Post World War II: Bloody Reprisal

(picture credit to billium12)

M. Jason Lucas

Z1630903

            World War II is well known for the form of ethnic cleansing called genocide, which seeks to kill all members of an ethnic minority within a State.  The countries of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were occupied by Nazi’s and later controlled by the Soviet Union under, what Naimark refers to as, a nationalism form with a socialist content.  Poland reeling from the terrible occupation by the Germans and fueled by their liberators the Soviets committed atrocities in order to encourage remaining Germans to escape any way they could.  Yugoslavia was torn apart during the German occupation by pitting the Yugoslavian ethnic minorities against each other creating an animosity that the Soviet government led by Tito after the war could barely hold together.  The one thing that both countries could agree on after the war was there animosity toward ethnic Germans.  They didn’t just target the occupiers either; they targeted ethnic Germans whose families had lived in their countries even before the war as well.

            Poland and Czechoslovakia were liberated from the Nazi’s by Stalin’s Soviet Union.  In Zara’s review of R.M. Douglas’s book The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War outlining the ethnic cleansing of the ethnic Germans inside Poland after World War II, she reveals that the Soviet Union supported and encouraged this cleansing.  The review states that Stalin, eager to adjust territories by talking up eastern Poland and compensating with German territory, encouraged the forced migration of ethnic Germans to homogenize areas that had traditionally overlapped culturally. Naimark points out that both the exiled Polish and Czechoslovakian government's were making decisions and plans to cleanse their respective countries of the Germans after the Nazi defeat.  The Poles who, according to Naimark, suffered the most between the two occupied countries were understandably ready to begin reprisal and removal of the German people from Poland.  He cites the city of Wroclaw as an example where the German population was caught between the Polish retribution if they remained in the west and the Soviets who prevented them from moving east.  Meanwhile, in Czechoslovakia, the process of reslovakization was in full gear.   Payback for the Germans was so intense that according to Naimark, the Czechoslovakians estimate that in 1946 5,558 Germans committed suicide.  

     While the Polish and the Czech's hated the Germans, the members of the former Yugoslavia hated each other as well.  German occupiers used the ethnic groups in Yugoslavia against each other and left animosity that scarred the country, according to Naimark, all the way to the end of the 1980's, when Serbs wore their Chetnick uniforms from World War II and believed they fought against Croat Ustashas and Bosnian SS facists while Croats and Bosnian Muslim fighters wearing the garb of Ustashas returned the fight.  And while that morass of ethnic animosity may never be solved, one thing they could agree on post war was that the Germans had to go.  Tito declared Germans to be enemies of the people and went so far as to remove the citizenships from ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia.  German property was seized and German refugees who had made it out were lucky.  The Germans who remained in Yugoslavia were forced into labor camps which killed many of them while simultaneously helping give Tito an economic victory in his new Soviet nation.  A nation that could not forever hold together the ethnic pot that was brewing and getting ready to violently boil over into war.

    Nationalism and ethnic cleansing is a never ending process throughout history.  In the United States, anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians and right wing media like Fox News who, despite often crying for States rights, rail politically against California's handling of their own Mexican immigration.  As our country swings to the right with nationalist Tea Party members, right wing media and merely waits for a suitable flashpoint to justify more ethnic cleansing in our modern world.  I can hope that we can learn from the examples after World War II of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the former Yugoslavia, but I believe we may be doomed to repeat them.

(picture credit to Bill McChesney)