Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe is the abridged English translation of a multi-volume publication that was created by a commission of West German historians between 1951 and 1961 to document the population transfer of Germans from East-Central Europe that had occurred after World War II. Created by the Federal Ministry for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims, the commission headed by Theodor Schieder (thus known as the Schieder commission) consisted primarily of well-known historians, however with a Nazi past. Therefore, while in the immediate post war period the commission was regarded as composed of very accomplished historians, the later assessment of its members changed. The later historians are debating how reliable are the findings of the commission, and to what degree they were influenced by Nazi and nationalist point of view.
Motivated by the Lebensraum ideology, some of the historians themselves had played an active role in these war crimes. Due to its relative frankness, the final summary volume was suppressed for political reasons and was never finished.
Historical background and origins of the research project
Lebensraum and Generalplan Ost
The Schieder Commission did not inform the readers about the implementation of the earlier Lebensraum concept: in 1938 and 1939 Nazi Germany expanded its territory far into the east, annexing parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland (Sudetenland, Warthegau). This was intended as only a first step towards establishing the so-called A–A line from Arkhangelsk to Astrakhan (both located in Russia) as Germany's new eastern border. Parts of Poland were "Germanized" by force, the local Polish majority population being subject to mass executions and murder as well as expelled into other parts of Poland. The Jews were systematically killed. In some cases German historians were involved in determining the fate of villages based on racial criteria. Ethnically German minorities from further east and settlers from within Nazi Reich were invited to settle in the annexed areas. Thousands of children from the occupied territories were kidnapped and examined according to racial criteria. Those who were eventually considered "Aryan" were given German names and thoroughly Germanized, but most were sent to orphanages, died from malnutrition or were killed in Auschwitz.
German expellees in early West Germany
Where they came from. At least 12 million affected, said to be the largest movement of any single ethnic population in modern history (per Expulsion of Germans after World War II#Legacy of the expulsions) Many fled through the Soviet-controlled territory to the western zones Extent of the population influx: Mecklenburg's number of inhabitants doubled. Previously purely Catholic regions got an influx of Protestants and conversely. Explosion of small settlements into big towns, see Heimatvertriebene#Expellee towns. Conditions in early post-war Germany Systematically organized interviews with arriving expellees as material to be used against the Soviet Union Federal ministry for expellees Integration of expellees into West German society
Origins of the project The project had its roots in initiatives in the British and American occupation zones that preceded the foundation of West Germany in 1951. At the time German politicians expected that a peace treaty would offer the chance for a revision of Germany's new eastern border. The German project which was to portray Germans as alleged victims of suffering, in particular as caused by the Red Army, was hoped to balance the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and create international sympathy for German territorial claims against neighbouring countries. These motivations were fully endorsed by Schieder and other commission members such as Diestelkamp, who felt that Germany had missed a similar chance after it lost the First World War, and that a related Polish project needed a counter-weight. Domestically, the documentation of the expelled persons' fate was meant to support their integration into West German society.
In the immediate post war period the commission was regarded as composed of very accomplished historians. The head of the commission, Theodor Schieder, had previously been closely associated with the Nazi settlement policy in occupied countries in Eastern Europe. Schieder in turn was supervised by Theodor Oberländer (who also wrote the introduction to the published works of the commission), the head of the Ministry, who had been Schieder's colleague in the Nazi Ostforschung. Oberländer is considered by some historians (for example, Götz Aly) to be one of the academics who laid the intellectual foundation for the Final Solution.
Members of the Commission The commission was headed by Theodor Schieder. Members of the editorial board were Peter Rassow, Hans Rothfels, Rudolf Laun as well as Adolf Diestelkamp, who died in 1953 and was replaced by Werner Conze. Apart from international law expert Laun and archivist Diestelkamp, all were distinguished historians. Non-board members included historians Hans Booms, Martin Broszat, Eckhart Franz, Kurt Kluxen, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and also several so-called "collectors" (of sources).
