PLAIN PEOPLE: The Sins of the Fathers

Between the Nazis and their victims was this difference (among others): those who suffered at Dachau and Belsen and Maidanek may have dreamed of vengeance against the individual Nazis who tortured them, but would not have planned the mass retaliation that has befallen millions of Germans, including children. No one, in fact, wished it; the misery that drags along the roads of Europe today is beneath premeditation, beyond mere vengeance.

A Lucky One. Karl Schwarzenberg inherited a 200-acre farm near Stargard, in Pomerania, where Germans had lived since 1253. He prospered, especially during the war.

When the Red Army overran Pomerania, Karl Schwarzenberg lost his geese and chickens, two or three cows. In July, when the Polish military government took over, his horses and bank account were confiscated. He was given 24 hours to leave his farm. With his five children, two to 14 years old, he set out, some of his household goods piled in a hand cart, and wandered on foot for two weeks. Somewhere he was forced to leave one child in a hospital with scarlet fever.

He crossed the Oder to a camp for deportees near Neuruppin in the Russian zone. Since he was an experienced farmer he received a small allotment out of a big estate broken up in the new land reform. Karl Schwarzenberg has a chance of making a new life—as a peasant. He even has a chance of finding his lost child.

Unlucky Millions. Few happy endings have come out of the mass migrations of at least nine million Germans from East Prussia, Danzig, Silesia, Pomerania and the Sudetenland. It is a tale of horror, old men starving on the roads, young girls raped in boxcars, children who will never find their parents or remember anything of childhood except cold and hunger and the fear of more cold and hunger.

Many displaced Germans had left homes which had been German as long as Karl Schwarzenberg’s. Many had given up homes seized in the bloody wake of Hitler’s armies. Thousands of displaced Germans sneaked across the demarcation line into the British and U.S. zones. The western Allies rounded up most of them, returned them to the Russians who could not feed and did not want them.

Last week British and U.S. authorities agreed to take 4,000,000 displaced Germans to be parceled out among western zone towns, whose burgomasters will be told to find food for them.

More & More. But another wave of some 5,000,000 Germans, including at least 1,000,000 from Czechoslovakia, 2,000,000 from Poland, is still to come from the east. Nobody knows how these can be cared for inside the Reich’s constricted borders. They will have to move there, just the same.

The actual people who wander along the roads will be harmless—defeated and broken men, dazed women, children who have already forgotten the Nazi salute. But the Poles and Czechs who expel them will be thinking of the past, and of the future. The German minorities in eastern Europe were not harmless, either as guests or, later, as masters.

Catastrophe shapes its own catastrophic standards. Displaced Germans, Poles, Russians form a parade of misery that the world of ten years ago would have found intolerable. Now their plight is part of the wreckage of Hitler’s New Order. It did not endure 1,000 years. It will not be cleared away in 20.