Chapter I: The Dispossessed

It was shortly before the halfway point in this our twentieth century that I drove through thousands upon thousands of tons of rubble, the undifferentiated remains of an ancient city. What were once the homes of man, his houses of worship, all the gathering-places of a city that had sheltered the spirits and bodies of men down through the ages, were now anonymous and monstrous heaps of ruin.

As I drove to the home of His Eminence, Cardinal Frings, the Archbishop of Cologne, I realized more vividly than ever the effects of total war on the inarticulate people of the many nations; on the men who were obliged to take part in this organized killing, on the women, mothers of families, and on their children, whose bodies moulder under the broken stones of so many towns and villages of an old continent. I felt about the violent half-century already drawing to a close (five decades of the most intensive destruction yet seen on the planet), as the poet had felt about an earlier era: “May it rest in peace, as it has lived in war.”

When Cardinal Frings received me, I thought he might make a point of the necessity of rebuilding a destroyed country, or of finishing the repairs on the ancient, partly bombed Cologne Cathedral. But his concern was for a more urgent problem, that of the living temples of the Holy Ghost, who have been herded into the ruins of Germany since May 1945, when the shooting war ended. War Relief Services-National Catholic Welfare Conference, as the official agency of the Bishops of America for relief to devastated countries, has done all in its power to ease the lot of these late refugees, but despite the earmarking of the majority of relief shipments for these dispossessed peoples, the problem is still staggering in its immensity. The Holy Father appointed Cardinal Frings as Special Protector of all these refugees within the borders of Germany.

As a result of a special agreement reached at Potsdam, the Germanic groups living in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were to be sent back within the borders of Germany in “an orderly and humane manner.” The Allies only took responsibility for the expulsion. German welfare organizations, both public and private, were to take care of all housing, food and other needs of the expellees. German authorities were told to expect an influx of 6,000,000 people.

However, the idea of mass expulsion, so much used by the Nazis during the course of the war, now took hold of the Councils of the Allies, and before long, the Yugoslav citizens of German origin who had settled in certain sections by special invitation more than three hundred years before were gathered into camps or driven across the border into Austria. Groups of people were likewise expropriated in Rumania and driven into Austria and Germany. Native Germans living in East Prussia, in Pomerania in Silesia, were also driven from their homes, while those who had fled before the Russian armies in what they thought was a temporary exodus were forbidden to return to their businesses, their homes and their well-kept farms.

With its welfare set-up weakened and without adequate resources, with its housing already damaged or destroyed by 40 per cent, with all social life in chaos, ‘rump Germany’ accepted a flood of nearly 12,000,000 men, women and children. They were destitute, carrying with them hardly more than the clothes on their backs. Leaving behind as barren deserts the areas that became productive because of their agricultural and productive skills, these unfortunates brought increased chaos and greater want into the areas that had to accept them.

These new Refugees are known as the Expellee Group. Their problems are not as well-known as those of that other homeless, exiled group, the Displaced Persons, because the DPs rightly became the concern of the Allied Nations and are being resettled under the direction of IRO (International Refugee Organization).

Since 1943, War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. has followed and cared for the exiles thrown off by a world at war. The Catholics of the United States have, through their delegates, been at the side of the Polish exiles who escaped after their unspeakable sufferings in Siberia and Asiatic Russia. Priests and lay Catholics from the United States went to such areas as Iran, India, North and East Africa, Mexico and British Isles to set up more than 250 welfare centers for those deported and exiled peoples.

As soon as it was possible to serve the Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and other groups liberated from the Nazi yoke, a wholehearted program of aid was initiated. Now nineteen offices staffed by American directors serve the DPs throughout Germany, Austria and Italy. Thousands upon thousands of Catholic DPs are being resettled in new homes in the United States and other countries through the emigration programs of the N.C.W.C.

At this moment, about 300,000 DPs remain, out of the enormous total of 1,500,000 which UNRRA took over after the war. The donations of the Catholics of America in the Bishops’ Laetare Sunday collection have made it possible to give these important services and also to approach a final solution of the DP problem.

