In January 1942, the situation in
California and in Ukraine was similar in that the powers that be were setting
the table for what they envisioned to be a long war. Behind the lines, on both
sides of the conflict, there was an urgency to mobilize and sustain a war
economy.
Hitler had overrun Western Europe,
unsuccessfully tried to bomb Britain into submission, was fully engaged against
Russia. Germany was short on labor for its factories and fields. The United
States, on the other hand, had only just formally entered the war and needed
both to build its armies and put its factories into a full war mode. It would
be a long war.
Gus and his future bride were in
separate but relatively calm eddies of the conflict. As events would playout,
they would both wind up in the post war rubble of Germany and in such proximity
that a chance meeting of the two would not have been entirely improbable. More
to the point, that rubble set the foundation for their eventual marriage. At
that time however, their individual prospects were worlds apart. For Gus it was
a long uncertain period of waiting to be deployed. Olga on the other hand watched
a third wave of Nazi horror roll through Ukraine.
After the Nazis had pushed through
Ukraine they quickly advanced to the outskirts of Moscow before stalling. In
addition to their early swift and brutal military success they had largely slaughtered
the Baltic and Ukrainian Jews. The big job of course remained. It was to crush
communist Russia. To do that, they needed to enslave enough labor to man their
factories and farms. So, another wave of horror washed over occupied Poland,
the Baltic States, and Ukraine – especially Ukraine.
The number of Russian prisoners taken, let alone the
casualties of dead and wounded, underscores the scope of the war on the Eastern
Front. Those numbers and the scale of the Holocaust overshadow the degree to
which the Nazi occupation ripped apart the civil fabric of occupied Eastern
Europe. The procurement of slave labor is largely hidden aspect of the war. As
with everything Nazi, it was particularly brutal.
Fritz Sauckel was its choreographer.
His career began with the rise of the Nazi party in the
early 1920s. In 1927 he rose to the rank of Gauleiter.
They were the regional commanders in Nazi party’s shadow
government, structured around Germany’s roughly 34 electoral districts, or
Gaue. At the time, the civilian government was being twisted into political
machine affirming Nazi party policies. At the same time it served as the
training ground for an infant Nazi bureaucracy.
Sauckel came from this lot of party bosses. His war
assignment was recruiting labor from Poland and Ukraine. He reporting directly
to Himmler. Like Friedrich Jeckeln, who was in charge of ethnic cleansing,
Sauckel took to his job with gusto.
His formal position began in March 1942 with the title of the
“Plenipotentiary of Employment.” His job was to “recruit“ civilian workers. As
his title implies, he had absolute authority in securing them. His techniques
were harsh. So harsh in fact that he eventually was tried at Nuremberg for
crimes against humanity. He was one of only twelve Nazi war criminals sentenced
to death and hung. (1)
The enslavement began with a soft campaign promising a
better life working in Germany. And it met with early success. In January 1942
some 1,500 young volunteers showed up at a recruitment office in Kiev. There
was a festive sendoff, complete with a brass band when they departed west by
train. Two more trains similarly departed in February. ( 2)
The propaganda quickly wore thin. By midyear the word of
working conditions in Germany began reaching home. It got to the point where
there were effectively no more volunteers. Under Sauckel, recruitment quickly became
a euphemism for forced deportations and enslavement.
Initially, in various districts throughout occupied Ukraine,
construction, agricultural and manufacturing ministers would estimate excess
labor available and Sauckel’s commissioners.
According to Karl Berkhoff’s
account of Nazi rule in Ukraine, Harvest
of Despair, village elders were to submit lists of the names those who
could be taken to be sent to labor camps in Germany. In the beginning the list
of non-volunteers included those who did not live in a village before 1941,
mostly former POWs, and those who were particularly disliked by native local
authorities and variously included Poles, Communist party members or children
of victims of Soviet oppression. The process was expedited with the aid of the
police, who took and held hostages until the excess labor could be collected.
