The outcome of the war was doomed - the Third Reich suffered a devastating defeat. After six years of brutal occupation, Poland was liberated. Our countrymen, apart from joy, felt something else - an unbridled lust for revenge. Murders, forced labor, inhuman conditions, looting and rapes ... This is how they repaid the beautiful Germans for what they needed.
The war was coming to an end, and the front that was moving through Poland drove the Nazi troops to where they came from. But not all Germans left our country:many families remained in the houses where they had previously been settled. But they waited in vain for the return of their soldiers. Piotr Pytlakowski writes about what the last days in the liberated Poland looked like for them in the book Their mothers, our fathers. The Inconvenient History of Post-War Poland :
Revenge can be sweet. After almost six years of occupation and the river of blood that flowed over Europe, it was hard to expect the victors to show generosity. They did not have mercy, nor will they experience it from us. This is cruel justice. There is no room for nuances here - German is German. It does not matter that it is an old man, a pregnant woman, a child. When set in motion, the machine of retaliation grinds evenly and mercilessly.
Violence by consent
Driving away the aggressors was not just a matter of "making amends" for personal harm done to individuals. "Killing the beast" has become a social act, a mission of the nation reborn in a new reality. Paper media was still pouring oil into the fire. Pytlakowski relates:
In so-called reclaimed territories, terror had to be justified against the local population. So not only revenge, but a historical necessity. "Trybuna Śląska", an organ of the Polish Workers' Party, wrote in February 1945:
"We Silesians need to clean our house first. Silesia must be Polish. We know what to do with the Gestapo, SS men, Sicherheit-Diensta and Werkschutz [...]. We will be ruthless with them. We also know what to do with the Polish henchmen of the German executioners, who today eagerly put on the white and red armband. We will take the reptiles out of their hiding places, we will exterminate the Nazi filth! ”
Announcement for the German population of Szczawno Zdrój in Lower Silesia about the deportation.
Such an unequivocally negative image of a German was to stay in the consciousness of Polish society for many years. Only the damning features of the neighbors from beyond the western border were brought to the surface, and the ancient history of the Teutonic Order was also recalled.
At the same time, the autochthonous population was hit with a ricochet of affiliation that was not fully specified:Masuria, Silesians, Slovinians and Kashubians. Why? The mass of people coming from Kresy, looking for a place to live, could easily, "officially" force the recent occupiers to withdraw. Families standing, in a sense, on the border between Poland and Germany - not anymore. Hence, the aggression towards them was even greater. In the book Their Mothers Our Fathers we read:
They chased Mazurians out of their good farms with curses, threats, sticks and axes and settled in them themselves. They took their food, live and dead livestock. They beat and abused them. Many a Mazur and Mazurka were murdered or severely injured to usurp their property. Many Poles demolished their homes; bricks, tiles, doors, floors and wood, horses, cattle, motorbikes and agricultural machinery, carts and harness to Poland. Some entire border villages have been abolished. Uwaymen and militiamen assisted in this nefarious work.
March of the defeated
The first days and weeks after the transition of the Soviet army were the worst. In a process called "displacement", "migration action" or "migration of the German people", everyone was expelled by absolute terror. Piotr Pytlakowski reports:
The German population who remained in the new Polish borders were separated, imprisoned in forced labor camps and expelled. Under a decree, the Germans were outlawed, their property was taken away , lynchings were made. There was an "eye for an eye" principle. Except that the victims of retaliation were chosen at random , not by actual fault, but by origin.
During many hours of marches, people heading west, deprived of any livelihood, perished. The Russians conducted a selection - and took some of them the other way. The story told years later by the then six-year-old Helga Kunka paints a terrible picture of those events.
The text is based on the book by Piotr Pytlakowski, 'Ich mothers, our fathers. An Inconvenient History of Post-War Poland "about the fate of German families in the Commonwealth at the end of World War II, which was just published by the Rebis publishing house.
The girl recalled that she and her mother, brother and a group of fugitives stayed overnight in the barn. The temperature was so low that some people froze. Among the victims was her younger brother - he fell asleep surrounded by his mother's arms, but in the morning he did not wake up. In total, a dozen or so dead bodies were counted, mainly children. And when their parents started screaming, the Russians entered the building with weapons ready to fire ...
During the many days of wandering, the Germans were killed not only by the frost, but also by disease, hunger and the Poles hungry for revenge. An inhabitant of one of the villages in Pomerania, Anna Kientopf described:
Four Polish soldiers tried to disconnect a young girl from her parents, who desperately clung to her. Poles beat my parents with rifle butts, especially my father. He stumbled, and they pushed him across the road and down the embankment. He fell, and one of the Poles took a submachine gun and fired a burst. There was silence for a moment, and then the screams of both women pierced the air. They rushed towards the dying man, and the four Poles disappeared into the forest.
Scenes of this kind took place regularly at the end of the war, all over the country - and yet those exiled could still speak of happiness compared to their compatriots imprisoned, used for forced labor or killed in murder pits. The sad truth is that at the end of the war and right after it, an inverted but as brutal machine as the Nazi machine of violence swept through Poland. There was no question of absolution, understanding or just cause - revenge turned out to be blind ...
Source:
The text is based on the book by Piotr Pytlakowski Their mothers, our fathers. The Inconvenient History of Post-War Poland , about the fate of German families in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of World War II, which has just been released by the Rebis publishing house.