The IRO has been an expression of international concern for DPs and has been the means of coordinating emigration plans and providing transportation to lands of resettlement. This specialized agency of the United Nations is now planning with private charitable agencies for the welfare of those DPs who cannot emigrate, the so-called “Hard Core.”

But no international agency has protected the millions of expellees. No group of governments has banded together to solve this problem which was, after all, internationally created.

The Expellees have been solely the concern of local German agencies, including the public welfare agencies, private welfare agencies, notably Caritas, the Catholic Charities of Germany, and the Evangelical or Lutheran Aid Society.

It was for these, the Expellees, that Cardinal Frings pleaded, like a father pleading for helpless stricken children. He told me that the relief supplies of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. had saved countless lives among this almost forgotten group, and he expressed his most earnest wish that we would not consider the problem solved and withdraw our help. He told me how heavily the problem of the Diaspora Catholics (those expelled Catholics who live in the northern areas of Germany without churches or schools) lay on the heart of each and every Catholic Bishop. For this reason a special Catholic Study Committee has been set up to find ways to meet the problem.

I told the Cardinal that I planned to see with my own eyes, as a means of giving a firsthand report to the Bishops of the United States, how these Diaspora Catholics lived in dioceses where one out of two Catholics is a homeless, destitute expellee.

The problem of expellees was not new to me, since I had been in Germany in 1945, right after the end of hostilities. I had come to set up a program for the Displaced Persons, innocent men and women and even children who had been impressed into slave labor for the Nazi war machine, or who had fled from such areas as the Baltic States before the second arrival of the armies from the East.

I had seen the cattle cars come into various towns of Germany. I had been present when these first transports were opened up, and the weary people, from aged grandmothers to little babies in their mothers’ arms, emerged into the daylight, into the ruins of railroad stations. I had stood with other witnesses as the dead and the dying were carried from the cars, and I had seen nameless expellees die right before my eyes on the cold stone of the station floor. These mass expulsions were the result of a theory of mass guilt, a theory which makes every single human being, in a given group, responsible for the actions of the leaders of the group. Thus even babies and little children are punished as guilty entities, in the same way as Hitler killed even little Jewish children as members of a race that he, in the obscenity of his racial hatred, considered guilty as a whole.

The Bishops of the United States spoke up against these mass expulsions in no uncertain terms. In 1946, when the deportations were at their height, and few voices were heard in defense of a recent enemy, the Administrative Board of N.C.W.C., in the name of the Bishops of the entire United States, made the following statement:

“Something has been happening in Europe which is new in the annals of
recorded history. By agreement among the victors, millions of Germans
who for centuries have lived in Eastern Europe are being forced
from their homes, without resources, into the heart of Germany. The
sufferings of these people in their weary travels, the homelessness
of them, and the hopelessness, make a sad story of the inhumanity of
their transplantation. Had there prevailed in the councils of the
victor nations a right appreciation of the dignity of man, at least
arrangements would have been made for transplanting these people in
a humane way. We boast of our democracy, but in this transplantation
of peoples we have perhaps unwittingly allowed ourselves to be
influenced by the herd theory of heartless totalitarian political
philosophy.

In the first days of peace they were locked in the cattle cars.
Here the steps are placed against the locked cars so that the
people can emerge into exile.
]

Owning only the clothes on their backs, the Expellees walk into the
night of homelessness and destitution.
]

Child Expellees, thrust across frontiers, descend from a transport.
]

Some, mostly the helpless aged and the helpless young, died on the
way; others arrived like this and died later.
]

The reports of the deportation of thousands in areas of Soviet
aggression to remote and inhospitable regions just because they
cannot subscribe to Communism tell of a cruel violation of
human rights. These men are men and have the rights of men. Our
sympathy also goes out to the technicians and skilled workers in
enemy countries who have been seized and forced to work for the
strengthening of the economy of victorious nations. It is not in
this way that peace is made and the nations are united in mutual
cooperation. No lasting good can ever come from the violation of the
dignity of the human person.”

