Forced Migration

In what was once eastern Germany, an anguished tide of humanity, one of the greatest mass movements of Germans in history, flowed toward the borders of the shrunken Reich. At least 10,000,000 hungry Germans were being uprooted from their old homes in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland by the new Polish, Czech and Russian owners.

The wanderers choked the roads in Russian-occupied Germany. Ragged, barefoot, with children in their arms, and the shabby remains of homes stacked on perambulators, carts and wheelbarrows, they trudged westward. But they were barred from the British and U.S. zones. No UNRRA was on hand to help, though their problem immensely outscaled that of Displaced Persons elsewhere in Europe.

German local authorities did what they

could with the little they had: primitive

medical care, transient shelters, bread-and-soup lines, harvest work. Then the wanderers were hustled on. In some places confiscated landed estates were distributed to them. But all efforts seemed puny against the colossal need.

An appeal to the uprooted came from Berlin's Russian-appointed Oberbuerger-meister Arthur Werner: "You have been living through only a small part of that which Russians, Poles, Czechs and other people . . . have had to suffer during the years under Hitler. But it would be of little use to anyone to accept our suffering as penance for the ill Germany has caused others. . . . The utmost efforts are being made . . . but you must help. . . . Help us to build a new Germany where freedom and democracy will reign. . . ."

Many a wanderer was beyond appeal or succor. Typical was a scene in Berlin's once fashionable Dahlem, now part of the U.S. zone. A grey old man stood on a curb. Beside him a tattered cadaverous woman leaned apathetically against a shell-scarred tree. On the pavement before them lay a long bundle wrapped in a frayed black dress and held together by a string drawn around the ankles and neck of the corpse inside. The three were refugees from the East. They were thumbing a ride out of town to a spot where the dead could be buried and the living could move on.

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