_Men and Work_
“Extraordinarily frightening,” says the _New York Times_ in examining
the German refugee problem in an editorial that appeared early in 1950:
“About one-fourth of the population of the Federal German Republic
is composed of refugees from the provinces now occupied by Poles,
from the Eastern Soviet Zone, the Czech Sudetenland and a few other
scattered places....
“There are now more than 8,500,000 registered refugees in the Western
Zones, and at least another 1,000,000 who are drifters and live
by begging, scavenging and thieving like so many gypsies, without
permits to work or settle down. Something like 40,000 refugees are
coming in monthly from the Soviet Zone. What can be done with them?...
“It is an example of how extraordinarily frightening German problems
can be when one stops to think about them.”[1]
This sensation of alarm was with me when I came close to the lives of
these refugees, or Expellees, in an industrial center in and around
Salzgitter.
Here during the war years, the Nazi conquerors brought hundreds of
thousands of workers, mostly slave laborers, who occupied the rows upon
rows of desolate barracks that stretched out over the flat countryside
as far as the eye could see. Not long after the barracks had been
vacated through the liberation of the slave laborers, they were filled
again—this time with destitute families and parts of families who had
been expelled from their homes by the Allies. In a gigantic movement
of population known as “Operation Swallow” millions of men, women and
children were dumped into this and other areas of a destroyed nation
after Silesia and part of East Prussia (formerly part of Germany
itself) were given to the Provisional Administration of a regime
imposed on an unfree Poland.
Sixty thousand of these Expellees were clustered in the infamous slave
labor camps of Salzgitter when I visited them recently. I visited one
barrack which served as a provisional hospital for the aged and infirm
among the Expellees. I was told that more than 400 old people, weakened
by the deportation and the consequent hunger and lack of care, had died
in this barrack-hospital in the days of the “Operation Swallow.”
In the meantime, the men among the Expellee group had found work in
some sections of the Reich Steel Works, a great war-born industry.
I knew that many of the industrial plants in the area had already
been dismantled as producers of materials that could be turned to war
purposes. No protest had accompanied these dismantlings, since no
working people anywhere wanted a repetition of the holocaust of blood
and broken steel and stones that they knew in World War II.
However, part of the steel works, which use the large deposits of
ore found in the area of Salzgitter, are still operating, and more
particularly the railroad repair shops. The Allies decided, after
dismantling a great rolling mill and crating it for shipment to
Yugoslavia as reparations, that three out of four smelting furnaces
could continue working, in order to make use of the special smelting
process necessary for the particular type of ore mined in the vicinity.
Coal was needed from the Ruhr, and as not enough was shipped, only one
smelting furnace was actually in operation.
Work was the precious thing that these dispossessed heads of families
had found here as a result of the fact that the furnace had not closed
down. Workers all their lives, they still had their self-respect
because they could buy the bread and potatoes that kept their families
alive. Other men, released as prisoners of war from Russia and Poland,
found that their families had already been resettled in the slave labor
barracks in the “Operation Swallow.” They also came here, and many of
them were able to use their industrial skills in the steel works.
What amazed me when I visited these desolate barracks on a damp and
overcast day was the lack of complaint at the obvious want of decent
comfort and privacy in their lives. In one medium-sized room, I found
four families living. Their quarters were separated by blankets hung
on ropes. One primitive stove served the four families. Some of the
men and one of the women (together with her daughter) had known from
months to years of slave labor in Eastern Europe since the end of the
war. They felt that this freedom in the west, though it was a freedom
bounded by blanket partitions and barracks built for Hitler’s slave
labor, was a beautiful thing. “We are grateful to God to be here,”
this woman told me. “I am glad that my daughter and husband are alive.
I’ll make no complaint.”
But with the men, I could feel a corroding fear. They discussed the
fear with Dr. Adalbert Sendker, who accompanied me on my visit. As
Director of Charities, and member of a local Commission for Expellees,
Father Sendker struggles daily to meet the needs of these dispossessed
people. They pointed to the tremendous lettered message, painted in
white on a great gas tank that dominates this woebegone community
of rows upon rows of rough wooden barracks, WE WANT TO LIVE. STOP
THE DISMANTLING. One of the men explained: “We want to support our
families—even if we can hardly buy the few things that are listed on
the ration card. Now most of us who work only have jobs because we
are dismantling. Every day, we destroy our own livelihood. What will
become of us all when there is nothing more to dismantle? Before long
everything will be as still as the grave.”
