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weaken Germany militarily, economically and politically to such an extent that it would never be
able to wage a war of aggression again. This common allied goal gave rise to many individual
plans which were the subject of heated debate within the countries from which they originated
and between the allies. These specific questions included the division or dismemberment of
Germany, the dissolution of Prussia, demilitarisation, denazification, the punishment of war
criminals, reparations, restoring the sovereignty of the German
Länder
, destroying the German
arms industry, breaking up industrial monopolies, taking control of the German economy,
military occupation for at least a generation and finally, the cession of territory in the east and
the west. All of these specific questions were the subject of numerous conferences,
memorandums - the Morgenthau Plan, to quote just one example - differences of opinion,
directives, arrangements and agreements. In spite of all of this, the records never included the
keywords “expulsion”, “resettlement”, or “deportation”. It was only in the Potsdam Agreement of
2 August 1945 that this whole issue was first addressed. It provided for the “transfer to Germany
of the German population and components thereof which have remained in Poland,
Czechoslovakia and Hungary”.
The only relevant episode recounted in the memoirs of those involved is the time at the Tehran
Conference of 28 November to 1 December 1943 when Churchill used matches to illustrate the
westward shift of Poland. This led Stalin to retort that the Soviet Union wished to maintain the
ethnographically correct borders of 1939. Nowhere in all of this was there any mention of the
Germans in eastern Europe. And yet there must already have been some discussion of the
expulsion of Germans by this time even if it was not mentioned in any of the formal agreements,
as the expulsion of Germans from the provinces east of the Oder-Neisse line was an inevitable
side-effect of the drawing of the new Polish border.
One of the earliest and strongest advocates of the expulsion of Germans from the eastern
territories was undoubtedly the Czechoslovakian president, Edvard Benes, who resigned in
October 1938 and went into exile as a private citizen. As the head of the exiled government in
London he propagated the idea of expulsion. As early as June 1943 he asked Roosevelt to
agree to the expulsion of Sudeten Germans on the false premise that Stalin had already given
his consent. In fact, only a few weeks before, he had put Stalin under pressure by announcing
that the Americans had agreed to their resettlement. Benes even deliberately deceived the
British public.
Until the end of the Potsdam Conference the western allies evidently had no clear ideas about
the Polish and Czech expulsion plans and were only very poorly informed about the “unofficial”
expulsions which had already occurred. This led them to try to gain a more accurate picture but
also explains the extremely vague wording of the Potsdam final communiqué on this subject.
However, after this, it was possible to prepare and carry out these “resettlements”,
“displacements” or “transfers" of population which were accompanied by all manner of arbitrary
acts, pogroms and atrocities.
Nobody knew what should and would happen to the people who were forced to resettle in
Germany in the long term. In March 1947 Countess Marion Dönhoff, who was a refugee herself,
wrote the following in “
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