It was ugly and would quickly become more so. (3)
As Wendy Lower
described it, regional German Commissars established indigenous administrations
who provided the Germans with a network of local supervisors and informers;
“the weight of Nazi demands fell on their shoulders directly as they were held
personally responsible for the population’s fulfillment of German orders in the
most remote locations. . . Anyone who
defied or obstructed the implementation of Nazi orders was deemed a saboteur
and subject to the death penalty.” (4)
The Nazi strong arm control of the
civil administration gave Sauckel the means for wholesale labor
“recruitment.” Berghoff writes:
“His targets in Ukraine were high: 225,000 workers in the
last three months of 1942, another 225,000
in the first four months of 1943. Still later, Sauckel demanded that
from March 15, 1943, three thousand laborers be apprehended every day, and
after a while even six thousand per day… All of the native administrators were
threatened with death if they could not supply the assigned total of
“recruits.” Sometime in late 1942, the procedure changed and native officials
no longer had to supply a certain number of people, but simply all people of a
certain age. Hence, in late 1943 everyone born in 1926 and 1927 was supposed to
go to the Reich.” (5)
Ultimately, between January 1942 and June 1943 Sauckel
enslaved almost 3 million to work in Germany. (6) For
perspective he notes that, in rough numbers, for seventy-eight weeks they were
enslaving 34,000 workers each week.
Highlighting the savagely cavalier Nazi attitude toward
Ukraine, during trip through there Hitler noticed some of the Ukrainian girls
had light hair and “Aryan” features. Must be descendants of the ancient Goths
who at one time had settled in the area, he thought. He subsequently ordered
that 400,000 girls and young women should be “recruited” to work as maids in
German households. Also hoping they might reinvigorate the German gene pool. By
early 1944 there were around 100,000 “Eastern” maids working in Germany. ( 7)
It got to the point where “recruitment” amounted to little
more than snatching young people off the streets.
According to Lower:
“When Sauckel’s agents or Rosenberg’s commissars received a
labor quota, they employed whatever means available to capture and intern the
Ukrainians who were then deported to the Reich. Numerous studies have described
the sinister methods used by Sauckel’s agents, such as surrounding movie houses
and churches and grabbing everyone inside, as well as snatching people on the
streets and in market places.” (8)
Ben Shephard, in The
Long Road Home, recounts the experiences of some of those caught up in the
Nazi labor dragnet.
“I was ploughing the fields, the police appeared and said we
were going to be taken to Germany,” Anatolij Ljutikov told an interviewer. He
was a seventeen-year-old farm boy who wound up becoming a welder in a German
munitions factory.
“A policeman came to tell me I had to be at the collection
point the next morning to be taken to Germany...”said Nikolai Sjoma, who was
fifteen at the time. “[The policeman] went on to say that if I escaped, they
would set my house on fire and hang my mother.
”
Klavdia Ochkasova was a young girl from a village near Kiev.
She recalled: “In the summer of 1942 they chased me to Germany. At the
distribution point, they gave us numbers and the masters already waited for
their German slaves. They began to choose their free workers – like cattle on
the market. I came to a good master. He was an antifascist. He treated me very
well and didn’t start anything with the other girls.”
Apparently that wasn’t the norm. She wrote a letter back
home warning others not to come to Germany, because they would be humiliated
and beaten. The letter was intercepted and she wound up in a concentration
camp. ( 9.)
Meanwhile, the battle on the eastern front in the beginning
of 1942 was shaping up to become the deadliest conflict in world history. By
early 1943 the Germans were losing 150,000 men a month. The Battle of
Stalingrad, waged from late August of 1942 until early February 1943, is widely
considered the turning point in the war. It resulted in the surrender of what
was left of the German 6th Army. But at the time it meant a
redoubling of the Nazi war effort.
Ultimately the Germans suffered the loss of 4,000,000
combatants either killed or missing in action. Another 3,300,000 were taken
prisoner by the Russians. This forced the Germans to conscript virtually every
man capable of fighting into its armed forces.
By 1944, filling that gap, according to German war records, 7,600,000
non-Germans were toiling away in Germany. (10)
Despite its ever increasing reliance on foreign labor, German industrial
production continued to grow during 1942 and ‘43 reaching its peak in 1944. The
slave labor that fed and armed the Nazi war machine would become the flotsam of
its bombed out wreck.
Into that another huge wave of humanity flowed toward
Germany. It was massive. As the German army retreated from the advance of the
Red army so did some ethnic 3.5 million Germans from eastern European countries
and Ukraine, who feared being summarily be branded as Nazi collaborators and
subject to Soviet reprisals and persecution. By war’s end these were joined by
nearly 3 million who were expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia. And Besides
the ethnic Germans, others fled from the return of Stalinism. According to
Shephard, there were another million non-Germans from throughout Eastern Europe
who had fled into Germany as the war ended. (11)
In it there was urgency, a sense of flight. This is from the
biographical sketch written for Gus’ sister Irene’s funeral.
