deportation

deportation expulsion of an alien from a country by an act of its government. The term is not applied ordinarily to sending a national into exile or to committing one convicted of crime to an overseas penal colony (historically called transportation). In international law the right to send an alien to the country to which he or she owes allegiance (or to any country that will accept him or her) derives from a government's sovereignty . In the United States, deportation is the responsibility of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement of the Dept. of Homeland Security.

Except under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 there was no American deportation law until the enactment in 1882 of a statute aimed at certain Chinese immigrants. The class of deportable aliens was subsequently enlarged several times, coming to include persons who before their entry into the United States were insane, feeble-minded, illiterate, or diseased in various ways. Many foreigners suspected of involvement in radical political activity were deported during the "Red Scare" of 1919. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 removed the statute of limitations on any kind of deportation.

The largest group of deported persons are those who have entered the country illegally. In the 1980s and 1990s expulsion of some of the numerous refugees from such Caribbean countries as Cuba and Haiti raised controversy. A deported alien cannot reenter the United States without special permission from the attorney general.

deportations. In democratic countries, deportation is usually regarded as a legal procedure affecting individuals who have committed an offence such as illegal immigration. In totalitarian states, however, deportation was a phenomenon affecting thousands or even millions of innocent people who could be arbitrarily removed from their homes by administrative means. They were sent to distant locations, often in conditions of the utmost degradation and danger, and with little pretence of legality. During the Second World War, it was practised in this sense on a wide scale both by the Nazis and especially by the Soviets. It also applied in Canada and the USA to residents of Japanese origin (see Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians).

For the Nazis, deportation was an important aspect of resettlement, labour, and security policies, particularly in the occupied zones of eastern Europe. It first became evident in November 1938 when some 30,000 Jews holding Polish passports were summarily expelled from Germany, and deposited in the no man's land between border posts on the German–Polish frontier.

Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, some thousands of Poles and Polish Jews were forcibly deported to the General government (see Poland, 2(b)) from other Polish territories, such as the Wartheland, which had been annexed to the Reich. In this instance, in an attempt to eliminate the so-called Polish corridor, the deported Polish population was replaced by ethnic Germans brought from the Baltic States in agreement with the USSR.

Nazi resettlement policy in the east envisaged the systematic Germanization of whole provinces either within or contiguous to the Greater Reich. To this end, the Jewish population was to be killed, either by executions on the spot or by deportation to the death camps (see OPERATION REINHARD) while the Polish or Ukrainian population was to be removed to make way for in-coming Germans. The Jewish part of the policy was given priority (seeFinal Solution). But several large-scale rural clearances were undertaken, notably in 1943 in the Zamość region where some 300 Polish villages were destroyed. Old-established German communities living deep in Ukraine were broken up, and their inhabitants relocated further west. Similar methods were used in Croatia by the fascist Ustašas intent on ‘de-Serbianizing’ districts of mixed settlement.

Nazi labour policy required the despatch of between 5 and 6 million men and women, mainly from Poland and Ukraine, to work on farms and in factories in the Reich. In the initial stages, it was possible to recruit a certain number of these Ostarbeitern (eastern workers) on a voluntary basis, but they were increasingly deported as forced labour.

Nazi security policy frequently resorted to deportation as a method for controlling troublesome districts. Selected groups and individuals might simply be expelled, or deported to the concentration camps. At points of maximum tension, as in the Warsaw rising in 1944, the SS resorted to random arrests and mass deportations as a means of terrorizing the population.

Mass deportations by the Soviet authorities took place before, during, and after the Second World War. They were a standard feature of the Great Terror and of the Purges, as they were of Soviet policy towards the population of all countries occupied by the Red Army. They may be classified in a number of categories descending from ‘free exile’ to penal sentences with hard labour (see GUlag). All were conducted by legal fictions, which ignored the innocence of the victims, and by almost total disregard for human life. Because of the vast distances and extreme climatic conditions, the journey to distant destinations in Siberia or the Far East could be no less lethal than the sentence itself. Men, women, and children were forced to travel for weeks and months on end, packed standing into sealed and unheated railway trucks. Large numbers died on the way. So-called ‘free exiles’ could often fare worse than convicts through being abandoned without food or shelter on the snowbound or drought-ridden steppe. The longest journeys to Magadan or Kolyma in eastern Siberia involving arctic sea jouneys in the holds of prison ships, and forced marches could last a whole year. In 1936, in expectation of war, the Soviets deported about 500,000 Poles to Kazakhstan from the frontier zone in Belorussia and Ukraine.

