Schieder commission
Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe is the abridged English translation of a multi-volume publication that was created by a commission of West German historians between 1951 and 1961 to document the
Motivated by the Lebensraum ideology, some of the historians themselves had played an active role in these war crimes. Due to its relative frankness, the final summary volume was suppressed for political reasons and was never finished.
Historical background and origins of the research project
Lebensraum and Generalplan Ost
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/Bundesarchiv_R_49_Bild-0137%2C_Polen%2C_Wartheland%2C_Aussiedlung_von_Polen.jpg/340px-Bundesarchiv_R_49_Bild-0137%2C_Polen%2C_Wartheland%2C_Aussiedlung_von_Polen.jpg)
The Schieder Commission did not inform the readers about the implementation of the earlier
German expellees in early West Germany
- Where they came from. At least 12 million affected, said to be the largest movement of any single ethnic population in modern history (per Expulsion of Germans after World War II#Legacy of the expulsions)
- Many fled through the Soviet-controlled territory to the western zones
- Extent of the population influx: Heimatvertriebene#Expellee towns.
- Conditions in early post-war Germany
- Systematically organized interviews with arriving expellees as material to be used against the Soviet Union
- Federal ministry for expellees
- Integration of expellees into West German society
Origins of the project
The project had its roots in initiatives in the British and American occupation zones that preceded the foundation of West Germany in 1951. At the time German politicians expected that a peace treaty would offer the chance for a revision of
In the immediate post war period the commission was regarded as composed of very accomplished historians.
Members of the Commission
The commission was headed by Theodor Schieder. Members of the editorial board were Peter Rassow, Hans Rothfels, Rudolf Laun as well as Adolf Diestelkamp, who died in 1953 and was replaced by Werner Conze. Apart from international law expert Laun and archivist Diestelkamp, all were distinguished historians.[11] Non-board members included historians Hans Booms, Martin Broszat, Eckhart Franz, Kurt Kluxen, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and also several so-called "collectors" (of sources).[12]
The commission was created in 1951 by
, Minister for the Expelled in West Germany from 1949 to 1953.[16] Lukaschek had before been an important Silesian politician responsible for persecution of Polish teachers and pupils in that region,[17] and lawyer, was actively involved in anti-Nazi resistance and in 1948 was appointed vice president of the British and US zones' supreme court.[16] After the war Lukaschek was reported by British press as saying that Germany's former eastern territories, ' including those occupied by Czechoslovakia will become German again[18][19]Schieder chose as members of the commission, individuals such as Werner Conze, who had previously advocated "dejewification" of territory occupied by Nazi Germany.[8] During the Nazi era in Germany, both Conze and Schieder had devoted their attention to the issue of Nazi settlement policies, including the matter of "depopulating" Poland of its Jewish population.[9][20][21] Schieder was also one of the primary authors of a document entitled Generalplan Ost which called for creating "Lebensraum" (living-space) for Germans in Eastern Europe by enslaving or starving to death the Slavs, and killing all the Jews who lived there.[22] Another person chosen was Hans Rothfels. Rothfels, while opposed to the Nazi regime and forced to emigrate from Germany during World War II,[23] was also a German nationalist who in the interwar period advocated German domination of Eastern Europe and making its population into serfs.[24]
As such, according to Hughes, the members of the commission were "consciously committed to ... propagandist activity in their government's service".
Rothfels was the one who had originally proposed Schieder as head of the editorial staff, having been his teacher and a key intellectual influence during the Nazi period.[27] Younger historians, such as Martin Broszat (who researched Yugoslavia) and Hans-Ulrich Wehler (who helped research Romania), who were later to break with the tradition of Schieder and Conze, served as research assistants (see also Historikerstreit).[6]
In the immediate post war period the commission was regarded as composed of very accomplished historians.[6]
Theodor Schieder
After World War II Schieder was "
Werner Conze
Werner Conze was a doctoral student of Rothfels in Königsberg under the Nazis, where he claimed in his research that Germans had a positive role in the development of eastern Europe.[6] Just like with Schieder's, the goal of his research was to justify alleged German supremacy over other nations and their right to take over new territories.[30] With the Nazis taking power, Conze, together with Schieder and Rothfels helped to institutionalize racial ethnic research in the Third Reich.[31] He also connected with Nazi propaganda, writing for a journal "Jomsburg" published in Third Reich by Reich's Internal Ministry[32] According to German historian Ingo Haar, "the Nazis made use of (this) racist scholarship, which lent itself gladly". While working for German espionage, in 1936, Conze prepared a document which portrayed Poland as backward and in need of German order and which recommended the exclusion of Jews from the legal system as Conze considered them outside the law.[31] In further work issued in 1938 Conze continued in similar vein, blaming lack of industry in Belarus on "Jewish domination"[33]
During the war Conze fought at the
Goals and work of the Commission
Presenting expulsions as one of the great catastrophes in German history
Part of Schieder's aim was to make sure that the expulsions were established as "one of the most momentous events in all of European history and one of the great catastrophes in the development of the German people".
