he was sentenced to a year in prison for inciting to riot, and he has privatelycalled his sentence" a badge of honor"and compared it to that of Hitler inLandsberg prison .

There is no mystery about the peopleto whom Hermann has made his pri-mary appeal. They are Germans andpeople of German origin who have,during the last four years, been kickedout of the countries of eastern Europe into a Fatherland which has no room,few jobs, and little understanding tooffer them. So far Hermann has madelittle headway with those outside ofDachau .

There are nine million or more ofthese Flüchtlinge - about two and ahalf million from the Sudetenland andthe rest of Czechoslovakia ; half a mil-lion from Hungary ; half a million fromYugoslavia ; some quarter million fromRoumania ; more than a million fromwhat was prewar Poland , and the rest,close to five million, from the easternGerman territories that were trans-ferred to Poland after the war.

Most of this latter group first wentto the Soviet Zone , as they were sup-posed to under the Potsdam agree-ment. Hundreds of thousands, how-ever, moved on to the western zones toescape being drafted for labor in ura-nium mines, or because they grew sickof being treated as second- class citizensby their countrymen, or because theyhad no liking for the" new democracy"of Soviet Germany . An estimated fortyto sixty thousand are still coming towest Germany every month.

This mass of displaced Germans - ina strange and often hostile environ-ment, resentful and deeply resented-constitute perhaps the gravest menaceto the development of democracy inwestern Germany .

Propertyless, bitter about their ex-pulsion from lands where they hadlived all their lives, these nine millionare dangerously susceptible to the blan-dishments of any new demagogue. Atthe same time, their presence in everycity, town, and village of the westernzones inevitably whips up a spirit ofirredentism among the native Ger­ mans , and leads too easily to talk of anew war to win back" lost territories"of the Fatherland.

On August 2, 1945, when the United States and Britain signed the Potsdam agreement, they agreed reluctantly, at

Russia 's insistence, that" the transferRussia 's insistence, that" the transferto Germany of German populations...remaining in Poland , Czechoslovakia and Hungary will have to be under-taken." They insisted, for what it wasworth, that any transfer" should beeffected in an orderly and humanemanner." As it has worked out, Ger­ mans have been expelled from othercountries besides those mentioned atPotsdam , and the transfers have beenPotsdam , and the transfers have beenanything but" orderly and humane."

The Sudeten Germans were givenonly a few hours to cross the Czechborders, and they were allowed to takeonly those possessions that they couldcarry on their backs. From Yugoslavia ,Germans were not permittedeven to take extra clothes. From Silesia ,they had to travel by foot across thenew Polish border to the Russian Zoneof Germany .

many

The Potsdam signatories had re-quested the Czechs, the Poles, and theAllied Control Council in Hungary tosuspend further expulsions until thedistribution of the expellees could beworked out and facilities found forthem. That plea was generally ignored.

The welcome in the homeland wasno warmer than the farewells. In al-most every German community, thelocal people did not have enough food,clothes, jobs, shelter, or money. So therefugees were mostly shoved into oldarmy barracks and former concentra-tion camps, where they were givenmeager rations and crowded, oftenfilthy, quarters.

Whatever the location of thesecamps from southern Bavaria , wheremore than two million expellees havesettled among the clannishly hostile.

MA

natives, to the little northern state ofSchleswig- Holstein , where the refugeescomprise nearly half the population-the inmates are similarly miserable andpoverty- stricken.

In a camp outside of Ludwigsburg , inWürttemberg , I heard a typical storyof wanderers who were once proud oftheir blood relationship to the Father-land- people whom Adolf Hitler oncegrandly insisted were his charges nomatter where they lived.

Eleven persons were squeezed into abarracks room, heavy with the odors ofstale straw and unwashed bodies. As Icame into the room, they all fell silent,and a man came up and introducedhimself as Herr Manfried Abusch. Hepointed out his wife, her mother- awraith of a woman who, I found out,was eighty- three- and his twin four-teen- year- old sons, Horst and Hel­ muth . They occupied the five beds inone half of the room, Abusch said. Thesix beds across the aisle belonged to thefamily of Herr Arthur Koeppler.

Early in 1946, the Abusches and theKoepplers had all been expelled fromYugoslavia , where their families hadsettled before the turn of the century.The Koepplers had owned a tinwareshop at Samobor, a village near Zag­ reb , in Croatia , and Abusch hadowned a sizable farm, on which he hademployed four tenant families.

Abusch had been conscripted by theGerman Army when it swept acrossYugoslavia . He was captured in Italy ,and released four months after the warended. When he returned home, hefound that his farm had been dividedamong three of his tenants and thelocal chairman of the People's Front.Koeppler's shop was confiscated inFebruary, 1946, and a month later thetwo families, along with three othersof German origin in the village, wereordered to leave the country. Theywere taken to the Austrian frontier inan army truck.

The Abusches and the Koepplerswent to a camp at Graz , where a cousinof Koeppler's lived. With this man'shelp, Koeppler found a job in a cheese-processing plant, and Abusch receivedtemporary work as a common laborer.Two years later, the cousin died. Koep-pler's job was taken by a native Aus-trian. Unable to get new work, bothmen were notified by the local housingoffice that they had to clear out of

The Reporter, October 11, 1949

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