Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

For many, the agony of deportation would last for up to four weeks, until they reached their destinations, where the new agonies of a life of hard labor and exile awaited them. Many found themselves in the Soviet Far North, in the district of Archangelsk, or in Siberia, where they were mainly put to work logging. Most of the remainder ended their journey in Kazakhstan, working on collective farms or laboring to construct railways. For all of them, the Soviet maxim ran, “Who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat.” Death tolls were substantial, with an estimated annual death rate of around 30 percent. Deportation to the wide expanses of the Russian interior was a policy with roots extending back to the time of the tsars, but the criteria applied by the Soviets were based on raw class politics. As those left behind in Poland were told, “This is how we annihilate the enemies of Soviet power. We will use the sieve until we retrieve all bourgeois and kulaks, not only here, but in the entire world. You will never see again those that we have taken away from you. Tam propadut kak rudaia mish . [They will disappear over there, like a field mouse.]”

The four main deportations from eastern Poland—in February, April, and June 1940 and June 1941—were all carried out in the same way. The precise numbers involved are unknown and have long been assumed to total over 1 million. Although recent scholarship, drawing on research from the NKVD’s own archive in Moscow, has revised this figure downward, it is suspected that the Russian archival record tells only one aspect of the story and does not include those condemned by summary courts or otherwise unregistered. For every convict or official deportee, it seems, there may have been three or four who went unrecorded, making the figure of 1 million—according to Poland’s foremost Western historian—a “very conservative estimate.” Whatever the true totals, few of the deported would ever see their homeland again.

Even those newly arrived in the Soviet zone from the west could find themselves en route to the Gulag. The Soviet authorities could be royally inhospitable, with many officials viewing refugees simply as spies or provocateurs. In one instance, a group of around 1,000 Jews was expelled across the border by the Germans, only for a nearby Soviet commander to attempt to force them back into the German zone some fifteen kilometers away, leading to a tense standoff with the local Wehrmacht units. Most refugees caught close to the frontier by the Soviet authorities were liable to arrest and a sentence in the Gulag. This would be the fate of the Dreksler family in the autumn of 1939. Having entered the Soviet zone without being apprehended, they were stopped in Lutsk, where the communist authorities asked them to fill out various forms. However, their answer to the question of where they ultimately intended to settle, Palestine, so irritated their interrogating officer that he sent them instead to a work camp in the Soviet Far North at Archangel.

Viennese Jew Wilhelm Korn was one of the few who sought to escape his fate. Expelled across the river Bug by Hitler’s SS security forces, with the instruction to “go over to your Bolshevik brothers,” he did not believe Soviet promises of work, accommodation, and good treatment and so decided to abscond. Recaptured and interrogated by the NKVD, Korn was accused of being a German spy and sent back across the border to Vienna. Remarkably, he survived the war.

Unsurprisingly, the Soviet authorities grew so frustrated by the volume of refugees entering their zone—willingly or unwillingly—that they complained to the Germans that future collaboration on the sensitive issue of population exchange was in jeopardy. With that, “wild” deportations were brought to an end, and border controls were tightened. The ethnic and political reorganization of the Polish lands required a degree of Nazi-Soviet cooperation.

Beginning in December 1939, therefore, both the Nazis and the Soviets began the process of registering those desiring to leave their respective zones of occupation. On the German side of the frontier, some 35,000 or so Ukrainians and Byelorussians, mainly former Polish POWs, were found wishing to be evacuated east into the Soviet zone, but the larger number of ethnic Germans wanting to go in the opposite direction presented more of a challenge. In the Soviet zone, therefore, joint Nazi-Soviet “resettlement commissions”—consisting of four SS officials from the Nazi ethnic German office, the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, accompanied by four members of the NKVD—began touring the towns and cities in December 1939 to oversee the registration of all those claiming to be ethnic Germans and to enable them to travel west into Germany. Over the next six months, 128,000 Volksdeutsche would successfully apply to be “repatriated” to the Reich, with the first group of settlers being welcomed at Przemyśl on the Soviet-German border by Heinrich Himmler himself.

Naturally, this process was not without complications. For one thing, the Soviets seemed committed to frustrating the operation, often vetoing applications in what appeared to their German counterparts to be an arbitrary fashion. The primary problem was that—embarrassingly for the Soviets—many more people beyond the ethnic German community evidently wanted to leave the Soviet zone, including many of the Jews who had only recently arrived. Some years later, the then Communist Party head in Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, would recall in his memoirs with incredulity the “long lines of Jews waiting to register to leave for the west.” Another account tells of a similarly incredulous German officer watching the queues and saying, “Jews, where are you going? Don’t you know that we will kill you?”

One of those who chose to return was the Jewish writer Mieczysław Braun, who had fled to Lwów with the outbreak of war but soon regretted his actions when he found himself forced to conform to the expected Soviet norms. “I have never been in such a humiliating and absurd situation,” he wrote to a friend. “Every day we have a meeting. I sit in the first row and they look at me, I hear propaganda, nonsense and lies. Whenever they mention Stalin my supervisor starts clapping and everyone present follows suit. I also clap, and I feel like a court jester. I don’t want to clap, but I am forced to. I don’t want Lwów to be a Soviet city, but a hundred times a day I say the opposite. All my life I have been myself and an honest person, and now I am playing the fool. I have become a scoundrel.” Wracked by the contortions that he was obliged to make, Braun opted to return to Warsaw and take his chances with the German occupation. He died in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941.

In fact, very few of those who applied to emigrate from the Soviet zone were granted permission, with only around 5 percent of all applicants succeeding. Those who were rejected would not be spared the self-righteous wrath of the Soviet state. Given that they had implicitly expressed their rejection of communism and been obliged to register their details to do so, they were now doubly exposed to the attentions of the NKVD. The Soviet authorities did not hesitate long in exacting their revenge. In June 1940, once the resettlement commissions had completed their work and departed, the recalcitrants were collected for transport to the Soviet interior. Some were even told to present themselves at their local railway station for emigration to the west—thereby saving the authorities the trouble of physically rounding them up—only to be loaded onto trains and deported in the opposite direction. Of those involved in the third large Soviet deportation from eastern Poland in June 1940, nearly 60 percent are thought to have been Jews, and the vast majority had unsuccessfully applied to leave the Soviet zone.