Crimes and Mercies (19 page)

The evidence is abundant in the Military Governors’ reports themselves that the governor was interested in giving the Chief of Staff in Washington, the Secretary of State and the President a pleasing portrait of Germany rather than a reliable statistic. It is also clear that the President himself did not rely on these reports. When the Displaced Persons camps were said in the American press to be in bad shape in autumn 1945, Truman did not rely on the Military Governor reports to find the facts, although the governor was in charge of those camps and reported every month. Truman appointed a commissioner to investigate. Similarly, after many senators had angrily denounced American policy in Germany, Truman paid no attention to the Military Governor’s monthly reports, with their enormous detail showing that there was no problem. Instead, he asked Hoover to
take over and solve the problem. Hoover replied to Truman that he would not go unless he had a mandate to investigate the very conditions in Germany that the Military Governor reports were supposedly describing. Truman let him have his way.

The highest estimates

The death figures of the French government are so high that they verge on the unbelievable.
¹⁵
They imply that some 50 per cent of the expellees died in a couple of years, far beyond the normal death rate. Combined with the deaths of prisoners and the unreported deaths of non-expelled civilians, this would mean an overall total of around fifteen million deaths. A cursory reading of the documents about the expulsion shows, however, that this 50 per cent figure does not differ much from the reports of thousands of eye-witnesses who survived the expulsions. As we have seen, in the hospital near Prague, twenty-six of twenty-seven children in one transport died in a few weeks; in another case, the death rate for some weeks was between 43 and 81 per cent per year in one large ‘transport’.

In Silesia, some figures given mainly by priests have survived. In Klein-Mahlendorf, according to the parish priest, 175 people died in 1945, whereas normally around 110–115 people died each year. And this happened although the village had already lost about two-thirds of its people through the expulsions. The main cause was the typhus that the Allies feared might spread to their own troops in the west if they did not relieve the starvation somewhat. The 1945 Klein-Mahlendorf total death rate was about 456 per cent of the pre-war death rate.
¹⁶

Of eighteen landowners near Alt-Wette in Silesia who were arrested and forced to work in the mines, twelve died in the first six months, beginning in late 1945.
¹⁷
Among sixty-eight villagers of Niederhermsdorf in one rail car, seven died in three days and four nights, plus three more on arrival. This is a rate far above 100 per cent per year.
¹⁸

The people of Lossen suffered abominably under the Russians. Of 770 who returned to the village after the Russian occupation began, more than 100 died in the six months from June to December 1945. This was a rate of around 26 per cent, or 260 per thousand per year, roughly twenty-one times the pre-war rate for the area.
¹⁹

In the villages of Glogau and Kuttlau, the rate was between 100 and 155 per thousand per year for the last half of 1945.
²⁰
At Thomaswaldau, the rate was around 42 per thousand in the last six months of 1945.
²¹

These and the French figures must be viewed against figures from Stolper, Guderian and, above all, Adenauer. These seem promising to investigate because they are offered by experts who were there in responsible positions at the time – Stolper with the Hoover Commission, and Adenauer first as Mayor of Cologne, then as Chancellor of West Germany. They reveal a massacre not as huge as implied by the French, but far beyond the belief of any later historian.

The mid-range figures

The mid-range figures from Adenauer and a few others say that some six million expellees alone died, without specifying any unusual number of deaths among the resident civilians. Adenauer wrote in March 1949:

According to American figures, a total of 13.3 million Germans were expelled from the eastern parts of Germany, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and so on. 7.3 million arrived in the eastern zone and the three western zones … Six million Germans have vanished from the earth. They are dead, gone. Most of the 7.3 million who stayed alive are women, children and old people.

A large part of the workers were shipped to the USSR for forced labour. The expulsion of these 13 to 14 million brought with it
unending suffering. ‘Atrocities were committed that are worthy of being put beside those perpetrated by German National Socialists [Nazis].’
²²

All these reports come from staunch friends of the West – Adenauer, Stolper, the French government, and others. We can see they are not lies: are they perhaps incorrect?

One of the leading experts on post-war refugees, author of a standard reference work,
European Refugees
, which is cited by many subsequent authors, is the British writer Malcolm Proudfoot. In Table 40 of his book, Proudfoot gives a detailed survey of the statistics of the German expellees from 1945 to 1950, by which time the exodus had ended for nearly all of them. We can get some idea of the validity of the Adenauer figures by combining some of Proudfoot’s basic figures with others from the Allied Control Council, so we can compare the
apparent
growth of the German population between January 1946 and September 1950 with the
actual
census count in 1950.

To Proudfoot’s opening population of 60.4 million in January 1946, we add the births and immigration in the period 1946–50 to find the total possible population for 1950. Births numbered some 5 million, the returning prisoners numbered 4.8 million, and the expellees, according to Proudfoot, added some 8.3 million, making a total potential population before deaths and emigration of 78.5 million. From these we subtract deaths
officially
recorded
of 3.85 million and emigration of some 0.6 million.
²³
The result is that in September 1950 we should find 74.05 million people. But the census of September 1950 found only 68.8 million. Missing, not accounted for, were 5.25 million people. These are in addition to the officially recorded deaths inside occupied Germany. These are in addition to the six million expellees Adenauer thought had died
before
reaching Germany. What happened to all these people?

Can the statistics be wrong? As we shall see below, the Allied Control Council figures from the census are the most reliable we have on this subject. If these are wrong, then virtually nothing is known for certain on the topic.