In the same year, the World Protestant leaders made a moving protest in these words:

“The Provisional Committee of the World Council of Churches is
persuaded that this policy, aggravated as it is by the compulsory
transfer of large numbers of people from other countries into a
smaller Germany, ought to be re-examined, lest, by condemning
millions of Germans either to be fed by charity for an indefinite
period or to die from starvation until the population fits the new
frontier, it bring ruin, not only upon Germany, but on Europe.”

The Catholic Bishops of America, as Fathers of the Poor, spoke out for all the poor—and who could be more poor than those driven like herds of cattle across frontiers without homes, or bread? They denounced the deportations of Eastern Europeans to Siberia, and of conquered peoples to slave labor in Nazi Germany, and of masses of Germanic Europeans to post-war Germany, in exactly the same terms—as a violation of the rights of man. These same Bishops had supported the war effort of the United States precisely because our country, in company with its Allies, was fighting a war to vindicate the common humanity of all men of all races.

They had called for the utmost sacrifice in the country’s service so that the bestiality of aggressive warfare, of extermination camps, of mass expulsions, could be erased from our generation. Their whole denunciation of persecution, and call to retribution, was based on the principle that men have rights that are inviolable, and they included in the category of men, all our enemies.

A man’s moral principles are put to the test, not so much in his treatment of his friends, of those he loves, as in his treatment of his enemies. All the qualities of forbearance, of respect for human personality, of obedience to strict justice, are strained when he has in his charge those who have been or are his enemies. This is equally true of nations. If there is any general acceptance of the thinking that the innocent men and women and children among the Expellees deserved their fate because of their racial stock, then it would seem that a moral catastrophe has come upon those who fought in the name of moral principles.

There are those who, unconsciously sharing the un-Christian concept of mass guilt, do not press for help to the expellees, or for a solution of the immense problems. Because of lack of full information, many people do not yet realize the crucial importance to the recovery of Europe of an organized approach to the whole matter of integration and resettlement of the millions of expellees now living in camps and barracks, airless bunkers and barns. It is not yet understood that this group hangs like a dead weight to impede the recovery of all of Western Europe. Many Catholics do not appreciate the moral and religious implications of the problems.

Sometimes it is easier to make a vivid and realistic picture of a problem if we describe it in terms of our own environment. The impact of the Expellee problem on a Germany reduced to three quarters of its former size, bombarded almost to a standstill, deprived of millions of its manpower by death and detention in Eastern Europe, would work out like this if it were applied to the United States. Suppose, God forbid, that one quarter of the wheat-producing and industrial territory of our country were ceded away, and that the greater part of our larger cities, including Detroit, Chicago, and all the port cities, were battered by bombs. Suppose that millions of men of active arms-bearing age were detained for years as Prisoners of War in other areas of the world. And then, suppose that all the populations of Canada and Mexico were driven into the United States as destitute refugees, having been forced to surrender their homes, their businesses, their farmlands, without compensation. It is easy to imagine the sufferings of so great an army of the dispossessed if they came wandering the roads of our nation, and it is easy to see how many of them might perish of cold, of hunger in the desolation of their enforced exile.

It is just such a situation that I shall write about in Europe. It is a situation from which our leaders and people alike have tended to turn away their heads. But no solution can ever be found unless we force ourselves to face problems in their reality—whether that reality be pleasant or not. By this time, the Expellees who could not survive the terrors of the road or cattle car, or the rigors of the first years of being homeless, have already perished. Estimates generally agree on the figure of a mortality of fifteen percent during the first year of expulsion. Now, the situation has settled down to a struggle for existence on the part of the Expellees—a struggle that would have resulted in death for many more were it not for the fact that charity still exists as a moving force in the world.

In the darkness of their bitter exile, their homelessness, their abandonment, in the hopelessness of their outlook toward the future, these Expellees, driven so heartlessly across frontiers, are, in the words of the old hymn, “Pilgrims of the Night.”

I shall try in a few short chapters to penetrate the terror and sorrow of their night of exile and to delineate for you a few of the experiences of these silent, joyless pilgrims. I shall record my visits to the various areas where the expellees live, and shall attempt to picture from these visits and from the special reports of various workers of our relief agency, the plight of little children, of women, of men, of priests, and even of Bishops, who make up this vast army of pilgrims of the night.