IB History Persecution and Fear of Reprisals Notes

Reprisals: Violence After Liberation

1. The end of the war did not end the violence. The months following Germany's surrender were marked by widespread reprisals, including attacks on former prison and camp officials, revenge against real and perceived collaborators, ethnic cleansing, sexual violence, theft, and looting.
2. Violent reprisals at the end of long wars are common, but they are often poorly documented. Accounts are suppressed, denied, or exaggerated depending on who is telling the story.
3. The post-1945 reprisals in Europe fit this pattern.

Violence Against Camp Guards: The Dachau Reprisals

1. The liberation of the concentration camps revealed the scale of Nazi atrocities. This triggered rage among both the surviving prisoners and the Allied soldiers who discovered what had happened.
2. The first targets of reprisals were the camp guards who had been unable to flee before Allied forces arrived. Many guards did leave before the liberators reached the camps, but those who remained faced violent retribution.
3. At Buchenwald, former prisoners captured and executed several guards.
4. At Dachau, guards were beaten or killed shortly after American troops arrived. Former prisoners also humiliated their captors. In camps with female guards, the guards sometimes had their heads shaved as a public act of shaming.
5. The liberators themselves carried out violent acts. At Dachau, American soldiers were so horrified by what they found that they executed between 35 and 50 guards.
6. This incident became known as the Dachau reprisals. Soldiers also ignored or encouraged former prisoners as they attacked guards, Kapos (inmates who had worked for the Nazis in the camps), or informers. The attacks were eventually stopped as the liberators tried to restore order.

Ostarbeiter: Forced Labour from Eastern Europe

1. During the war, Germany faced severe labour shortages as men were conscripted into the military. The Nazi regime addressed this by importing workers from Eastern Europe.
2. These workers were called Ostarbeiter (German for "Eastern worker"), civilian forced labourers from Poland, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union who worked in Nazi Germany under harsh conditions.
3. The recruitment of Eastern European workers happened in phases. Before the war, Germany had already been short of workers and recruited from Eastern Europe.
   1. Between 1938 and 1939, over 40% of agricultural labourers were foreign-born.
4. In the early days of the war, many workers from Nazi-occupied Poland went to Germany voluntarily, attracted by better pay and hoping to avoid food shortages at home.
5. After Germany invaded Ukraine in 1941, the Nazis used propaganda films to entice workers.
   1. When Italy surrendered, Italian men and prisoners of war were rounded up and shipped to Germany.
   2. Once word reached Eastern European villages about the reality of conditions in Germany, volunteers stopped coming.
6. From 1942, the regime began forcibly conscripting workers from the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, Poland, and the Soviet Union.
7. In Ukraine, local authorities were ordered to round up a quota of recruits and threatened with death if they failed.
   1. Many of those taken were very young, with the majority being teenagers and young women.

Conditions of Forced Labour

1. Forced labourers were taken to transit camps that were overcrowded, dirty, unheated, and lacked basic sanitation.
   1. They were then packed into overcrowded trains with little or no food, sometimes travelling for weeks before reaching Germany.
2. On arrival, they were put to work across a range of sectors.
3. Industrial facilities. Weapons, vehicles, chemicals, and other supplies for the war effort. Factories used POWs, Ostarbeiter, and concentration camp inmates.
4. Farms. Millions of Ostarbeiter, especially Poles, worked on farms and lived in barns or stables.
5. Construction and infrastructure. Projects like the Autobahn highway system used forced labour.
6. Concentration camps. Camps provided labour for industrial and military production. Conditions were so brutal that this was known as Vernichtung durch Arbeit (extermination through labour).
7. Private homes and small businesses. Young women from Eastern Europe provided domestic help.
8. Military and SS facilities. POWs and concentration camp prisoners dug ditches, maintained roads, and served officers.
9. Ostarbeiter were housed in dreadful conditions.
   1. They were forced to wear badges saying "OST" (German for east) to show their origins and were banned from participating in German life.
10. Nazi regulations required Western and Eastern workers to be kept physically separate, with Eastern Europeans assigned the more dangerous and labour-intensive jobs.
    1. Many had to work in confined spaces with contaminated air and caustic, harmful materials.
11. Food rations were meagre.
    1. In April 1942, after the influx of Eastern workers, the Nazi administration decreased food rations for everyone.
12. Eastern European workers faced severe hunger, malnutrition, and sometimes outright starvation.
    1. At the Middledeutsche Motorenwerke plant in Leipzig, an average of 12% of forced labourers missed work because of undernourishment.
    2. At the Krupp Steel factory in Essen, forced labourers collapsed on the floor from hunger.
13. Conditions on small family farms were generally more humane, with higher food rations.
14. But on large agricultural estates, forced labourers were under constant watch by armed foremen.