“Pursued by the Russians, they escaped by oxcart to
Czechoslovakia where they stayed for another year and one-half. Again the
Russians began closing in on them, and they escaped …”
Gus’ war was different but he wound up in the same
neighborhood. While queued for transit to front line and combat in the Ardennes,
he was instead pressed into the job of sorting through an unsettled mass of
humanity surfacing as the war came to its close.
And it was his luck. He was among the more than 600,000
American soldiers amassed for the Battle of the Bulge, the last major battle of
the war, and what turned out to be the largest and most bloody battle fought by
the United States, with nearly 90,000 casualties and 19,000 dead.
For Gus, It was the endpoint of a wartime
military career that began in a search light battery in San Diego in February
1942.
At the time United States anticipated
a long war but was only beginning to man up to fight it.
When Gus enlisted the term of service was one year. Shortly
after the Pearl Harbor attack, on December 19 the term of service was
indefinitely extended to the duration of the war plus six months. All men
between the age of 18 and 64 were required to register. At the time the U.S.
Army wasn’t much. When Germany invaded Poland, the U.S. Army had 170,000
soldiers, and another 200,000 served in the National Guard.
It would take a while before the U.S. could mobilize the sort
of armed force necessary to engage in a sustained offensive war. For most
enlisted men already in the army, and those being inducted, their immediate
prospects were for a long and indefinite period of training and waiting –
mostly waiting.
“In the middle of February, [1942], I was sent to San Diego.
I was assigned to the coast artillery battery. We were quite fortified there.
We had as much as 16 inch guns up there. Point Loma was tunneled. They had the
machine gun nests up there and then they had the 16 inch guns on railroad
tracks. They could hide them in the tunnels. I worked in the plotting room
where they tracked the target . . .” Gus recalled.
Point Loma is a sand stone peninsula on the ocean side of the
San Diego Bay. Its cliffs rise more than 400 feet above sea level and offer an
unobstructed view along the far southern U.S. coast to Mexico. Fort Rosecrans,
on the south side of the peninsula, was a natural home U.S. Army’s Coast
Artillery Corps in both World War One and Two.
Gus never said anything about it, but a nearly two year
billet there couldn’t have been an altogether bad thing. It was southern California – a pleasant
climate after all. He had friends in relatives in California’s Central Valley.
There were not too many targets to track.
In early 1942, it seems military assignments for enlisted
men were unavoidably haphazard. Point Loma was one of those places where
building a military force from a few hundred thousand into what would number
over 12 million began.
“When I got to San Diego, they didn’t need bakers or cooks.
So I was assigned to a gun crew. First I was a gun commander on a 10 inch gun.
I had a sergeant’s rank.
“I was in “F” battery and we got orders to go to Alaska.
Since I had just come back from Alaska I was transferred into ‘K’ battery. When
I was transferred to ‘K’ battery, I was moved to the plotting room. I was
shipped to Europe in December 1944.”
So Gus’s war was mostly three year wait for deployment into
what would be its last big battle. And for most of that time the outlook was pretty grim.
From December of 1941 through May of 1942, Filipino and U.S.
forces were engaged with the Japanese in the Philippines. The engagement
concluded with the infamous Bataan Death March. Of the 150,000 Filipino and American
combatants: 25,000 were killed; 21,000 were wounded; and 100,000 were captured.
About the only bright spots were: the defeat of the Imperial
Japanese Navy, in June, at Midway; and a hard fought victory at Guadalcanal. The
Guadalcanal fight raged on from June 1942 until February 1943. The nature of
the war became increasingly clear. There were 60,000 U.S. ground forces at
Guadalcanal. Overall the battle left 7,100 dead.
The war on the Eastern Front, between the Soviet Red Army
and the Nazi Wehrmacht, was more grim. Up to that point in the war, the Soviet
dead and missing in action numbered at 8.7million, according to G. I. Krivosheev, in Soviet Casualties and
Combat Losses. Of those nearly
five million had been taken as prisons of war where over one million died in
captivity. The Red Army had been all but crushed in 1941, but held a line and
turned the German Army from the outskirts of Moscow in the winter of 1941-42.