The commission was created in 1951 by Hans Lukaschek, former German propaganda chief throughout the Upper Silesia plebiscite after First World War, known for his anti-Polish viewsNiemiecki ruch obrońców pokoju: 1892–1933 Karol Fiedor Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, page 153, 1993 Minister for the Expelled in West Germany from 1949 to 1953. Lukaschek had before been an important Silesian politician responsible for persecution of Polish teachers and pupils in that region,Polski ruch narodowy w Niemczech w latach 1922–1939 Wojciech Wrzesiński, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, page 192, 1993. and lawyer, was actively involved in anti-Nazi resistance and in 1948 was appointed vice president of the British and US zones' supreme court. After the war Lukaschek was reported by British press as saying that Germany's former eastern territories, ' including those occupied by Czechoslovakia will become German againThe Manchester guardian weekly, Guardian Publications Ltd., 1952, volume 67The Labour monthly, Volume 34 Labour Pub. Co., 1952
Schieder chose as members of the commission, individuals such as Werner Conze, who had previously advocated "dejewification" of territory occupied by Nazi Germany. During the Nazi era in Germany, both Conze and Schieder had devoted their attention to the issue of Nazi settlement policies, including the matter of "depopulating" Poland of its Jewish population. Schieder was also one of the primary authors of a document entitled Generalplan Ost which called for creating "Lebensraum" (living-space) for Germans in Eastern Europe by enslaving or starving to death the Slavs, and killing all the Jews who lived there. Another person chosen was Hans Rothfels. Rothfels, while opposed to the Nazi regime and forced to emigrate from Germany during World War II, was also a German nationalist who in the interwar period advocated German domination of Eastern Europe and making its population into serfs.
As such, according to Hughes, the members of the commission were "consciously committed to ... propagandist activity in their government's service". The propagandist aims of the German government at the time were to utilize the commission's work to keep the question of the territories lost by Germany as a result of World War II open. Adolf Diestelkamp, another member of the commission, expressed the hope that the work of the commission would be a "decisive factor in our fight to win back the German east", that is, territories which Germany ceded to Poland after World War II. The commission relied heavily on interest groups, including expellee organizations, to collect their sources. Some of the witness accounts gathered by the commission reflected Nazi propagandaMoeller pp. 65–66
Rothfels was the one who had originally proposed Schieder as head of the editorial staff, having been his teacher and a key intellectual influence during the Nazi period. Younger historians, such as Martin Broszat (who researched Yugoslavia) and Hans-Ulrich Wehler (who helped research Romania), who were later to break with the tradition of Schieder and Conze, served as research assistants (see also Historikerstreit).
In the immediate post war period the commission was regarded as composed of very accomplished historians.
Theodor Schieder Theodor Schieder had lived in Königsberg in East Prussia since 1934. In the interwar period Schieder was known as one of a group of conservative historians with little sympathy towards the Weimar republic Once the Nazis seized power, Schieder directed a regional center devoted to the study of East Prussia and World War I. According to Robert Moeller, after 1945 Schieder merely transferred his ideas about one German defeat to the study of another. In 1937 he joined the Nazi party himself. Schieder enthusiastically supported Hitler's invasion of Poland and wrote academic papers on Germany's role as a "force of order" and a "bearer of a unique cultural mission", in Eastern Europe. During World War II he advocated the "dejudaization" of territories occupied by Germany. As one of the prominent proponents of German racism, he advocated maintaining German "race purity" by not mixing with other, "inferior" nationals. The aim of Schieder's research was to justify alleged German supremacy over other peoples. He fled Königsberg when the Red Army approached it December 1944.
After World War II Schieder was "deNazified" and kept publicly quiet about his past. He was appointed to a chair in modern history at the University of Cologne in 1947, and in the 1950s edited one of the most known historical journals in the Federal Republic of Germany. However, personal correspondence with Werner Conze from this time, revealed that they still held old antisemitic prejudices.
Werner Conze Werner Conze was a doctoral student of Rothfels in Königsberg under the Nazis, where he claimed in his research that Germans had a positive role in the development of eastern Europe. Just like with Schieder's, the goal of his research was to justify alleged German supremacy over other nations and their right to take over new territories. With the Nazis taking power, Conze, together with Schieder and Rothfels helped to institutionalize racial ethnic research in the Third Reich. He also connected with Nazi propaganda, writing for a journal "Jomsburg" published in Third Reich by Reich's Internal MinistryMichael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1988), pages 139–142 According to German historian Ingo Haar, "the Nazis made use of (this) racist scholarship, which lent itself gladly". While working for German espionage, in 1936, Conze prepared a document which portrayed Poland as backward and in need of German order and which recommended the exclusion of Jews from the legal system as Conze considered them outside the law. In further work issued in 1938 Conze continued in similar vein, blaming lack of industry in Belarus on "Jewish domination"
During the war Conze fought at the Eastern Front. In the meantime his family fled west. At the end of the war Werner Conze ended up in a Soviet POW camp. After the war, Conze moved to Munster, then to Heidelberg.
Goals and work of the Commission Presenting expulsions as one of the great catastrophes in German history