The US government bills Serbian actions in Kosovo as the worst ethnic cleansing since World War II, by which we are meant to understand the German genocide against the Jews. As we shall see, targeted persecution on the basis of ethnicity was not confined to Germany during the war, nor is Serbia guilty of the worst of offenses since the Nazis by a long margin. Yet respectable opinion proclaims that the US has battled against the dark forces of ethnic persecution throughout its history.
Such rubbish can not be taken seriously. Concerning Serbia: we now know that there was no “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo prior to the US-lead attack; that such displacement of civilians as actually took place was stimulated by US actions. The unprovoked US offensive ended in peace terms perhaps less generous than might have been reached at the negotiating table.
The NATO occupation forces now administer a territory where mass killings and “reverse” ethnic cleansing of Serbs is rampant-a return to the historic persecution of the Serb minority, as described in the 1980s in several New York Times accounts. It’s a small price to pay in a blatant move to coopt the traditional Russian sphere of influence, off limits to US planners for the duration of the Cold War due to the deterrent factor presented by the Soviet Union.
The US record on ethnic cleansing is considerably less sanguine than media accounts would have it. In fact, the US holds the distinction of perhaps the first wholesale ethnic cleansing in the history of Christian Europe. But the US government’s record extends back to the extermination of the American Indian, and the forced displacement of survivors to reservations. In fact, the US government has spent the better part of this century complicit in campaigns of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terror, often, though not always, conducted through proxy governments.
Client states that deal in terror targeted at minority populations raise no eyebrows in Washington as long as their governments toe the State Department line. Indeed, US-backed regimes with longstanding records of active persecution of minorities remain beyond criticism. Only when they lose their usefulness do their crimes become worthy of our attention. Remorse for US involvement in these crimes, if expressed at all, occurs after the actions no longer support US objectives.
Examples are numerous. Strategic concerns prohibit us from noticing the ongoing persecution of the Kurds in Turkey, a state that also moved harshly to expel its Armenian minority early in the century. Terror against the Kurds peaked during the Clinton administration, when deaths were consistently reported in the many thousands each year. Over a million Kurds have reportedly been displaced. By Clinton’s second year, Turkey’s repression of the Kurdish population had shot to record levels. In America, only a few leftists made note of the fact that in 1994 Turkey was “the biggest single importer of American military hardware and thus the world’s largest arms purchaser.” US aircraft was subsequently used to destroy Kurdish villages. US arms continued to flow to the Turkish government despite press revelations.
The only talk of US military action in Turkey revolved around the use of Turkish soil to continue the almost decade long war against the civilian population of Iraq. As things heated up in Yugoslavia, that conversation shifted to the use of Turkish aircraft to bomb Serbia. Humanitarian concerns remain irrelevant.
Terror with a racial slant is old hat for more direct US military operations. In Guatemala, US-trained and directed death squads and military units (often the same) were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths prior to the Reagan years, when terror reached new and even more obscene heights, marked by wholesale massacres in the Indian highlands. Since the 60s when the US engineered a military takeover of the country, torture, disappearances, and political murders have been supported and administered as an response to the threat of “communists”. In practice, this meant not only teachers, community organizers, and priests, but simple Indian peasants living in poverty. In the 80s, political killings mounted monthly, cheered on (literally) by neoconservative Republicans.
Examples of US involvement in terror applied indiscriminately to a general population are numerous and give the lie to State Department crowing about human rights. Laos is a representative example, where displacement was less an objective than wholesale destruction of an entire society. During the period of US “non- involvement,” the US air force dropped more bombs on a peasant society than on Germany and Japan combined during the Second World War. More than half of the country’s population was killed as a result of the US attacks.
Needless to say, Laotian society was wrecked. Today, children continue to be killed by “bombies”, tiny anti-personnel bombs still littering the fields of Laos. The Wall Street Journal reported that anywhere from hundreds to more than 20,000 deaths per year may be attributed to these weapons. The US government refuses to release information on how to defuse these murderous devices, since it is a “state secret.”
The historical record tells a story that the media doesn’t even allude to: that humanitarianism is a cynical propaganda device. Of course, history is never supposed to intrude on the present, which is why the worst example of ethnic cleansing in history is perhaps the least well known. It too occurred with US approval and collaboration.
At the close of the Second World War, the Allied powers expelled fifteen million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. More than two million died as a result. The remainder were crowded together in a decimated Germany, which the Allied powers proceeded to deindustrialize, as put forward in the notorious Morgenthau plan.
As Harry Elmer Barnes noted, the planners “envisaged the starvation of between twenty and thirty million Germans in the process of turning Germany into a purely agricultural and pastoral nation. In revised form as JCS 1067 and JCS 1779 [the Morgenthau plan] was actually applied for several years in occupied Germany.” German suffering was overshadowed by the attention given to the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazi establishment, though Allied “crimes against humanity” were at least as extensive.
The most thorough descriptions of the plight of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe are in the books of Alfred de Zayas, who notes: “most Americans and Britons do not even know that there was an expulsion at all, much less that Western authorization of the principle of compulsory population transfers made the American and British governments accomplices in one of the most inhuman enterprises in the history of Western civilization.” Ethnic Germans were driven from their homes in Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland, and East Prussia at the end of the war-historically German areas turned over to the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments. In the case of Poland, the establishment of the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish border was rationalized as compensation for Soviet gains in the east. The expulsion of the German-speaking people, though unnecessary, was predetermined.
As Winston Churchill expounded in the House of Commons in 1944, “Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble…. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions then they ever were before.” Roosevelt and Churchill had entertained the idea as early 1943. It was officially agreed to by Truman, Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam (Article XIII of the Potsdam protocol).