(12)
On the whole the war wasn’t going well.
When Stalin and Churchill met in mid-August 1942, Stalin understandably
wanted an immediate second front in France to relieve the onslaught. It wasn’t possible. Instead, Churchill’s
offensive plan at that time focused on North Africa.
Churchill recounted
the meeting in his history The Second
World War, Volume IV:
“I told Stalin … I had good reason against an attack on the
French coast in 1942. We had only enough landing-craft for an assault landing
on a fortified coast – enough to throw ashore about six divisions and maintain
them ...
“Stalin who had begun to look very glum, seemed unconvinced
by my argument, and asked if it was impossible to attack any part of the French
coast. I showed a map which indicated difficulties of making an air umbrella
anywhere except actually across the Straits …
“Stalin, whose glumness had by now much increased, said
that, as he understood it, we were unable to create a second front with any
large force and unwilling even to land six divisions. I said that this was so …
“Stalin, who had become restless, said that his view about
war was different. A man who was not prepared to take risks could not win a
war. Why were we so afraid of the Germans? He could not understand. His
experience showed that troops must be bloodied in battle. If you did not bloody
your troops you had no idea what their value was …” (13)
And Stalin’s view about war was different. A soldier either
fought to the last bullet or was a traitor.
It’s understandable why Stalin was so insistent on an immediate second
front in France, but ultimately saw the logic of Churchill’s near term focus on
North Africa. Churchill continued later in that passage:
“At this point Stalin seemed suddenly to grasp the strategic advantages
of “Torch.” He recounted four main reasons for it: first, it would hit Rommel
in the back; second, it would overawe Spain; third, it would produce fighting
between Germans and Frenchmen in France; and fourth, it would expose Italy to
the whole brunt of the war.”
U.S. ground forces didn’t engage the German land force until
the end of 1942 with Operation Torch in North Africa. This was followed by the
Invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and Italy with American forces landing on
Italian peninsula in September. Rome fell to the Allies in June 1944. Operation
Overlord, the invasion of France in Normandy, was launched on June 6, 1944. American
forces were fully mobilized.
So things went. While Gus was stationed in San Diego,
waiting, by 1944 the mood of the nation was dark. The foreboding of those
serving in the armed forces, and by extension that of their families, loved
ones, and friends, was overwhelmingly breathtaking. That is, as in literally
breathtaking, as if having had the wind knocked out of you.
The lyrics of Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas expressed the uncertain limbo in which
enlistees and civilians alike drifted. It was written by Hugh Martin for Meet Me in Saint Louis, released in
November 1944. Here’s what he wrote:
“Have yourself a
merry little Christmas
It may be your last
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Pop that champagne cork
Next year we may all be living in New York
No good times like the olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us no more
But at least we all will be together
If the Lord allows
From now on, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now
The business of “It may be your last” and “Next year we may all be
living in the past” were too dark for Judy Garland, who had those lines
rewritten to “Let your heart be light” and “Next year all our troubles well be
out of sight.” A recording of the song, released at the same time as the movie,
became hugely popular with U.S. troops.
Gus shipped to Europe in December 1944, at the age of thirty-five,
as a sergeant and presumably an infantryman. He arrived in Glasgow Scotland and
from there to London. There was a five day layover in London prior to shipping
to Le Havre, France. They camped out in a London park because the transport
ships at harbor were subject to submarine attacks
.
In those five days “they had torpedoed two boats,” he said.
Le Havre was devastated during the Battle of Normandy following
D-Day. Nevertheless, it was one of the largest “Replacement Depots” through which
thousands of combat troops poured before moving into combat and the transition
was almost immediate.
“The Battle of the Bulge was just going on there,” Gus said. “We
got there at night. We got up the next morning, had our breakfast, received our
day rations, got our cigarettes and all that. The trucks were there and we were
just lining up [to be transported to the front].”
“I didn’t give any thoughts about fighting Germans. No one asked
me and I didn’t think about it.
“See, my records showed I was born in Russia. It never said
anything about my being German. In fact, they wouldn’t have sent me to the
front had they known I was German or if I claimed I was German. I had a good
friend who went over but went into the medics because he was German. They could
use you for non-combat jobs.”
The ambiguity of being Russian or German worked out well when he emigrated
from Canada to the U.S. It play out well again as Gus queued for transport to
the battle front.
