Deportation

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DEPORTATION.

NAZI DEPORTATIONS, 1939–1942
DEPORTATIONS AND THE "FINAL SOLUTION"
EXPULSIONS IN EASTERN EUROPE, 1944–1948
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Forcible and violent mass deportations of civilian populations to remote areas are a phenomenon that twentieth-century total-itarian regimes often resorted to. Typically, the deported groups were nationally, ethnically, religiously, or racially distinct, and their deportation was part of a campaign of annihilation that the deporting regime conducted against them. Almost always, the deported population was transferred by violent means to areas of settlement that were unsuited to its ways of life and livelihood. In the course of the deportation, the deportees suffered grave economic damage, loss and disintegration of their social and community framework, severe violence, and loss of lives. In many cases, deportation was the first stage in a process of ethnic cleansing or genocide. Its purpose was to induce the deported group to eradicate itself by assimilating into the population at large or to destroy it in the literal, physical sense, resulting in its disappearance as a group with an identity and characteristics of its own.

The first salient case of deportation as part of such a process was the removal of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Ottoman regime, led by a group of reformist officers known as the Young Turks, regarded the Armenians as an ethnic and national collective that obstructed the fulfillment of the Ottoman national and economic goals. In April 1915 hundreds of Armenians affiliated with their national intelligentsia were executed in order to deprive the Armenian population of its natural leadership. Afterward, the Ottoman government ordered the deportation of approximately one million Armenians from Anatolia to the areas of Syria and Mesopotamia. The deportation escalated into an act of genocide in which lengthy death marches resulted in mass mortality. As the victims of the deportation made their way across arid zones and deserts, their Turkish military escorts subjected them to gunfire, abuse, and brutal acts of rape. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation, illness, and murder. The number of victims of the Armenian deportation and genocide is estimated at between 800,000 to 1.2 million.

Another example of mass deportation with ethnic-cleansing characteristics is that perpetrated by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) against the Ukrainian peasant class in the 1930s. To promote collectivization and shatter the Ukrainian peasants' resistance, the Soviet regime began in 1930 to deport hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to faraway areas of settlement in Central Asia, Siberia, and northern Russia. Ostensibly the deportations were directed against prosperous peasants, known as kulaks, only, but in reality encompassed peasants from many different backgrounds. The deportations were accompanied by total destruction of the agricultural and rural infrastructure in Ukraine. Sometimes the peasants themselves, in their struggle against the authorities, elected to destroy their own farms and slaughter their work animals to keep them out of the hands of the Soviet apparatus. More than 1,800,000 Ukrainian peasants were driven off their land in 1930–1931 and forcibly resettled far away. More than 380,000 deportees died during the deportation or in their places of resettlement as a result of the harsh conditions that they found there. These deportations, which continued on a small scale throughout the 1930s, obliterated the independent Ukrainian peasant class and brought the economic and community system in Ukraine to total collapse. The ghastliest result of the deportation policy was the severe famine that gripped Ukraine in the early 1930s, claiming as many as seven million victims, according to current estimates.

The Polish population that had settled in areas that came under Soviet sovereignty after 1920 also became victims of brutal deportations in the 1930s. During the great Stalinist terror (1937–1938), some 110,000 ethnic Poles who dwelled in Belarusian and Ukrainian territory were executed, and additional hundreds of thousands were deported to Central Asia or northern Russia, where they were interned in Soviet forced-labor camps, the gulag, or in labor and penal colonies.

NAZI DEPORTATIONS, 1939–1942

The Nazis' Jewish policy stressed from the beginning the need to banish Jews from the German society and nation. By the late 1930s, this policy rested on deliberate pressure from the economic authorities, the police, and/or the SS (Schutzstaffel) to induce Jews to emigrate from the German Reich. The first deportation of Jews from Germany took place on 28–29 October 1938. Some seventeen thousand Jews who held Polish citizenship and were living in Germany were rounded up in a coordinated Gestapo action and driven across the Polish border to the vicinity of Zbaszyn. The Polish government blocked the deportees' entrance, trapping them in a no-man's-land along the German-Polish frontier with no systematized source of sustenance. Jewish relief organizations, foremost the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, saw to their needs.

