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7/31/2019 Jspes Ddm Bkrev Dezayas(2)

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[This review was published in the Summer 2012 issue ofThe Journal of

Social, Political and Economic Studies, pp. 257-264.]

Book Review

50 Theses on the Expulsion of the Germans from Central and Eastern

Europe 1944-1948

Alfred de Zayas

Verlag Inspiration Un Limited, 2012

In recent years, ethnic cleansing has come to be seen in themedia and the international community as a particularly heinous human

rights violation. At the same time, a strong double standard has existed tosuppress any mention of what Alfred de Zayas calls the greatest forcedmigration of civilian population in history the well-documented

expulsion of vast numbers of ethnic Germans from their ancestralhomelands in east-central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II.

Approximately 19 million ethnic Germans had lived in those regions,

often for hundreds of years. Of these, de Zayas says that some 12 million

were expelled, 4 million were allowed to stay in their homes but for themost part without rights or minority protection, one million died in the

war, and the final two million were killed or perished in the course of theexpulsion and its aftermath. We are told that numerically speaking,only the so-called population exchange between Pakistan and India in the

years 1947 and 1948 comes close. Indeed, the German expulsion farexceeds the ethnic cleansing conducted by Serbia in the formerYugoslavia between 1991 and 1999.

Article XIII of the communique issued at the end of thePotsdam Conference in July 1945 spoke of the deliberations between U.S.

President Harry Truman, British prime ministers Winston Churchill and

Clement Atlee (the latter having supplanted Churchill during theconference after the British elections that month), and the Soviet dictator

Joseph Stalin about the transfer of Germans. It seems that Article XIIIwas inserted hurriedly because, aware that a brutal expulsion was already

ongoing, the Western Allies wanted to provide that expulsions would be

orderly and humane and to place them under the supervision of theAllied Control Council in Berlin.

Orderly and humane predictably turned out to be a mereverbal cover for a brutal process. Statistical assessments of the numbers

who died vary widely. De Zayas himself accepts a two million figure,

which is consistent with the number of 2.225 million determined by a1958 investigation by the German Federal Statistical Office in

Wiesbaden. The same two million estimate was stated by the German

government in 2006. At the same time, however, in hisMemoirs KonradAdenauer noted: According to American figures a total of 13.3 millionGermans were expelled 7.3 million arrived in the Eastern zone and thethree Western zones [of Germany] Six million Germans have vanishedfrom the earth They are dead, gone. It would seem, then, that thenumber is open to question.

The taboo against any mention of this particular ethnic

cleansing still continues. De Zayas observes that the silence surroundingthe expulsion of the Germans transgresses the very ethos of scholarshipand constricts both research and open discussion. It is noteworthy that

Canadian historian James Bacque, in his bookCrimes and Mercies (Little,Brown and Company, 1997), says that my fellow author, Alfred deZayas, a graduate of Harvard and of Goettingen, spent years researching

and writing his bookNemesis at Potsdam, about the expulsions from theeast of Germany. And then he had to spend ten years sending it round to

almost a hundred publishers in the West before the manuscript was finally

accepted. The president of one of the biggest houses in New York

returned the manuscript with the note that he would never publish a book

sympathetic to the Germans. Despite the taboo, however, de Zayas and afew other scholars continue their efforts to make the episode (if we maycall something of such magnitude that) known. The memory of the

horrors, and of the people who suffered in the experience, is also kept


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alive by an organization called the League of Expellees, which deZayas calls the largest and most peaceful association of expellees inhistory (it is peaceful because, in the words ofits charter, the expelleesrenounce all thought of revenge and retaliation.

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1947,

and in a long and distinguished career has excelled as a scholar.Presently, he is Professor of International Law and World History at the

Geneva School of Diplomacy. Educated at Harvard, where he earned his

Juris Doctor degree, and at Goettingen, where he received a Dr. phil. inmodern history, he has written nine books and over 200 scholarly articles.

This is in addition to having occupied leading positions at the United

Nations in the area of human rights. Much of his writing has to do withinternational law and ethnic cleansing, with special focus on the expulsion

of the ethnic Germans.