The first wave of expulsions came as the Soviet army moved into German territory for the first time. This was less an organized expulsion than the result of the fact that the Soviet soldiers simply went berserk: killing, raping, and pillaging indiscriminately. The story of Nemmersdorf, one of the first villages to experience Russian occupation, served as an illustration of what the ethnic Germans could expect.
Few persons were left alive after the forty-eight hours it took for the German Wehrmacht to recapture the village. The old men, women, and children had been tortured, shot, and nailed to barn doors. Most, if not all, the women were raped, an act that was to become a hallmark of the Russian occupation. One 84-year-old woman was found with her head sheared in two by an axe. Women were stapled to barns in cruciform position. The children were killed as well; babies were found bludgeoned to death, their heads caved in.
The story of Nemmersdorf spread rapidly, triggering a massive wave of refugee flight, even in the cold of the winter. Those fleeing before the Soviet army were targeted by Soviet aircraft and troops. German ships evacuating civilians across the Baltic sea were sunk by Soviet submarines. Of those that could not escape by land or sea, more that 200,000 were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor “under conditions that were considerably more barbarous than the conditions under which Hitler-Germany had recruited forced labourers from the occupied countries during the war.”
Many who could not escape committed suicide rather than endure the Allied liberation; women in particular killed themselves rather than endure the serial rapes that were routine facts of life under Polish and Soviet rule. Others who survived the exodus to Germany were killed in the carpet bombing by American and British bombers. Dresden, for example, was overcrowded with 600,000 refugees when the city was attacked on February 13-14, 1945, for terror purposes, in accord with Churchill’s policies.
Those ethnic Germans unable to flee came under the control of Poland and Czechoslovakia. In Poland, the Soviet occupation authorized the commencement of expulsions long before the German capitulation. The actions were brutal, and accounted for the majority of civilian deaths. Washington was aware of these conditions: Eisenhower’s reports contained details of “reasonable estimates [that] predict between 2 1/2 and 3 million victims of malnutrition and disease between the Oder and Elbe…. Breslau death rate increased ten fold, and death rate reported to be 75% of all births. Typhoid, typhus, dysentery, and diphtheria are spreading….”
In 1945 Secretary of State Byrnes contacted the US Ambassador in Poland Arthur Lane under pressure from Robert Murphy, US Political Adviser for Germany, instructing him to approach the Polish provisional government on this matter. Lane refused, stating that the Germans were exaggerating “in keeping with their characteristic whining after losing war.”
In fact, the German victims in Poland were often herded into concentration camps. These camps were little more than death centers, with astronomical death rates. Typhus raged uncontrolled and the prison guards engaged in sadistic beatings, killings, and torture. Conditions were such that in one camp of a population of 8,064 Germans, 6,488 inmates died, including 628 children. In a rare instance of even-handedness, the American Court of the Allied High Commission for Germany found the deputy commander of the camp at Budweis in Southern Bohemia guilty of criminal and sadistic conduct and sentenced him to an eight-year prison term. The American journalist John Sack published a controversial account of these camps in 1995, An Eye for An Eye.
More generally, it is a mistake to regard the treatment of ethnic Germans by the Poles and Czechs as motivated solely or even mostly by revenge. In both countries, ethnic Germans were subject to political persecution and physical abuse prior to the war, which is why the German army was regarded as a liberation force by many ethnic Germans. The savagery of the host nations towards their German minorities at the close of the war was in some ways a continuation of existing practices, albeit in a radically exaggerated form. As an historian of my acquaintance noted, the Czechs were not discontent under Nazi rule. No native resistance movement materialized-though one existed even in Germany. The expulsion of Germans provided a convenient pretext for stealing their homes, factories, and wealth. As many as 200,000 Sudeten Germans died in the process.
In the end, some two million ethnic Germans were killed of the 15 million that had been displaced. Few noticed, though in an exceptional case Anne O’Hare McCormick reported in the New York Times that “[t]he scale of this resettlement and the conditions in which it takes place are without precedent in history. No one seeing its horrors first-hand can doubt it is a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible retribution….” In another report she filed with the paper, McCormick noted, “We share responsibility with horrors only comparable to Nazi cruelties….”
Germany itself was devastated and, given her unconditional surrender, at the complete mercy of the Allies. The US occupation force proceeded to enforce the spirit of the Morgenthau plan “for the destruction of the German-speaking peoples”, as one Senate critic put it. JCS 1067, alluded to above, was a directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to General Eisenhower from April 1945. It instructed Eisenhower to “take appropriate measures to ensure that basic living standards of the German people are no higher than those existing in and of the neighboring United Nations….” As de Zayas notes, this was “clearly a punitive measure” that was “as revolutionary and abnormal as might have been a proposal to depress the standard of living in the United States below that prevalent in Mexico or Guatemala.” This was in accord with the Potsdam protocol, which called for the disassembly of German industry.
The latter goal was carried out with efficiency. Factories were looted and heavy machinery carted off. The US had a political showdown with the Russians for uprooting German railroad tracks in Anglo-American controlled territories: a quarrel among thieves. The plan was all the more cruel when one considers that this deindustrialized Germany had also lost its most fertile agricultural lands to Poland and was unable to feed herself. The Great Powers maintained starvation conditions for years until the onset of the Cold War shifted US policy toward integrating the German industrial heartland into the US orbit.
Of course, the US role in World War Two is trumpeted by the press as a triumph for peace, justice, and the American Way-as is our involvement in Kosovo. The facts tell a much different story. Interventionism, then and now, follows the same pattern: self-triumphant moralism broadcast to the world from atop a pile of corpses.
Greg Pavlik is editor of Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays by John T. Flynn.