After World War II began, the deportation policy became a basic element in the Nazis' plans for the German-occupied areas in eastern Europe. By late October 1939, the SS chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), the ex officio "Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom," had issued guidelines for a grandiose scheme involving a demographic upheaval in the occupied Polish territories. According to the guidelines, within four months more than 550,000 Jews living in the areas of western Poland that had been annexed to the German Reich (the Wartheland area) were to be deported, as were hundreds of thousands of Poles in these areas who were deemed hostile to Germany. It was decided to transfer the deportees to the General Government, the area in central Poland that the Nazis intended to transform into a reserve for racially inferior population groups. These groups, according to the Nazi ideology, were to become a pool of labor and an economic resource to be exploited for the economic utility and the needs of the German Reich.

The deportations started in late 1939. In the Wartheland area, a main target for Germanization, mass expulsions of Poles and Jews began, and ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries were transferred to the area for resettlement in the localities that had been cleansed of Poles. By spring 1941, the Germans had deported about four hundred thousand Poles and Jews from the Wartheland, southeastern Prussia, and eastern Upper Silesia. Preparations for the resettlement of the deportees in the General Government were not made, and those removed were not allowed to ease their absorption in the resettlement areas by bringing possessions. The Jews, who accounted for 13 percent of the deportees, faced an especially dire situation; they had to find living quarters in the congested ghettos where the Nazis had interned the Jews who lived in the General Government area.

The deportation plan that the SS officer Karl Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) had prepared for the Jews in occupied Poland was even more farreaching. By October 1939, Eichmann had set forth a program for the deportation of more than seventy thousand Jews from eastern Upper Silesia to the Lublin area, east of the Vistula (Wisla) River. Shortly afterward, he also began to include on the deportation trains Jews from the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and from Austria. In this scheme, known as the Nisko and Lublin Plan or the Lublin Reservation, Eichmann aimed to transform the chosen area (eastern Poland, along the Soviet border) into a territorial reserve to which the Jews of the Reich would be expelled. However, after only several thousand Jews were sent to the camp that had been established in the Lublin area, Hitler struck down the plan in March 1940, ruling that this kind of a territorial solution to the Jewish problem was inapplicable. In summer 1940, the Lublin Plan was succeeded by a new deportation scheme, the Madagascar Plan. The idea now was to transform the faraway eastern African island of Madagascar into a massive, isolated ghetto, where the millions of Jews living in the Nazi-controlled areas in Europe would be concentrated. This plan, too, was shelved in early 1941 after its utter inapplicability became blatantly clear.

These deportation attempts were initial pilot steps toward a comprehensive program, known as Generalplan Ost, that took shape progressively in 1941–1942. The intent now was to create a new ethnic and demographic order in the areas that Germany had occupied in eastern Europe. It was related to the expansionist aims and the creation of Lebensraum (living space) for the German nation that the Nazi ideology prescribed. The plan called for extensive ethnic cleansing in the areas that Germany was about to occupy in the Slavic east of Europe—Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. These areas were to undergo intensive Germanization and the disappearance of their Slavic population within ten years, with the exception of a carefully selected minority suited for assimilation into the "Aryan" race. Some fifty million Slavs in these areas would be deported to the east, beyond the Ural Mountains, and a minority of several million would remain in eastern Europe as a labor force for the German economy. Within the framework of this ethnodemographic upheaval, the Jewish question would find its final solution.

In January 1942 Himmler set the plan in motion by promoting a German settlement project in the southwestern part of occupied Lithuania. In March 1942 he also approved a German colonization venture in the Polish territories around Zamo??, in Lublin District. In November–December 1942, about one hundred thousand Poles were deported from this area brutally and without time to prepare. They were to be replaced with ethnic Germans from Ukraine.