Fear of Reprisals from Forced Labourers

1. When the war ended, about 7.5 million foreign workers and POWs were in Germany, all of whom had been badly treated.
   1. Conservative estimates suggest that 20% of the German workforce was made up of forced labourers.
2. This created enormous fear among the German population about what these people might do once the war was over.
3. As it became clear that Germany would lose, people began to fear reprisals from the forced labourers.
   1. In Hamburg, Nazi Party workers formed a special emergency guard to prevent a backlash.
   2. Rumours spread that new arrivals would bring weapons, or that forced labourers were acting as spies for the Allies.
   3. Many of these rumours were encouraged by the forced labourers themselves.
   4. French prisoners claimed that an advance force of parachutists was about to arrive, and Polish prisoners taunted the Germans, claiming they had lists of people they would kill once victory was declared.
4. This fear of reprisals drove many Germans to flee their homes before the forced labourers could act on their threats, contributing to the mass displacement that followed the war.

Ethnic Cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe

1. One of the largest sources of post-war displacement was the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from territories across Eastern Europe.
2. The Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 sanctioned the "orderly and humane" transfer of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
   1. In practice, the expulsions were often chaotic and violent.
3. In Czechoslovakia, around 3 million Sudeten Germans were expelled.
4. In Poland, the redrawing of borders along the Oder-Neisse line meant that formerly German territories in Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia became Polish.
   1. Germans living in these areas were forced out.
5. Across Eastern Europe as a whole, an estimated 12 to 14 million ethnic Germans were expelled from their homes between 1944 and 1950.
6. These expulsions were driven by a mix of factors: revenge for Nazi occupation, the desire to create ethnically homogeneous nation-states, and the territorial changes agreed at Yalta and Potsdam.
   1. Many of the expelled Germans lost everything they owned and arrived in occupied Germany with nothing.

Sexual Violence and Looting

1. Sexual violence was widespread during and after the war, perpetrated by soldiers on all sides.
2. As the Red Army advanced westward through Germany, mass sexual violence against German women became a tool of revenge and domination.
   1. Fear of this violence drove millions of German civilians to flee westward ahead of the Soviet advance, adding to the refugee crisis.
3. Looting was also common.
   1. Displaced persons banded together in small groups of different nationalities and robbed shops, warehouses, and farmhouses to feed themselves.
   2. Local populations were wary of them.
4. In areas where law and order had broken down, where local police had been killed or interned, and where there was no shelter or food distribution, displaced persons were seen as both a burden and a threat.

How Persecution and Reprisals Drove Displacement

1. Persecution and reprisals caused displacement through several connected mechanisms.
   1. The forced labour system placed millions of Eastern Europeans in Germany against their will.
   2. When the war ended, these people needed to be repatriated or resettled.
   3. The ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe created a massive westward flow of refugees into an already devastated Germany.
   4. And the cycle of violence, including reprisals against former Nazis, collaborators, and entire ethnic groups, pushed more people to flee their homes.
2. Between Stalin and Hitler, about 30 million people had been forced to move between 1939 and 1943, whether through deportation, transportation, or expulsion.
   1. As German armies retreated, the process reversed.
   2. The newly established German resettlements were abandoned, and settlers retreated to Germany.
3. This added to the growing numbers of displaced persons, including in the areas that would be given to Poland.