Nemesis at Potsdam
Nemesis at Potsdam is the first book by the American lawyer and historian Alfred-Maurice de Zayas. It was originally published in 1977 by Routledge & Kegan Paul in London and Boston with a preface by US Ambassador Robert Murphy, a participant at the Potsdam Conference and former political advisor of General Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II and of General Lucius Clay during the American military government in Germany. The book was dedicated to Victor Gollancz, whose seminal book Our Threatened Values had inspired the author.
The name Nemesis is drawn from Greek mythology, Nemesis being the Greek goddess of revenge. The implication is that at the Potsdam Conference (17 July to 2 August 1945) the victorious Allies of World War II took revenge on the Germans, entailing significant territorial losses in Eastern Europe and the forced transfer of some 15 million Germans from their homelands in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, East Brandenburg, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.
An enlarged German edition, with many previously unpublished photographs from the United States Army Signal Corps, facsimiles of documents from the National Archives, Public Record Office, Federal Swiss Archives in Bern, and Bundesarchiv-Koblenz, was published in October 1977 by C.H. Beck in Munich.
The book is a revised version of a doctoral dissertation for the History Faculty of the University of Göttingen in Germany. Although a sedate, scholarly book with 761 endnotes and 47 pages of bibliography: archives, interviews and secondary sources, the book quickly became a best seller. It received much praise in the American Journal of International Law, the American Historical Review,Foreign Affairs, the Times Educational Supplement, British Book News etc. However, some historians have criticized the book because of the moral outrage expressed by the author.
The book is the first scholarly study in the English language concerning the expulsion of Germans after World War II. It effectively broke a taboo in the English-speaking world, and also in Germany and Austria, thus facilitating the subsequent research in the subject matter by other scholars.
The English version was published under the full title: Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans. Background, Execution, Consequences. ISBN 0 7100 0458 3 (hardbound) 0 7100 0410 9 (paperback). It experienced three editions with Routledge, two editions with the University of Nebraska Press, and is still in print, thirty-one years after its initial publication, in a much revised and enlarged edition with Picton Press in Rockland, Maine ISBN 0-89725-360-4. The Picton edition contains excerpts from the statement to the German expellees by the first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Dr. Jose Ayala Lasso, at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt a.M. on 28 May 1995, and excerpts of the final report of the UN Rapporteur (now judge at the International Court of Justice) Awn Shawkat Al Khasawneh on the illegality of forced population transfers (UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/23).
The German version experienced six editions with C.H. Beck, Germany's foremost law publisher, three editions with dtv (the leading pocketbook editor in Germany), four editions with Ullstein, and is still available in its 14th revised and enlarged edition with Herbig Verlag in Munich, published under the title Die Nemesis von Potsdam. ISBN 3-7766-2454-X. The Herbig edition was positively reviewed by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 23 February 2006, p.9.
In his preface Ambassador Robert Murphy wrote: "This is a revealing account which is timely, and it accurately portrays the tragic fate of the dramatic transfer of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe to the West, as the Second World War ground to a halt...It was advertised that the transfers should be made under 'humane' conditions. There was no controls or authoritative supervision, so that the individual refugee had no recourse or protection. It is true that the United States State Department voiced proper regard for the humanities, but its voice was not vigorous or even heard in Eastern Europe at the time of the expulsion. Few Americans dreamt of a brutal expulsion affecting perhaps 16 million persons!"
Giles MacDonough in his book After the Reich (John Murray Publishers, London 2007. pp. 126, 556, etc.) notes: "There is a similar lack of documentation in English on events in Czechoslovakia. The best remains Alfred M. de Zayas's Nemesis at Potsdam (London 1979)," p. 585.
The book has considerable potential in that it examines the events in an interdisciplinary fashion, not only from the historical but also from the legal perspective. However, notwithstanding the merits of the book, the theory of collective guilt and the prevailing Zeitgeist dampens the human compassion that should have been shown to the victims.
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