Supporting revision of post-war settlements
Schieder and other members of the commission were interested in more than just sympathy for the expellees.
Countering information about atrocities committed by Nazi Germany
An official of the Ministry of Expellees envisioned use of the commission's work to counter the "false impression, produced by the propaganda of the opponent" that Nazi German forces of occupation in Eastern Europe "had raped robbed, terrorized, and butchered the population as long as Hitler was in power", which the official claimed was presented in documents of the Polish government. Information about Nazi atrocities was described by the Ministry as "perverted version of the war's history"[2]
Methodology
The commissioned gathered and used a large number of primary sources and Schieder also wanted the volumes produced to also include supposed political context of the events.[6] Two out of the five volumes, about Romania, prepared by Broszat, and the one on Yugoslavia prepared by Wehler, included some form of analysis of collaboration by the local Germans during the war, Nazi plans and the atrocities of German occupation.[35] At the center of the project were documents prepared by expellee organizations, German government, testimonies dictated in response to questions from officials of regional expellee interest groups, and personal diaries initially written as retrospective for the author or family. Together the volumes contained 4,300 densely printed pages.[35]
While the commission was aware that first person accounts of the expulsions were often unreliable, the members believed it was necessary to utilize these in their work, as they did not trust either Nazi era sources, nor those published by post war communist governments.[36] The use of personal testimonies was part of the "modern history" approach developed earlier by Rothfels and applied in practice by the commission.[36] Both Rothfels and Schieder were concerned with the accuracy of these accounts.[36] As a result, Rothfels insisted that the relevant documents were subjected to "historical standards of measurement" that characterized other historical research.[34] Schieder insisted if an account failed to pass official "testing procedures" set up by the commission, then the account would be completely excluded.[34] As a result, the commission claimed that their methods "transform(ed) subjective memory into unassailable fact".[37]
Commission's conclusions
The five volumes produced by the commission were entitled Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa (Documents on the Expulsions of Germans from East-Central Europe).
In 1953,
Apart from the Schieder commission the Statistisches Bundesamt
A 1974 an internal study by the
The estimates of 2.0 million deaths due to expulsions have been criticized by subsequent researchers. For example, according to the German historian Rüdiger Overmans it is only possible to establish the deaths of 500,000 individuals and there is nothing in German historiography which could explain the other 1.5 million deaths.[41] Overmans and Ingo Haar state that confirmed deaths result in a number between 500,000 and 600,000.[40][42] Both believe that further research is needed to determine the fate of the estimated additional 1.9 million civilians listed as missing. However, according to Overmans the 500,000 to 600,000 deaths found by the Search Service and German Federal Archives are based on incomplete information and do not provide a definitive answer to losses in the expulsions. However Overmans maintains that there are more arguments in favor of the lower figure of 500,000 than the official figure of 2.0 million, he believes that additional research is needed to determine an accurate accounting of the losses.[41] Ingo Haar has said that all reasonable estimates of deaths from expulsions lie between around 500,000 to 600,000.[40][42]
According to Rüdiger Overmans, the German Red Cross Search Service records list 473,013 confirmed deaths and some 1.9 million persons listed as missing. Overmans maintains that the figure of missing persons includes non Germans included in the total population surveyed, military deaths, the figures for living expellees in the
See also
- Drang nach Osten ("The Drive Eastward")
- Lebensraum ("Room to Live")
- Generalplan Ost
- historiography and nationalism
External links
- Dokumentation der Vertreibung (in German)
Further reading
- Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, ed. (1954–1963). Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa.
- Beer, Matthias (1998). "Im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Das Großforschungsprojekt 'Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa'". Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. 46 (3): 345–389.
- Moeller, Robert G. (2003). "Driven into Zeitgeschichte. Historians and the 'Expulsion of the Germans from East-Central Europe'". War Stories. The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. University of California Press. pp. 51–87. ISBN 978-0-520-23910-4.
- Köhler, Otto (2005). "Die Deutschen machten sich ihre Vertreibung selber. Wie deutsche Historiker ihre Taten aus der NS-Zeit verarbeiten". Der Freitag.
Footnotes
- ^ Beer, p. 354.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Moeller, pg. 62
- ISBN 978-0-674-40567-7.
- ^ Beer, p. 362.