“I was always lucky. I never thought about it. I just went in and
always got some better job, even in the army. That’s just the way it turned
out.”
Just as he was lined up to be transported, an officer came around asking
if anyone in the group could speak German. Gus said yes.
“What had really happened, a couple of G.I.s had raped a girl. She
came and complained but there was no one in the group that knew what she was
complaining about. So they asked if anyone could understand German. I went over
there, got the story and relayed just what happened. After that, I was a
translator.”
He told them, “I speak German, Russian, Ukrainian and I understand
Polish but don’t speak it too well.”
So there was Gus’ luck. Rather than combat, he was detailed to
another side of the war – bringing order from chaos. The scope of that side of
war was becoming increasingly clear as the Allied forces advanced toward
Germany. It was huge.
From the outset, shortly after D-day the Allied forces confronted the
weird reality that many German combatants were actually Russians. Then as they advanced into Germany they found
the people manning its factories and farms weren’t German either, but a
hodgepodge Eastern Europeans. Gus was
pressed into sorting through that mess. It unfolded almost with the same lightning
speed as his transfer from the US to the front line in Europe.
In the days and weeks following D-Day, the Allies often found they
were fighting a peculiar enemy. They were taking German prisoners who oddly did
not speak a word of German. They were Russians. By June 14, barely a week after
the first Allied soldiers set foot to the Normandy beaches, 1,600 of them had
been taken, and army intelligence obviously wanted to know what was going on.
(15)
At that time nearly 900,000 former Soviet soldiers were serving in
the German army, 115,000 were positioned in Normandy by D-Day. Another 2
million Soviet POW forced laborers were within Germany, according to Mark
Elliott in Ukraine During World War II. And the POWs made up only one-third of the
Russians in German forced labor camps. Remember, Ukrainians were considered
“Russian.”(16)
Shephard gives this description from the eyes of Allied
journalists embedded with the troops. “They began to see Germany for
themselves, they noticed first the prosperity of the countryside. . . .However,
as they ventured deeper into Germany, other impressions followed: the total
devastation of many of the cities, the air of defeat – and then the slave
laborers.”
An American intelligence officer, Alan Moorehead, described the
scene as the Allied advanced into Germany.
“Thousands,” he wrote, “tens of thousands, finally millions of
slaves were coming out of the farms and the factories and the mines and pouring
on to the highways.” He saw:
“… little groups of Frenchmen, then Dutch, then Belgians and
Czechs and Poles and Italians, and finally in overwhelming majority, the
Russians in their bright green uniforms with “SU” – Soviet Union – painted in
white on their backs. Half the nationalities of Europe were on the march, all
moving blindly westward along the roads, feeling their way by some common
instinct towards the British and American lines in hope of finding food and
shelter and transportation there.” (17)
The number of people stranded in Germany was astonishing, but more
astonishing was how many did not want to return to their homes. That too was
something that began to be evident with the Russians captured among the German
Army ranks.
Shepard reported, “One soldier reminded the interrogator of the
fate of the 32,000 Russian prisoners of war exchanged against the Finns after
the 1939 Finnish campaign: they were shot by a machine-gun company which in
turn was liquidated by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.” (18)
The fear of Stalin, of persecution and reprisals wasn’t limited to
Russian POWs but was a fear that shared by many of those stranded in Germany
and by all who fled there.
Here was the battle front into which Gus was dispatched. Unknown to him, that sea of humanity would
profoundly shape his future, but at the time it was just another contingency of
war.
The need to deal with uprooted people was anticipated following the
lessons from World War I. Planners anticipated a-half-million or so displaced
persons in the immediate aftermath of the war. The scope of what was unfolding
was by orders of magnitude greater than anything imagined. Allied commanders
found that in addition to defeating an enemy, they had to avert an
unprecedented humanitarian crisis. It was something couldn’t be placed on hold
until the end of the war. Its urgency explained Gus’ on-the-spot transfer from
combat into a built on-the-fly, makeshift occupation force.
Already in early 1943, the Allied countries began planning
for processing the people left stranded in the wake of the war. The efforts
resulted in the formation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA). It should be
noted that “united nations” at the time simply referred the Allied Nations, not
to the formal international body formed in 1945.