As we assess his work, we are bound to appreciate the fact that

he is one of the worlds relatively few scholars who are willing to tackletaboo subjects, perhaps doing so precisely because such subjects cry out

to honest minds to have their story told. We notice, however, that he has

not cast his net widely to seek out some other rather obvious taboos to

challenge, which causes him to be selective in the instances he cites, such

as the expulsions of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrian Christians, Bosnians,

Croatians, Albanians and Serbs. Nor does he challenge the taboo againstscholarly investigations for which serious scholars have gone to prison in

Europe and Canada on the pretext that their work amounts to violations of

hate speech laws. It would not be unreasonable to criticize de Zayas forrailing against one mind-closing taboo while thus actually participating in

the taboos on other subjects, also vastly important. To say this does not

detract, however, from the credit he has brought upon himself by his

courage, humanity and determination in shining a light on one horrific

episode that the dishonest veneer of contemporary thought would like tokeep submerged in its memory hole. Were de Zayas to enter the ring to

fight on other subjects, his message would become diluted and would be

subjected to attack on grounds that are extraneous to the expulsion of theeast European Germans. There may well be a conjuncture of wisdom and

prudence in the choices he has made.

It ought not to be necessary to point out that his work is

seriously misconstrued if it is taken to be, as the publishing house editorthought, an apologia for the Germans. It is evident from all that he writes

that De Zayass sympathy for the expellees is as human beings, the vastmajority of whom had nothing to do with Hitler or his regime. (De Zayas

discusses the question of collective guilt, and denies its validity,arguing that well established principles of due process and the rule oflaw see guilt as individual, not assignable to vast populations (whichnecessarily include women and children and countless numbers of people

who are simply trying to live their lives) because of their ethnicity or the

like. De Zaya does not come to his research as a sympathizer with theNazis.

The fifty theses referred to in the books title consist of fiftyparagraphs, frequently of some length, broken down into three categories:

historical, points of international law, and conclusions. The firstseventeen tell the story of the expulsions and the background of the

Volksdeutsche who were expelled. In the course of this explication, he

addresses the question of collective guilt and the idea, advanced by some,that expulsions are irreversible (de Zaya rebuts this by citing several

examples of populations, such as Poles, Crimean Tartars and the Alsatian

French, who have indeed returned to their homelands). This historical

review of the expulsion of the Germans from eastern Europe at the end ofWorld War II gives the statistics recited above about the numbers of

expellees and of those who died, but 50 Theses is not the place where deZayas gets into the human details such as are bound to be revealed in the

tens of thousands of individual testimonies contained in the GermanFederal Archives. Readers who want those details will find them in hisbooksNemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East

(third edition, 1988) andA Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the


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East European Germans, 1944-50 (1994). Considerable detail is also

given in Giles MacDonoghsAfter the Reich (2007).1

Theses 18 through 35 discuss international law as it relates to

human rights. In addition, the book contains statements from PopeJohn Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Jose Ayala Lasso, who was the first

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (serving from 1994 to 1997).

De Zayas takes international law and the recent emphasis on

human rights seriously, as one might expect from a man o f hiseducational background. He is thus one of many intelligent and well-meaning people who accept its legitimacy. Indeed, one should take itseriously in light of the judicial heft placed behind the law by the

existence of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. And yet, one

of the more interesting features of de Zayass discussion is how much itreveals (contrary, no doubt, to the impression he would prefer to leave)

the almost surreal nature of the international law thinking that hasdeveloped since the beginning of the twentieth century. We mean noreflection on de Zayas specifically when we say that this thinking reflects

a worldview that emanates from quite a peculiar mentality -- that of a

long-existing cosmopolitan elite whose thinking is at once unworldly and

ahistorical. One might say that it weaves a tapestry of a do-goodersparadise. That something so divorced from reality is given judicialweight so that it is enforceable against actual human beings is necessarilya travesty of justice, violating the very essence of the rule of law in itstruest sense. Not only is it esoteric, but it inevitably calls into play a

selective enforcement against those who lose wars or who are not shieldedfrom prosecution by being identified with one of the superpowers.

Why do we speak of it this way? Consider just a few of the

points on their merits. The U.N. Declaration on Population Transfer andthe Implantation of Settlers, adopted in 1997, says that it sets standards

which are applicable in all situations and sets out that every person hasthe right to remain in peace. All human history cries out that thisexpresses an aspiration, dear to the heart of every non-bellicose human

being, but one that cannot possibly be met unless history comes to an end,

with a radical change in human beings and arriving at a stasis that affirms

the status quo in all situations. It manifests the mentality that underlay

the Kellogg-Briand Pact which in 1928 purported to outlaw all war. The

reality of international conflict demonstrated quite soon how wide of themark that was, making it seem ludicrously naive in the context of the

world war that soon followed.