- ^ Beer, page 387.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Moeller, pg. 58
- ^ Fred Kautz, "The German historians: Hitler's willing executioners and Daniel Goldhagen", Black Rose Books, 2003, pg. 92 (Google Print)
- ^ a b Alan E. Steinweis, "Studying the Jew: scholarly antisemitism in Nazi Germany", Harvard University Press, 2006, pg. 121 (Google Print)
- ^ a b c R. Gerald Hughes, "Britain, Germany and the Cold War: the search for a European Détente, 1949-1967", Routledge, page 74 (Google Print)
- ^ Wulf Kansteiner, "In pursuit of German memory: history, television, and politics after Auschwitz", Ohio University Press, 2006, pages 222-224 (Google Print)
- ^ Beer, pages 347–350 and 374f.
- ^ Beer, pages 350–351
- ^ Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, Wojciech Wrzesiński, Bożena Szaynok, Jakub Tyszkiewicz "Studia z historii najnowszej", 1999, pg 136
- ^ T. Hunt Tooley, "National identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the eastern border, 1918-1922", U of Nebraska Press, 1997, pg. 176 (Google Print)
- ^ Niemiecki ruch obrońców pokoju: 1892-1933 Karol Fiedor Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, page 153, 1993
- ^ a b Amos, Heike (2011). Vertriebenenverbände im Fadenkreuz: Aktivitäten der DDR-Staatssicherheit 1949 bis 1989. Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Oldenbourg Verlag. p. 15.
- ^ Polski ruch narodowy w Niemczech w latach 1922-1939 Wojciech Wrzesiński, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, page 192, 1993.
- ^ The Manchester guardian weekly, Guardian Publications Ltd., 1952, volume 67
- ^ The Labour monthly, Volume 34 Labour Pub. Co, 1952
- ^ Steven P. Remy, "The Heidelberg myth: the Nazification and denazification of a German university", Harvard University Press, 2002, pages 228, 233 (Google Print)
- ^ Wolfgang Bialas, Anson Rabinbach, "Nazi Germany and the humanities", Oneworld, 2007, pg. 41 (Google Print)
- ^ Doris L. Bergen, "War & genocide: a concise history of the Holocaust", Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, pg. 162 (Google Print)
- ^ Moeller, pg. 57-58
- ^ Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch, "German scholars and ethnic cleansing, 1919-1945", Berghahn Books, 2005, pg.238 (Google Print)
- ^ Moeller, pages 56–84.
- ^ Moeller 65-66
- ^ a b c d e f g Moeller, pg. 57
- ^ Moeller, pg. 56
- ^ a b European Association for Jewish Studies. Congress, Judit Targarona Borrás, Ángel Sáenz-Badillos, "Jewish Studies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Judaism from the Renaissance to modern times", BRILL, 1999, pg. 317 (Google Print)
- ^
- ^ a b Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch, "German scholars and ethnic cleansing, 1919-1945", Berghahn Books, 2005, pg. xi, 10-12 (Google Print)
- ^ Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1988), pages 139-142
- ^ Michael Thad Allen, "The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps", UNC Press, 2005, pg. 137 (Google Print)
- ^ a b c Moeller, pg. 61
- ^ a b Moeller, pg. 59
- ^ a b c Moeller, pg. 60
- ^ Moeller, pg. 61. Note that Moeller employs scarce quotes extensively in this section to indicate how the commission viewed itself
- ^ a b c Hanna Schissler, "The miracle years: a cultural history of West Germany, 1949-1968", Princeton University Press, 2001, pg. 105-106, [1]
- ^ Theodor Schieder, Dokumente der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-MittelEuropa. Band I/1 und I/2. Die Vertreibung der Deutschen Bevölkerung aus den Gebieten östlich der Oder-Neisse Herausgegeben vom Bundesministerium für Vertriebene 2 Bände, Bonn 1954, Pages 157-160
- ^ a b c d e Haar, Ingo (2007). ""Bevölkerungsbilanzen" und "Vertreibungsverluste"". in Ehmer, Josef (in German). Herausforderung Bevölkerung: zu Entwicklungen des modernen Denkens über die Bevölkerung vor, im und nach dem "Dritten Reich". VS Verlag. p. 271
- ^ a b c d Rüdiger Overmans: Personelle Verluste der deutschen Bevölkerung durch Flucht und Vertreibung. (A parallel Polish summary translation was also included, this paper was a presentation at an academic conference in Warsaw Poland in 1994), Dzieje Najnowsze Rocznik XXI-1994
- ^ a b c Ingo Haar, "Straty zwiazane z wypedzeniami: stan badañ, problemy, perspektywy" (Casualties associated with expulsions: current state of studies, problems, perspectives"), [2]