The nemesis of Potsdam

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The nemesis of Potsdam. The Anglo-Americans and the expulsion of the Germans (alluding to the "punitive justice"; after Nemesis , the goddess of vengeance and retribution) is a book by the American lawyer and historian Alfred de Zayas , published by the British publisher Routledge and Kegan Paul Was published in 1977. The book takes up the role of the western allies in dealing with the approximately 12 to 14 million Germans displaced after the Second World War , mostly from the former eastern German territories and Czechoslovakia .

Content of the work

The first chapter "Population resettlement as a political principle" describes the historical and political background to the phenomenon of the expulsion of the Germans, which, according to Alfred de Zayas, was "the most serious mass resettlement of the 20th century" (p. 15). The study investigates the status of the German minorities that have lived in Poland and Czechoslovakia for centuries. They had rights under the minority protection treaties. Their multiple petitions to the League of Nations and several judgments by the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague show that they had been systematically discriminated against. The German minorities were defamed as “disloyal minorities”, and later even accused of treason. The key to the problem lay in the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain , according to which two million Germans outside the borders of Germany were to leave Poland as minorities, and three and a half million German-Austrians were placed under Czechoslovak rule against their will. The US delegation in Paris in 1919 argued against the artificial creation of minorities, but Georges Clemenceau's idea of ​​power politics prevailed. In this chapter, de Zayas also explores the question of why the Anglo-Americans gave up the principles of the Atlantic Charter .

The second chapter deals with the history of the Sudeten question , the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 , the Munich Agreement and the Anglo-American position on the Beneš decrees .

The third chapter discusses the files on the German - Polish border from the Tehran and Yalta conferences . The fourth chapter describes the escape . The fifth chapter analyzes the British and American memoranda on the question of the "transfer" of the East Germans, whereby a relocation of three to four million was intended, which should be regulated by a Population Transfers Commission . The sixth chapter documents how the expulsion of the Germans actually took place, mainly on the basis of archival documents from the USA and Great Britain . The seventh chapter describes the Marshall Plan and describes the integration of the displaced. The eighth chapter deals with the displaced persons in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR , the ninth chapter with the Eastern Treaties and the tenth chapter with the right to the homeland and human rights .

The book quotes many previously unpublished documents from the Public Record Office (London) and the National Archives (Washington, DC). Former political advisor Dwight D. Eisenhowers and later Lucius D. Clays , Ambassador Robert Murphy , wrote the preface. In addition to displaced persons and their representatives, de Zayas interviewed many participants at the Potsdam conference , including a. Sir Geoffrey Harrison (author of the draft of Article XIII of the communiqué on the "orderly and humane transfer" of the Germans), Sir Denis Allen (author of the draft of Article IX on the Oder-Neisse Line ) and other experts such as James Riddleberger , chief the Germany department in the US State Department and George F. Kennan .

expenditure

The English-language original of the book was first published in January 1977 under the name "Nemesis at Potsdam". This was followed by two issues with Routledge and two issues with the University of Nebraska Press. A 6th expanded edition was published in 2003 by Picton Press, Rockland, Maine. In the autumn of 1977 the Munich-based CH Beck Verlag published a German translation. Dtv Verlag published the book in 1985, Ullstein Verlag in 1996 as a paperback. The 14th German edition was published by Herbig-Verlag in 2005 . In the previous 13 editions, the book was entitled "The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans".

Reception in the US, UK and Germany

Right from the start, the work received some attention in the historical and international legal literature and in the general media, but the assessments were divided. In the American Historical Review , John C. Campbell said that de Zaya's book was a considerable, competently researched piece of research, but that his theses on the responsibility of the Allies were not very illuminating. A few months later, Carl G. Anthon reviewed the German edition of the book in the same magazine. He attested to the author sympathy for the expellees and moral indignation about the expulsion - and at the same time the honest effort to show the complicated network of conditions of the expulsion process and the Allied attitude. In the American Journal of International Law , Benjamin Ferencz , once chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial, praised the “well-organized and moving historical study”. In Great Britain, Tony Howarth ruled: "His is a lucid, scholarly and compassionate study."

In the Federal Republic of Germany, Lothar Kettenacker reviewed the first English edition of Nemesis at Potsdam in 1978 in the " Historischen Zeitschrift " (HZ). He gave de Zayas his appreciation for the handling of the subject, which is rarely dealt with in the English-speaking world, but criticized the combination of a “legal approach” with a certain partiality, which tends to give the work the character of an “indictment”. De Zayas made the viewpoint of the expellee officials interviewed too much his own and completely excluded the German war crimes in the east. In the following year, Andreas Hillgruber gave a brief report on the German edition, but dispensed with evaluations. Gotthold Rhode , who comes from Posen , praised in the FAZ "[...] the fact that an impartial and visibly committed American is holding on to the joint responsibility of Anglo-American politics for one of the great catastrophes of the post-war years [...]."

On February 23, 2006, Patrick Sutter reviewed the latest edition (2005) of the book: “You don't play down the crimes of the Nazis one bit if you don't want to accept that they should serve to legitimize international law crimes, most of which are still moral recognized yet legally processed. De Zayas sees this as a precedent for later expulsions in Palestine, Cyprus, Bosnia or Kosovo. "

The historians Hans Henning Hahn and Eva Hahn criticize de Zayas' work in their book The Expulsion in German Remembrance by accusing him of not having written an empirically researched historical book. It inspires readers in their emotional state because it repeats what has long been known. He has been supporting the myth of displacement for 30 years . Before that, the British historian Giles MacDonough had explicitly written about the treatment of the displacement issue in his book After the Reich : “ The best remains of Alfred M. de Zayas's Nemesis at Potsdam. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ AHR, Vol. 83 (1978), No. 1, p. 155 f.
  2. ↑ "[...] he strives to show how Allied decisions regarding postwar Germany were the product of many factors, such as horror over Nazi atrocities, the passions of war and victory, and considerable ignorance on the part of Anglo-American leaders regarding the actual state of affairs in Central and Eastern Europe. " AHR, Vol. 83 (1978), No. 5, p. 1289.
  3. ↑ American Journal of International Law , Vol. 72 (1978), No. 4, pp. 959 f.
  4. ^ The Times Educational Supplement , Apr. 22, 1977, p. 495.
  5. ↑ Review by Lothar Kettenacker in: Historische Zeitschrift , Vol. 227 (1978), pp. 222–224. See Manfred Kittel: Expulsion of the Expellees? The historical German East in the culture of remembrance of the Federal Republic (1961–1982). Munich, Oldenbourg, 2007, p. 164.
  6. ^ According to Manfred Kittel: Expulsion of the Expellees? The historical German East in the culture of remembrance of the Federal Republic (1961–1982). Munich, Oldenbourg, 2007, p. 164. Hillgruber's review was published in HZ, Vol. 229 (1979), pp. 748-749.
  7. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 21, 1978, p. 21.
  8. ↑ Patrick Sutter, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, p. 9.
  9. ↑ The expulsion in German memory. Legends, myths, history . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, p. 619 f.
  10. ^ Giles MacDonough, After the Reich . John Murray Publishers, London 2007, p. 585 (see also p. 126, 556).

Web links