Deportations of Jewish and non-Jewish populations also took place in western Europe in 1940. After the defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to the German Reich, about seventy thousand French whom the Germans defined as undesirable, including thousands of Jews, were deported from the annexed territory to areas controlled by the Vichy government. In October 1940, police raided villages in the Baden and Saarpfalz areas and rounded up all Jews without forewarning. About 6,500 Jews were concentrated and deported to the Vichy zone in the south of France, where they were placed in camps that the French authorities had established for them.

DEPORTATIONS AND THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

When the decision about the Final Solution was made in the autumn of 1941, the next phase of the deportation of European Jewry began. The destinations now were extermination centers in eastern Europe. The deportation of German Jews to various ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus began in September 1941. Some fifty thousand Jews had been deported by the end of 1941; many of them had been murdered immediately upon reaching their destinations, along with the local Jews. Those remaining were placed in the ghettos of ?ód?, Warsaw, and Riga. The person responsible for organizing the transports from Germany, Austria, and (later) from western Europe, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, and Croatia, was one of Eichmann's aides, a young SS officer of Austrian origin named Frantz Novak. Novak had amassed experience in the technical organization of deportation trains during the deportation actions in Poland in 1940–1941, and when mass deportations of Jews to extermination began, it was he who coordinated and organized the evacuation trains. As a result of his organizational efforts, more than seven hundred deportation trains delivered Jews to death camps.

The first deportations of Jews to extermination took place in the middle of January 1942. The destination was Che?mno, in western Poland, the first extermination camp activated in Poland. The establishment of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka camps and the installation of extermination facilities in Auschwitz marked the completion of the mass extermination system. Once this was done, mass deportations of Jews in Poland and from the other European countries for extermination began. The deportation of Jews in Lublin District started in spring 1942. The great deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto took place that summer, as approximately 350,000 were transported to Treblinka for extermination within a few weeks. Deportation transports began to leave Slovakia in late March 1942; by the end of the summer, fifty-eight thousand Jews had been taken to Auschwitz. Initial deportations from France set out in the spring of 1942. Transports from the Netherlands and Belgium began in July 1942, and 5,500 Jews from Croatia were deported to Poland for extermination in August 1942.

In summer 1941, Romania, Germany's ally, formulated its anti-Jewish policy under the influence of the policy that was taking shape in Germany. The Romanian dictator, Ion Antonescu (1882–1946), decided to solve the problem of the Jewish population in the areas that his country had annexed in Bessarabia and Bukovina. First, Romanian military forces and SS murder units murdered more than 150,000 Jews in these areas. Afterward, Romania issued a deportation order for the remaining Jews, alleging that they had collaborated with the Soviet Union during the Soviet occupation of these territories in 1939–1941. From September 1941, some 150,000 Jews were deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria, a salient between the Bug and Dniester Rivers in Ukraine. The deportation was typified by horrific death marches, as its Romanian military and police escorts murdered deportees ruthlessly.

A second large wave of deportations of Jews from western Europe to the death camps in Poland began in early 1943. That spring, Greece joined the roster of countries from which Jews were being deported. Some forty-six thousand Jews, a large majority of whom came from Salonika, were sent to Auschwitz for extermination during these months. In late 1943, as the Wehrmacht (the German army) entered Italy to stop the Allied armies that were advancing from the south and prevent them from occupying the entire country, the Nazis began to deport Jews from Rome and locations in northern Italy. In 1944 mass extermination deportations continued in almost all places where Germany's declining situation on the fronts allowed them to take place. A new wave of deportations of Jews from Slovakia began that year. In August 1944 the last large concentration of Jews in Poland, the seventy thousand who were still living in the Lodz ghetto, was deported. The Germans' last large murder deportation took place in Hungary. When the Wehrmacht rushed into Hungary in March 1944 to frustrate its ally's intention to secede from the war, Adolf Eichmann and members of his unit reached Budapest and, from the middle of May to July 1944, engineered the deportation of some 440,000 Jews from Hungary in conjunction with units of the Hungarian gendarmerie. Most of the deportees met their death in Auschwitz.