Can the expert Proudfoot have misunderstood? There is some slight evidence for that. For instance, he admits that he was working only ‘from estimates’ in a large number of categories, without specifying
which
categories. Also, he did not refer to the census of Germany that was conducted under the Allies in October 1946, ten months
after
the start-date of his own population tables, although he did end his table with the census conducted in September 1950. Further, Proudfoot reports that the total of refugees in the British zone in January 1947 was 3,201,000, whereas the British themselves reported to the Control Council that just over 3,500,000 had arrived at that date, of whom only 2,800,000 actually remained in their zone, the others having departed for other zones.
²⁴
Clearly, Proudfoot did the best he could with the figures that were available at the time, which have been superseded by papers since declassified.

We have today something Proudfoot did not use in his basic table, the census figures for October 1946, done by the four military governments of Germany who controlled the censuses of 1946 and 1950.

The October 1946 census of all four zones of occupied Germany was carried out ‘by Germans under the direction of the Allied Control Council’.
²⁵
The second census, of August–September 1950, was also carried out by Germans under the control of the four occupying powers. An important subset is the births recorded in the relevant period. Statistics concerning the expellees have always been disputed, but we do now know, as a result of the declassification of the Murphy Papers from 1988 on, the number of expellees who arrived in occupied Germany during the period between censuses. There were six million.
²⁶
The number of prisoners discharged into Germany during the period is also known: 2,600,000.
²⁷
This number has been seriously disputed, but the truth has been discovered in the KGB archives in Moscow, recently opened. The numbers of deaths and emigrants are also known.
²⁸
With these figures in place, we can swiftly calculate the missing/unreported deaths.

The population of all occupied Germany in October 1946 was
65,000,000, according to the census prepared under the ACC.
²⁹
The returning prisoners who were added to the population in the period October 1946–September 1950 numbered 2,600,000 (rounded), according to records in the archives of the four principal Allies. Births according to the official German statistical agency, Statistisches Bundesamt, added another 4,176,430 newcomers to Germany.
³⁰
The expellees arriving totalled 6,000,000.

Thus the total population in 1950 before losses would have been 77,776,430, according to the Allies themselves. Deaths officially recorded in the period 1946–50 were 3,235,539, according to the UN Yearbook and the German government.
³¹
Emigration was about 600,000, according to the German government.
³²
Thus the population found should have been 73,940,891. But the census of 1950 done by the German government under Allied supervision found only 68,230,796.
³³
There was a shortage of 5,710,095 people
, according to the official Allied figures (rounded to 5,700,000).
*

Such a gigantic discrepancy immediately raises questions. The first is, how reliable are the largest figures, the censuses?

The Allies took great care over these figures because the German population was extremely important to all of them. They even recorded the 1,143 people registered as ship crews at sea. All the Allies believed that they were in serious danger of further German aggression, which they judged was prompted (as Hitler himself had said), by too great a population confined to too little land. Therefore, the Allies’ discussions centred on population comparisons of post-war Germany with Germany in 1939; of Germany with France; on the German birth rate; on population per square kilometre; on agricultural production per person and per kilometre; and so on. Important Allied policy decisions about Germany in this period were based on these censuses. The Allies disagreed about all kinds of substantive issues and policy in the period, but they agreed on the German birth rates and the base populations assessed in 1946 and 1950.

Of the remaining variables, we know that the arriving
expellees were counted at the border and reported year by year by the Allied Control Council, whose figures we now have.
³⁴
‘The statistical picture of newcomer-population in the western zones is elaborate and complete,’ according to a memo of 18 May 1949 by Brad Patterson, secretary to Robert Murphy, in the preparatory papers to the 1949 Council of Foreign Ministers used by US Ambassador Robert Murphy. Nevertheless there were some slight variations in the figures.

Up to 1995, the prisoner-of-war arrivals were in dispute because the Western Allies said that the Soviets had over 3,000,000 prisoners at March 1947, when in fact they had only around 890,000 at that time.
*
With the opening of the KGB archives, we now know that the Soviet figures are the most solid evidence available in all the prisoner archives. This is a massive correction only possible because of the end of Cold War. All the other figures necessary to calculate the prisoners on hand at October 1946 were supplied by the governments in question.

Of all the remaining variables, the only one seriously at issue is the death figure. Could 5.7 million
extra
deaths have occurred beyond those recorded in German and Allied documents? Either the official death figures are wrong, or the censuses with their subsidiary figures. The question has now become: are those official, published, Allied/West German death statistics reliable?

To begin with, the official West German government death figures are at odds with themselves. As we saw, they reported that the death rate during two prosperous years of 1968–69 was 12.2 per thousand per year. This is higher than the death rate of 12.1 they report for 1947, a year of unparalleled misery, starvation, want and epidemic disease, remembered by Germans as the Hunger Year (
Hungerjahr
). That is incredible. I believe that the explanation for this is simple: the source for the official German figure for 1947 was not German at all, it was the US Military Governor, who reported the 12.1 figure to President Truman. Dr de Zayas, author of the definitive work on the expellees, has
several times since January 1994 asked the Statistisches Bundesamt at Wiesbaden to explain the discrepancies and to reveal their sources for statistics in 1945–50, and has received no satisfaction. This also happened to a Member of the Bundestag, a friend of de Zayas, who asked for similar information, and received no explanation of the strange discrepancies. As we have seen, the expert Professor Brian Mitchell has cast doubt on the reliability of the official figures.

The West German government death figures being reported to this day are also at odds with nearly all the other sources that we have, both German and Allied. Let us look at a mid-sized city, Brilon, which had always been prosperous, and in 1945 regarded itself as one of the more fortunate of the German towns. In the first place, it was in the British-Canadian zone, where the policy was, if not exactly genial, at least not fatally indifferent as it was in the French and Soviet zones. And Brilon was also favoured by its location, in beautiful rolling country north-west of Kassel near a formerly prosperous agricultural region not as heavily damaged as most others. This was especially lucky for the 71,000 people of Brilon, because it meant that they could scrounge for food more easily in a productive countryside close by.