In 1939–41, during the currency of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, massive deportations took place from eastern Poland, the Baltic States, Finland and Moldavia (see Bessarabia). NKVD officials arrived in each of the newly occupied districts armed with detailed lists drawn up in advance in Moscow. Their deportation orders were taken to apply not only to the persons named, but to all their family members as well. As a rule, the menfolk would be arrested first. A little later the families would then be given 30 minutes to pack their belongings, and would be sent under armed guard to a collection point, on the (false) pretext of joining the men. In this way, three vast convoys took some 1.5 million Polish citizens from eastern Poland alone.

Thanks to the Polish–Soviet Treaty of 1941 (see Poland, 2(e)) the surviving Polish deportees were granted an ‘amnesty’ (for crimes never committed). Many thousands left the USSR via the Middle East, or even by walking across the Himalayas to India, and many then joined Anders' Army. They constituted the only large group ever to make eye-witness reports of the GUlag to the outside world. But their stories were suppressed by Allied wartime censorship, and when told, were widely disbelieved.

After the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) the populations of the industrial cities in the Ukraine were forcibly evacuated to the Urals and western Siberia in circumstances barely distinguishable from deportation; and Stalin, who had always regarded the possibility of collaboration by non-Russians with an invader as quite high, wreaked his vengeance upon suspected collaborators by deporting them when the Red Army reoccupied their homelands. The Germans showed sympathy, in particular, for the national aspirations of the north Caucasian, Crimean, and Kalmyk peoples. During the two and a half years of German occupation the Crimean Tatars were able to reopen mosques and establish Islamic committees and Tatar units were used against Soviet partisans in the Crimea. In the autonomous republic of Kalmykia a cavalry corps was raised and it, too, operated against Soviet partisans (see alsoSoviet exiles at war). In the Karachayevo-Cherkas oblast a Karachai national committee was formed and enjoyed some autonomy, and a Cossack region, also with a degree of autonomy, was set up in the Kuban in October 1942. When the Red Army reoccupied these areas whole nations, including party members, were deported and accused of collaboration. In November 1943 over 60,000 Karachai were deported from Stavropol krai. The deportation of the Kalmyks began in December 1943 and by the following February over 90,000 had been sent east. In February 1944 it was the turn of the Chechens, Ingushi, and Balkars from the Checheno-Ingush and Kabardino-Balkarian autonomous republics who, in April 1944, were deported to the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Kirgizia, and the Checheno-Ingush republic and the Karachayevo-Cherkas oblast were dissolved (both were reconstituted in 1957).

Over 190,000 Crimean Tatars were deported in May 1944. Armed Tatar groups resisted deportation but they were no match for the NKVD. Also deported from the Crimea were 37,000 Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians found guilty of collaborating with the Germans. In November 1944 86,000 Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins (Muslim Armenians) were deported from Georgia to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kirgizia. About 3.5 million, from 52 nationalities, were deported to the Soviet east between 1940–6. Of these about a million were moved from November 1943 onwards. Possibly about a quarter died en route. Chechens and Ingushi were deported even though only a fraction of their autonomous republic had been occupied by the Wehrmacht. Beria personally supervised the deportations. Resources were extracted from the military effort to ensure that the deportees were sent packing. Stalin's inhumanity was to cost the Soviet Union dear. While in Kazakhstan and Central Asia the various clans, especially the Chechens, collaborated to survive and thus were born the networks which were later to control the black market in Moscow and elsewhere. The nationality conflicts in the north Caucasus in the 1990s were a direct result of the deportations, since many of those who returned after 1956 did not recover their homes and property.

At the end of the war, with the consent of the western Allies, the remaining German population of the Sudetenland, East Prussia, Pomerania, Posnania, and Silesia, was deported to West Germany. These German Vertriebenen (Expellees) were officially classified euphemistically as ‘repatriates’. Their numbers have been the subject of controversy, but may well have been in the range of from 5 to 8 million. Their homelands in the east were repopulated by Czechs and Poles, many of whom had been repatriated from lands annexed by the USSR. In 1947, about 500,000 Ukrainians were forcibly deported from the Breszczady region of south-east Poland, mainly to destinations on the Baltic or in former East Prussia.

Taken together, the total number of Europeans subject to deportation cannot have been less than 20 million. Mortality rates among them cannot be determined for certain. At the worst, in the wartime Soviet Union, they could have been as high as 50%.

Mass deportation was one of the hallmarks of totalitarian practice. In several countries, it transformed demographic and ethnic structures out of all recognition (see demography). It is one of the features which rendered the wartime experience in Eastern Europe so much more traumatic than anything encountered in the west (butsee also refugees).

Norman Davies/ and Martin McCauley