Contrary to what I had believed, mass expulsion and slave labor, far from coming to an end in Europe with WWII, continued during 1945-50, overseen by the victorious allies. An estimated 500,000 or more uprooted Germans died in this little-known episode. Stalin, who can always be relied upon to do the ghastliest thing imaginable, compensated the Poles for the Polish areas he had grabbed for the Soviet Union by grabbing German land, emptying it of Germans and passing it on to Poland. Both Poland and Czechoslovakia sought ethnically homogeneous countries and wanted their German citizens driven out without recompense and often to their deaths. The Brits and the Americans either stood by or actively helped. Atlee, the British Prime Minister, opined that the mass expulsion of Germans "would be worthwhile in the end" and the Americans did not want to alienate Poland and Czechoslovakia for fear of pushing them into Stalin's embrace.
Unfortunately, although Prof. Douglas makes clear that "tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies' cynical formulation, "reparations in kind")" in notorious concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, he is not specific enough about this serious atrocity. Who was in charge? What work were the captives doing? Under what conditions?
The article makes no mention of anybody being prosecuted for the crimes described in it. I feel a slight shiver every time my mind drifts back to the possibility that this atrocity may be one of the very few in modern history in which the perpetrators got away absolutely scot-free.
Update, August 10, 2012: See the review by Andrew Stuttaford in The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2012, of "Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War" by R. M. Douglas.
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