The task of creating the agency fell to an up and coming
diplomat, U.S. deputy secretary of state Dean Acheson and the ambassadors to
the U.S.: from Britain, Lord Halifax; from Russian, Maxim Litvinov, an old
Bolshevik who in fact roomed with Stalin while attending the 5th
Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in London in 1907, and;
from China, Wei Tao-ming a senor diplomat who ultimately wound up as foreign
minister of the Republic of China (Taiwan).
It took them until June, 1943, to draft an agreement. Said
Acheson of the deliberations, “our group was a congenial one, often escaping
from the confines of an uninspiring agenda to speculate about the world which
was to be.”
It took Roosevelt and Acheson nearly another five months to
get Congress on board with it.
UNRRA was an international civilian authority funded with a
$2 billion budget, with more than half coming from the U.S. and the balance
from the United Kingdom, Canada and Latin America.
It was no small thing. That $2 billion is the equivalent of
about $28 billion in 2020 dollars. Upon signing the agreement, in November
1943, President Roosevelt announced:
“In UNRRA we have devised a mechanism, based on the process
of true democracy, which can go far toward accomplishment of such an objective
in the days and months of desperate emergency which will follow the overthrow
of the Axis.” (19)
Anticipating a problem is one thing, which clearly the UNRRA
was set up to do. But in establishing UNRRA, neither the immediate scope, nor
the internal and international politics of that “desperate emergency” were
fully anticipated.
At the outset of 1945 the infant international bureaucracy was
simply overwhelmed by mess it had been charged to address. Instead, a here and
now problem that unfolded as the Allied armies advanced, and dealing with
defaulted to the “feet on the ground,” to the military.
From Shephard’s account, this is how the situation unfolded:
“The plan was that the DPs would be rounded up by the
military and transported to assembly centers or camps, where they would be fed,
fumigated and kept in order by special UNRRA teams. In December 1944 – after,
it will be recalled, “vexatious delays” caused by the High Command’s reluctance
with the new international organization – SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary
Force] had asked UNRRA to provide 200 such teams and then, on February 1, 1945,
requested a further 250. This was almost certainly an impossible task. At all
events, thanks to further delays caused by the German offensive in the
Ardennes, UNRRA’s recruiting problems, and difficulty with transport and
supply, only fifteen “spearhead” UNRRA teams (consisting of seven people each
instead of the intended thirteen) were in the field by the end of the war … The
military would have to man the assembly centers itself, with some help from the
voluntary agencies. And so 20,000 solders – the equivalent of an entire
division – had to be withdrawn from combat units and assigned to the task.”
(20)
Instead of the Battle of the Bulge, Gus marched into this
other theater of war. But not directly, he was assigned to become a translator
for anticipated war crime tribunals and sent off to training for it.
“At first we weren’t
doing anything. We had a school, maybe an hour or so a day. They were trying to
teach us what the laws were before Hitler’s time and during Hitler’s time. I
was supposed to be an interpreter in court. I wasn’t good enough for that. They
were looking for interpreters to handle war crimes.”
This wasn’t surprising given Gus’s formal education was
limited to four or possibly five years and pretty much ended in the turmoil
following World War One and Russian Revolution.
He was subsequently assigned to the occupation forces until
the end of the war and his discharge.
“We went through concentration [labor] camps right when we
got into Germany. We interviewed a lot of those people. There were a lot of
them [forced laborers] in Germany. The used the people to work in factories. We
found some people – they were nothing but skin and bones. They fed them so
little, you know. . .
“The German men were all in the army and forced labor ran
the factories. There were a lot of Russians and a lot Poles working there.
Prisoners of war didn’t work in the factories. They had a lot of laborers they
brought in from Russia. Some of Olga’s cousins volunteered. And they took a lot
of them – whether they wanted to go or not.”
His job mostly involved in restoring some semblance of
civilian order.
“When we took a town we got some old German who lived there and
made him the Burgermeister – the mayor – and then left an attachment of
American soldiers there.”
After that he was assigned to an occupation detail in charge
of maintaining order in a town, and after that an entire county or more
precisely a German Gaue.
It wasn’t easy.
Gus said, in general the liberated Displaced Persons were somewhat
unruly. While the DPs were placed in “refugee” camps they were not confined to
them and could pretty much come and go as they pleased. They became
particularly adept in navigating the black market that whole of the post war
German economy had sunk into.
Gus continued.
