrter Railroad Station in Berlin alone our medical
authorities state an average of ten have been dying daily from
exhaustion, malnutrition and illness. In viewing the distress
and despair of these wretches, in smelling the odour of their
filthy condition, the mind reverts instantly to Dachau and
Buchenwald. Here is retribution on a large scale, but practiced
not on the Parteibonzen, but on women and children, the poor,
the infirm.
Knowledge that they are the victims of a harsh political
decision carried out with the utmost ruthlessness and disregard
for the humanities does not cushion the effect….
Now the situation is reversed. We find ourselves in the
invidious position of being partners in this German enterprise
and as partners inevitably sharing the responsibility. The
United States does not control directly the Eastern Zone of
Germany through which these helpless and bereft people march
after eviction from their homes. The direct responsibility lies
with the Provisional Polish Government and to a lesser extent
with the Czech Government… As helpless as the United States may
be to arrest a cruel and inhuman process, which is continuing,
it would seem that our Government could and should make its
attitude as expressed at Potsdam unmistakably clear. It would be
most unfortunate were the record to indicate that we are
particeps to methods we have often condemned in other
instances.”(11)
Ladies and gentlemen, to sum up let me underline that the
expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe undoubtedly
constituted a crime against humanity, as a matter of law,
measured by the very principles and norms that we ourselves, the
Allies, formulated and applied against the Germans at Nuremberg
and other trials. Moreover, aspects of the Vertreibung certainly
fall within the scope of article 2 of the Genocide Convention,
notably the many massacres committed against helpless women,
children ad old men, the millions of rapes, the mass deaths in
the internment camps of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
Bearing in mind that the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice have
repeatedly held that the massacre of Srebenica constituted
genocide, then the mass deaths of Marienburg, Postelberg,
Aussig, Brunn, Lamsdorf, Swientochlowice and Gakovo would also
qualify as genocide.
We cannot continue applying international law a la carte, nor
can we pick and choose in our respect for the victims.
As a human rights activist for most of my life and expert by
virtue of my decades-long association with the United Nations,
let me appeal to your conscience, to your sense of justice, to
your sense of proportion. We all know that there are manifold
violations of human rights in all regions of the world. What
worries me, however, is what seems to be a concerted effort by
some to create legal black holes within human rights, to confuse
the terminology, to instrumentalize human rights to destroy
human rights, to create new concepts that are intended to erode
the very fabric of human rights, by, for instance, postulating
categories of victims with the intention to eventually
disenfranchise entire groups.
If you accept that some victims are more important than others,
what kind of human rights are you actually applying? Or are you
not polluting the notion of human rights and denying the very
essence of human dignity? When you hear the notion of
"uniqueness", ask yourselves what that concept actually entails.
If uniqueness means that the elements of a particular genocide
are unique, this is frankly rather banal and does not mean much.
Obviously the facts and circumstances of the Armenian genocide
are unique, the clash of civilizations of the Europeans and
First Nations of the Americas and the consequent decimation of
the latter are unique, the facts and circumstances of the
Holocaust are unique. But this concept of uniqueness can entail
a serious violation of the fundamental norm of human dignity if
you pretend that there is only one group of unique victims
deserving of our attention, while we are at liberty to ignore
all the others. This entails a corruption of the concept of
victimhood and a separate and distinct violation of human
rights. It is tantamount to negationism. If we allow only one
category of victims, we are aggressing all the others, we are
depriving them of their human dignity.
Und da so viele Deutsche heute abend hier sind, erlauben Sie mir
ganz kurz dies in Deutsch zu formulieren. Es geht um den Begriff
der sog. Einzigartigkeit. Wenn Einzigartigkeit bedeutet, dass
ein bestimmtes Geschehen einzigartig ist, ist diese Feststellung
so ziemlich banal und selbstverständlich. Wenn es aber bedeuten
sollte, dass, wenn ein bestimmter Völkermord als einzigartig
eingestuft wird, dann die Opfer von anderen Völkermorde
unerheblich sind, dann stellt dies eine vulgäre Verleugnung dar
bzw. eine Art Negationismus , und bedeutet ganz sicher eine
schwere Verletzung der Menschenrechte der anderen Opfer, die
gewiss dieselbe Menschenwürde und denselben Anspruch auf Respekt
besitzen. Einzigartigkeit ist eine geradezu unethische
Wortschöpfung, ja eine menschenverachtende Wortschöpfung.
Ladies and gentlemen,
To deny the Armenians, the Greeks, the Kurds, the Roma, the
Palestinians, the Tamils their status as victims, to deny the
Ukrainians the horrors of the Golodomor, to deny the German
expellees the status of victims constitutes in itself a
violation of everyone's human dignity, also mine.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing but primitive
discrimination and unworthy of all of us. Negationism of the
Armenian Genocide, of the Holocaust, of the horrors of the
expulsion of Germans and Magyars constitutes a grave violation
of human rights.
Let us therefore make sure that the schools and universities
give proper time and attention to these neglected victims, that
education encompasses the overarching principle of equality, and
that education is henceforth based on a genuinely felt
commitment to solidarity and human rights.
I thank you for your attention.
Prof. Dr. iur et phil. Alfred de Zayas
Geneva School of Diplomacy
23 Crets de Pregny
CH/1218 Grand Saconnex
Geneva, Switzerland
www.alfreddezayas.com
(1) Statistisches
Bundesamt, Die deutschen Vertreibungsverluste, Wiesbaden 1958.
Gerhard Reichling, Die Deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen,
Vol. I-2, Bonn, 1985-86.
(2) Alfred de Zayas
«Forced Population Transfer» in Max Planck Encyclopaedia of
Public International Law, Oxford University Press, Online 2010.
(3) Victor Gollancz,
Our Threatened Values, Gollancz, London 1946, p. 96.
(4) Alfred de Zayas,
Nemesis at Potsdam, Routledge, London 1977, p. xv (6th revised
edition, Picton Press, Rockland Maine 2003).
(5) Alfred de Zayas,
A Terrible Revenge, Palgrave/Macmillan, New York 2006, p. 115.
(6) Ibid., p. 85.
(7) Ibid, p. 151.
(8) Ibid., p. 153.
(9) Alfred de Zayas,
A Terrible Revenge, p. 87.
(10) Alfred de
Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 80.
(11) Ibid., p. 130.
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