A Terrible Revenge

A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 is a book by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas about the expulsion of Germans after World War II. Based on testimonials of German civilians and military, as well as many interviews with British and American politicians and diplomats who participated at the Potsdam Conference, including Robert Murphy, the political advisor of General Eisenhower, Sir Geoffrey Harrison (drafter of article XIII of the Potsdam Protocol concerning population transfers), and Sir Denis Allen (drafter of article IX on the provisional post-war borders), the book also describes the crimes committed by the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, at the end of World War II, and cites the condemnation of the expulsions by Bertrand Russell, Victor Gollancz, Bishop Bell of Chichester and other contemporary intellectuals.

The author describes the history of German settlements in Central and Eastern Europe since the 12th century, the impact of the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain on German minorities left in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the failure of the League of Nations system of minority protection, the outbreak of World War II and crimes committed by the Nazis, followed by the fate of the refugees from the former Eastern parts of Germany (Silesia, East Prussia, Pomerania, East Brandenburg), as well as the fate of German minorities in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.

Approximately two million Germans, many of them children, died during the post period of 1944-1949.

In the words of de Zayas,

The tragic experience of the German expellees could have served as a warning to spare other nations the traumata of expulsion from their homelands, heritage, and pride. Alas, for decades the facts of the expulsion of the Germans were systematically ignored by the media and even by professional historians, whose function was and remains to do proper research, to chronicle events and to put them in perspective. No wonder that the ethnic cleansing of the 1990’s in the former Yugoslavia was presented by the media as unprecedented.

Besides being a concise summary of the historical and legal aspects of the expulsion of the Germans, A Terrible Revenge weaves into the narrative numerous literary references, translated from the German by de Zayas, including moments from Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea (a novel about refugees), Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, Rainer Maria Rilke's Volksweise, as well as from other East German poets including the Silesians Joseph von Eichendorff and Gerhart Hauptmann, the East Prussian Agnes Miegel, the Danube Swabian Nicolaus Lenau, and the Sudeten Germans Richard Pleyer and Walter Vorbach.

Table of contents of the book

• Foreword
• The Germans of East Central Europe
• The Expulsion Prehistory: Interbellum Years and World War II
• War and Flight
• Allied Decisions on Resettlement
• Expulsion and Deportation
• The Expellees in Germany - Yesterday and Today
• Epilogue

Printing history

The book originated as a script for a television documentary of the Bayerischer Rundfunk. It is a popular, more accessible rendition of the author's seminal monography on the expulsion (Nemesis at Potsdam, Routledge, German: Die Nemesis von Potsdam. Die Anglo-Amerikaner und die Vertreibung der Deutschen, 14 editions with C.H.Beck, dtv, Ullstein and now Herbig, Muenchen). This shorter introduction to the subject matter was initially published in German as Anmerkungen zur Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten (4 editions during 1986-1996, Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, ISBN 3-17009-297-9), first printed in English under the title of The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1993, Macmillan, London). The new, 1994 English title, included the then neologism "ethnic cleansing", massively used at these times relating to the crimes committed by Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina of 1990s. The 5th expanded German 2006 edition was titled Die deutschen Vertriebenen (Leopold Stocker Verlag, ISBN 3-902475-15-3). The book ends with 12 historical theses, 14 legal theses and 10 conclusions. The Theses were positively reviewed by Professor Andreas Hillgruber in the Historische Zeitschrift and by Professor Gotthold Rhode in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. http://www.alfreddezayas.com/Articles/Thesenzurvertreibung.pdf

The new 2006 English edition with Palgrave/Macmillan is expanded by about 20%. It contains additional information from interviews with the children of the displaced, German expellees who migrated to the United States and Canada, new photos and new statistical tables.

Reviews

"This popularly written but still scholarly study follows the author's other successful books in the fields of history and international law [which] were hailed by historians as well as lawyers as masterpieces of academic craftsmanship. His book.presents in a nutshell the history of the ethnic German population which had settled in the early 13th century in large parts of what is nowadays Eastern Europe." Netherlands International Law Review 1986, pp. 430-431

"This is the story of the ethnic Germans who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some two million died and fifteen million were displaced - driven from their lands by those opposed to anyone and everything German... De Zayas's moving plea is that one's home should be a human right. As frontiers once more shift in Eastern Europe and families flee in Bosnia, he could hardly have chosen a better moment to deliver it." The Times, (London) 18 November 1993.

"The author has given the history of these expulsions a dramatic immediacy through a series of eyewitness accounts ...The remarkable sequel to this recital of inhumanity is that this displaced population has, in the 50 years since the war, managed to find a new home in a reunited Germany where nearly 20 percent of the population is made up of first- or second-generation descendants of these exiled millions." Army January 1996, pp. 49-60.

"Atrocity begins with a euphemism. Under the rubric 'orderly population transfers' the victors of the Second World War drove 15 million Germans out of their ancient homes in an ethnic cleansing far worse than what is happening today in the Middle East or Bosnia Hercegovina ... Western historians have long averted their eyes from the stupendous crime authoritatively described by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas in this grim, essential book. The author has impeccable credentials for this work: a law degree from Harvard, a doctorate in history at Göttingen, mastery of five languages. He has worked in foreign archives and interviewed many survivors for this book, his fourth. For many years he has been a senior legal adviser on human rights to an international organization in Switzerland... The author conservatively takes the lowest available estimate of the deaths: over two million people died in the expulsions...." Ottawa Citizen 16 October 1993.

"De Zayas, a lawyer, historian and human rights expert specializing in refugees and minorities, has uncovered testimony in German and American archives detailing these atrocities, adding a new chapter to the annals of human cruelty. His carefully documented book serves as a reminder that many different peoples have been subjected to ethnic cleansing." Publishers Weekly, July 1994.

In his review article "Inside the Panic", Robert Paxton relies on "A Terrible Revenge" to illustrate consequences of Nazi crimes. New York Review of Books, 22 November 2007, p. 50.

Criticism

One reviewer argues that de Zayas over-emphasizes the role of the Bund der Vertriebenen (non-governmental association representing the expellees) and its property and territorial claims. It has been noted that no West-East migration occurred when this possibility arose after the unification of the German states, and that practically no Germans have returned to the East after the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania entered the European Union.

The book has also been criticized for its victim-perspective, normally unsuitable for scholarly works, unfavourably comparing it with a more recent book of Detlef Brandes. The 2006 revised and enlarged edition of "Terrible Revenge" with Palgrave/Macmillan takes some of these considerations into account. In the introduction the author notes that a "Terrible Revenge" is a popularized version of his longer monograph "Nemesis at Potsdam" (1-3 editions Routledge, 6th edition Picton Press, Rockland, Maine 2003). See also review of the Future of Freedom Foundation in http://www.fff.org/freedom/0795f.asp

Other reviews have criticized both de Zayas and Brandes reversely. According to Eagle Glassheim, Brandes does not provide any moral conclusion deriving from violence against civilians due to their ethnic heritage.

See also

• Not by Their Own Will
• Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union
• Journey Back to Youth
• Nemmersdorf massacre