“We were involved with the refugees. We had a lot of trouble
with the Poles. They had regular [DP] camps. They used to go out.”
“They would rob. They would break into German houses. One time,
we were just travelling and a girl came running down. She had a flock of sheep
that she was watching. The Poles came and got into the sheep. They were
butchering her sheep, one after the other.
“One time, this was later on when we were in Bavaria, the
Poles used to go into a farm and clean it out. If there were and pigs or other
livestock, they would take and butcher it. And they killed one guy. We were the
authority. We had to get rid of them. So our commander said, this is enough,
well send them back to Poland. They didn’t want to go.”
Among all the nationalities comprising the cohort of
Displaced Persons, Gus was not alone in observing the Poles were particularly
lawless and unruly. The Brits found them troublesome too.
This is from Shephard’s history:
“In August 1945, the
British military government warned that a growing problem of law and order
among Polish DPs was bringing British rule into disrepute ... Field Marshal
Bernard Law Montgomery proposed shooting on sight to stop “looting, rape and
murder by DPs, and warned that the German police might be rearmed ... When
fourty-eight Poles were put on trial for acts of violence against Germans four
were sentenced to death in August 1945.” (21)
It should be noted that given what can only be called the
German rape of Poland, it’s understandable that the Poles would seek a measure payback
and even more so in that many of those stranded in Germany at the end of the
war were subject to the abuse as forced laborers and POWs. A similar rage was
expressed during the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia
after the war while sovereign order was being restored.
At the end of the war forced repatriation was both a matter
of official policy, and an expedient means to restoring order. It was a two way
street.
In the summer of 1944 the U.S. War Cabinet agreed that
Russians POWs would be returned to the Soviet Union. This was in light of the
Soviet policy regarding soldiers who surrendered that had been displayed by the
treatment of 32,000 soldiers who were captured during Russia’s ill-fated
invasion of Finland.
Yet with that in mind, based on humanitarian considerations,
the War Cabinet was somewhat reluctant to adopt the policy of forced
reparations. The decisive factor, according to Shephard, was the need to insure
the Russians would return the 50,000 U.S. and British prisoners who had been
liberated by the Red Army from German POW camps. “In September they gave into
the Russian request that all Soviet citizens be returned. At the Yalta
Conference, in February 1945, a verbal agreement further stipulated Soviet
citizens should be repatriated “whether they were willing or not.”
Nevertheless, the policies didn’t match the realities on the
ground. Forced repatriations were a nasty business, both for those being
repatriated and those doing it. Between the black and white of high command
orders there was every shade of grey. If you were a grunt or a junior officer
in the army, being part of a forced repatriation detail was the last job you
wanted. It got to the point where the
officers in charge, held off releasing assignment lists until the last moment
and equipped repatriation details with guidelines on how to prevent suicides.
Shepard offers this account by Olexa Woropay from her book, Road to the West: Diary of a Ukrainian
Refugee.
This incident happened at the Kempten DP camp in Bavaria in
the summer of 1945. At the time in the American troops were forcibly
transferring Ukrainians for the American DP camps to Russian ones, and ultimately
to repatriation. When the soldiers were sent to Kempten, the refugees sought
refuge in a church.
“[The soldiers] began
to drag people out forcibly. They dragged the women by their hair and twisted
the men’s arms up their backs, beating them with the butts of their rifles. One
soldier took the cross from the priest and hit him with the butt of his rifle.
Pandemonium broke loose. The people in a panic threw themselves from the second
floor, for the church was in the second floor of the building, and they fell to
their death or were crippled for life. In the church there were suicide
attempts.”
Elsewhere Shephard writes, “The Americans found it not only
shocking but incomprehensible when Soviet refugees targeted for extradition bit
each other’s jugular veins rather than submit to repatriation.” (23,)
Needless to say, the American command on the ground conveniently
used extremely narrow criteria in determining just who exactly was Russian. For
example, White Russians and Cossacks from Czechoslovakia who fled Russia in the
1920’s were not Soviet Russian Citizens. Western Ukrainians who were Polish
citizens prior to 1939 were not Russian. And why, the ethnic Germans who fled Ukraine
and Russia in advance of the Red Army were not Russian citizens. They were
German refugees and so it went.
In addition, to avoid repatriation the Ukrainians variously
avoided the DP camps or, forged or falsified identity documents claiming they
were from Western Ukraine which was part Poland prior to 1939.