The mechanism that the Germans used to deport European Jewry to extermination in 1942–1944 did not require the establishment of a special and sophisticated logistical and transport system. Eichmann's department, which handled the logistical aspects of the deportations, relied on cooperation with officials at the German foreign ministry and its representatives at the German embassies in the German-allied countries and in satellite states such as Vichy France and Slovakia. Furthermore, local police forces and auxiliary units in these countries collaborated in the deportations and provided assistance. They did so in the service of their own interests; there was no deep German involvement, as there had been, for example, in Romania and Hungary. The German transport ministry, together with the Reich railroad authority, made special trains available for deportation needs. In Poland, the local railroad authority, integrated into the Reich rail network after the occupation in 1939, participated in the transport of Jews to extermination. Record-keeping, planning, and payment for the "special trains" that delivered the deported Jews to death were worked out between Eichmann's unit and the general railroad system even during the most difficult periods of the war, when needs on the eastern front placed the rail system under severe pressure. In many cases, especially during the deportations from Germany and western Europe, Jews were hauled to the east in ordinary passenger trains under group-fare arrangements. Most of the extermination deportations, however, were carried out in sealed freight cars; the internal reckoning for payment treated them as freight transport.

The Gypsies in the Reich territories were also subjected to a policy of deportation as part of a genocidal solution after the war began. The first groups of Romanies (Gypsies) who were defined as criminal or asocial elements were evicted from Berlin in May 1940, shortly before the invasion of France. By the autumn of that year, 2,850 Romanies had been deported to the General Government. In autumn 1941, after the systematic murder of Jews in eastern Europe began, the deportation of five thousand Roma from the Burgenland in Austria got under way. These Gypsies were deported to the Lodz ghetto, where they were concentrated in a separate area and were among the first to be deported to extermination from the ghetto when it began in late 1941. On 16 December 1942 Himmler issued an order for the deportation of Sinti and Romanies to concentration camps. These deportations began in the spring of 1943 and continued until summer 1944. Although Gypsies were deported from all Nazi-ruled areas that they inhabited, the actions against them were sporadic and uneven. Some twenty-two thousand Gypsies reached Auschwitz, where 19,500 perished in the gas chambers or died of starvation and disease.

EXPULSIONS IN EASTERN EUROPE, 1944–1948

After World War II, deportations and forced emigration were used extensively in eastern Europe to regulate the ethnic and national tensions that had been typical of these areas before 1939. Another element in this phenomenon was the wish of the peoples who had suffered from the terrors of Nazi occupation and enmity to settle scores with Germany. As the war wound down, the leaders of the three leading victors—the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States—in conjunction with the governments-in-exile of Poland and Czechoslovakia, agreed that the problem of German populations in the two last-mentioned countries, which Germany had occupied during the war, had to be solved. The solution chosen was the expulsion of millions of Germans who were living in the areas that had just been annexed to Poland, at Germany's expense, under the agreements concluded at the Tehran and Yalta conferences, and in western Czechoslovakia. Between 1945 and 1948, some eleven million Germans left Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic countries, and Romania, and moved to Germany; nearly all of them settled in the British and the American occupation zones. This powerful outflux of humanity began before the end of the war, as Germans fled in an unprecedented fashion because of fear of the approaching Red Army, and it continued immediately after the surrender of Germany. What followed was a mass expulsion of Germans from the countries that had just been liberated in eastern Europe. Some two million German civilians are believed to have died in the course of these escape and expulsion actions.

The Germans were not the only group expelled forcibly from Poland after the war. In April 1946 Polish military forces embarked on the violent expulsion to the Soviet Ukraine of the Ukrainian population that was still dwelling in various parts of eastern Poland. This action, too, was influenced by the wish to avenge Poland for the role of Ukrainians in supporting the Nazi occupation during the war and in perpetrating severe violence against ethnic Poles. Roughly 260,000 Ukrainians were evacuated against their will, but even afterward the Polish authorities believed that too many Ukrainians remained in the country, estimating their numbers at 75,000 or as many as 200,000. In spring 1947 an operation began to remove and resettle these Ukrainians in western Prussia, in order to place them at the greatest possible distance from the Polish-Ukrainian frontier. Approximately 140,000 Polish citizens of Ukrainian origin were displaced and settled in the new areas that had been allocated to them.