De Zayas says that Article II of the UN Convention on the

Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocideas acts or actions intended to partially or entirely destroy a certain

national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Lawyers can hardly avoidgrimacing at this definitions open-ended, ambiguous nature. Instead ofrequiring, as a minimum, a significant destruction, it includes partiallydestroy. But how large or small a part? Will one percent of a population

count as genocide? The act is declared a crime, but the truism thatcrimes are to be defined with definiteness, surely a part of due process,is ignored.

We are told that expulsion and deportation can qualify asgenocide, and then are told that all victims of expulsion have a right tocompensation, a right as to which no statute of limitations applies.Has anyone thought this through? If there is no statute of limitations, the

seeking of compensation can go back for wrongs long ago. Given thisnorm, will anything ever become settled among peoples? The scabs can

be torn off of every wound, including those inflicted many decades or

even centuries ago. Further, who is to provide the compensation? Ifthere is no such thing as collective guilt, how can it be justified that

people of future generations who played no part in a wrong, if thatswhat it was, can be made to give of their substance to compensate forwhat earlier people did? Is this not in fact itself a violation oftheirhuman

rights?

1 This book was reviewed by this reviewer in the Spring 2009 issue of this

Journal, pp. 95-110. The review may be found on the reviewers website,www.dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.infoas Article 99 (i.e., A99).
http://www.dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info/http://www.dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info/http://www.dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info/


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De Zayas tells us that since the late 1990s the United Nations

has recognized and promoted the right to truth, which entails the right tohistorical memory. Fantastically, this presupposes that there could everbe a consensus about what truth and historical memory are in givensituations. The very fact that de Zayas has himself had to fight asuffocating taboo on a subject of major historical importance belies the

existence of such a consensus. We live in a world in which myths of all

sorts prevail and in which there are conflicting interpretations of almost

everything. This is to say nothing of the major religions with theirvarying cosmologies, and of the tension that looms so large in modern life

between science and secular humanism, on the one hand, and those whorepose faith in the supernatural, on the other. Disregarding this maze of

disputation, the mentality of lets declare as law whatever feels goodtakes it upon itself to proclaim that there is a right to truth. Part of theproblem with this is that it is housed in juridical language and given the

force of law. Instead of leaving truth to scientists, scholars andphilosophers in an eternal, on-going process of seeking, the mentalitypresumes to reduce it to something that can result in the final judgment of

a court. One can hardly imagine so insouciant a reductionism.

The lack of respect for differences in opinion or perspective

appears in another way, too. De Zayas argues that advocacy of theexpulsion or negationism of the attendant crimes can be taken as a

violation of Article 20 of the U.N. Covenant on Civil and PoliticalRights. This is similar to the criminalization of Holocaust denial. It

runs counter to the intellectual freedom to gather and weigh evidence andto reach conclusions that may or may not agree with an existingconsensus about an events occurrence, extent or seriousness. It meansscholars beware, because a given perception is hardened into criminal

law.

All of this should be enough to illustrate the point. What is

clear is that there has been for several decades an international

community of the oddest sort. It isnt too much to say that its thinkingtakes on the form of a new religion, far removed from the realities of lifeas it is actually lived. It claims absolute truth and universality. And it has

a messianic temper: in Commissioner Lassos speech to the Germanexpellees, set out as one of the appendices to 50 Theses, he says wereally want to create a new international order a new conscience. It isa new world order that transcends national sovereignties, as we see

when Lasso goes on to say that we cannot be indifferent to violations ofhuman rights, wherever they happen. We can see in this that theAmerican neoconservative and neoliberal drives for a universalremaking of cultures to fit the preferences and worldview of the UnitedStates (or, more correctly, of the governing elite in the United States and

perhaps of Europe) at a given time. An interesting feature is that the

elites own beliefs evolve over time, never being quite the same fromdecade to decade, even though at any particular time it feels convinced

that it is the guardian of immutable truth.

Taken all together, we see that 50 Theses contains two very

different things: a vitally important introduction to the little-noted atrocitythat occurred at the end of World War II when millions of ethnic Germans

were uprooted from their ancestral homes; and an eye-opening

introduction to the wonderland of international law as it pertains,especially, to human rights. Thoughtful readers will find both of thesedimensions worth pondering.

Dwight D. Murphey

jspes ddm bkrev dezayas(2)

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