Still the whole business of forced repatriations was ugly. General
Eisenhower banned forced DP transfers on September 4, until Washington
reconsidered the policy. Yet the situation remained unsettled and turbulent.
Gus recalled: “I came, one time, to a [train] station and
there was a family of Germans there from Romania. They had them all rounded up
and were waiting for the train to come. They were crying. So, I asked them what
the trouble was. Well they were being sent back and they didn’t want to go
back. I said you don’t have to go back if you don’t want to go back. Come on.
They can’t force you back.”
But there was a caveat. It was huge.
“I had to find them a
place to live, which was kind of hard there. They stayed on. But a lot of
people didn’t know any different and they sent them all back.”
The problems posed by displaced persons were amplified by
the ethnic German refugees who fled from the advancing Red Army. Following the
conclusion of the war their numbers would swell as the Eastern European nations
expelled more than 10 million of them.
That too was the result of an agreement reached Yalta
between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. The Germans being deported were from Eastern
European settlements, the ethnic roots of which had been established for
generations. With regard to expulsion of these people from their homes,
Churchill cavalierly commented to Stalin they would make up for Germany’s
nearly six or eight million war dead.
They were discussing post was political boundaries of in the
course of which, according Churchill’s history The Second World War, Volume VI, Roosevelt observed:
“Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years.”
Churchill replied,
“All the more, must we do what we can to put an end to these troubles.”
In his account, Churchill acknowledged the moral question of
forcibly relocating six or eight million ethnic Germans was something “I would
have to settle with my own people.” (23)
In addressing the House of Commons, December 15, 1944, he
explained: “Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see
will be the most satisfactory and lasting.” And he went on: “A clean sweep will
be made. I am not alarmed at the prospect of the disentanglement of the
population, nor am I alarmed by these large transfers, which are more possible
now than they were before through modern conditions.” (24)
This soft ethnic cleansing it seems was widely viewed necessary
to create a politically stable post-war Eastern Europe. Ironically that
political stability was cemented by Stalin’s iron curtain.
And in any case the “clean sweep” wasn’t so clean with as
many as 2.5 million dying in route. No one knows. Regardless of the precise
numbers, the continuing prospect of a humanitarian remained unabated. By late
summer and autumn in 1945, according to Shephard, more than 2 million displaced persons remained in displaced
persons camps in the country, and 13 million homeless were wandering about the
county, most were expelled from the Sudetenland, the new Polish territory and
Czechoslovakia.
“There was a danger of serious rioting in the winter, and
administrators on the spot believed that some 5 million to 10 million Germans
would die.” (25)
That assessment
was illustrated by the scenes unfolding in Germany and Austria. Two British
journalists went to meet a train transporting uprooted German refugees from
Poland and arriving in Berlin in August, 1945. The refugees endured a seven day
train trip in cattle car accommodations. As Shephard tells it, in one car they
were greeted with the sight of four dead women on stretchers one side of the
car and four dying women on the other. Throughout the station people were
dying. They described one woman, “emaciated, with dark rings under her eyes and
sores breaking out all over her face, could only mutter self-condemnation because
she was unable to feed her two whimpering babies . . . [she was] desperately
trying to force milk from her breasts – a pitiful effort that only left her
crying in failure.” (26)
In December repatriation for most Displaced Persons
officially became voluntary. Ultimately, about one million people refused to be
repatriated. This group included approximately fifty-two nationalities, and
were scattered among 920 camps in Germany, Austria and Italy. In the US Zone of
occupied Germany they were polled over why they refused to return to their
homes. Eighty-two percent said they refused to live behind Stalin’s Iron
Curtain. Said one Estonian, “my country
has ceased to exist.” (27)
This is the scene
of Gus’ departure from Germany. He was discharged from the army in December of
that year, 1945. It seems he took this part of the war home with him. Once
settled in civilian life he increasingly found himself sponsoring the entry of
immigrants from the rubble of post war Germany into the U.S. It began with
blood relatives and mushroomed from there.
Decades later, when the extended family of aunts and uncles,
of cousins and grandchildren gathered for various social events at Gus’
suburban home, two entirely separate gatherings took place: the young were drawn
together as extended siblings in the blood ties of cousins; their parents and
grandparents were the “old timers,” bound in a brotherhood of time and place, of
Germany 1945 and various roads that led there.