I looked for confirmation to Dr. Sendker. “That is true,” he said. “We
fear that before long all will be still here. Only about 800 men will
have work in the ore mines, which will then send the ore to the Ruhr.”
The sign “WE WANT TO LIVE. STOP THE DISMANTLING” stared at me wherever
I went in this community of desperate people. I am not competent to
judge the question of dismantling in its larger aspects. Any steps to
prevent another war should be taken at the earliest possible moment.
There is here, however, the problem of nearly 60,000 Expellees from
Upper and Lower Silesia in a much larger native population. These
heads of families have found a livelihood for themselves and their
families in works that have been turned to peacetime uses. Now, at one
stroke, they will all be rendered paupers, exiled paupers who will
depend on the pittance of the local public welfare set-up and the
local religious welfare agencies. Already, Caritas of the diocese of
Hildesheim, the local Catholic Charities, is spending 85 percent of its
budget and of its donations from the outside to meet the needs of the
hundreds of thousands of Expellees in its area.
This, then, is undoubtedly a social and human problem that goes far
beyond the realm of politics. Those who agreed to the creation of this
double problem must have an answer adequate to meet it.
So far, there has been no hint of an adequate answer, nor have
sufficient serious studies been made which give much hope for the
future. Whether the Salzgitter Steel Works were dismantled or not
would have little importance if plans were afoot to resettle, either
in Europe or beyond Europe’s frontiers, the more than 60,000 uprooted
human beings who have found a refuge and bread there. The latest report
of the High Commissioner’s Office for Germany says, on the subject of
Expellees:
“The influx of refugees is primarily a German problem and the care
and maintenance of these groups until they can be assimilated by the
West Zone economy is primarily a German Government responsibility.”
When, several years ago, I studied the waterfront labor problem in a
great Eastern port, I found many intricate and involved problems, but
to each one there was the possibility of a solution—whether or not
any steps were taken toward that solution. Here in Salzgitter, turn
which way I would, I could see no solution, because in making overall
decisions of an economic and political character, the human material
has been completely ignored. That human material faced me as I walked
among the rows of slave labor barracks—the men, with their grey, worn
faces, the women, with their pathetic attempts at homemaking, the
children playing in the mud inside the barbed wire enclosures.
Up to now only local German agencies, and the Protestants and Catholics
of the United States, have been active in trying to salvage the human
material of the mass expulsions, of the mass misery and unemployment.
War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. has been sending large quantities of food
and clothing to answer the desperate appeals of the German Catholic
Charities for continued help. Some help has come from England,
particularly for expelled priests and forsaken parishes.
Eight expelled priests, who lost their parishes when they and their
flocks had to take to the road, serve the Catholics among the Expellees
around Salzgitter. These men, dressed like workmen, bicycle around from
barracks to barracks, instructing, comforting, consoling.
They have set up a church in a great old cow barn and celebrate Mass
there regularly, often while the rain drips in through the ancient and
unrepaired roof. Animals are still kept in annexes to the barn.
At night these men return home to rented rooms; one to a sleeping room
in a kitchen, a group of several to a small rented apartment with
borrowed furniture. They are much heartened by any little help they
receive in their difficult ministry.
In a special program to relieve their most urgent needs, English
Catholics have collected help from their own slender resources to send
to the priests of the area. Active in the work are the members of the
St. Vincent de Paul Society of the Diocese of Nottingham, England. One
sees in the putting aside of old enmities, the real beginning of peace.
Salzgitter, with its thousands of desperate men, first rendered
destitute and homeless, and now rendered unable to earn the bread for
their families, is a meeting place of the burning social problems
of Europe as a whole. America and the Allies can only ignore this
problem at their peril, because these forgotten men with their expelled
destitute families are becoming a dead weight on the spiritual and
material revival of western Europe.
Since I visited the area of Salzgitter, there have been mass meetings,
demonstrations, and even riotings by the local population against the
progress of the dismantling project. It was finally decided to retain
a large portion of the Reich works in activity. The men who so feared
complete idleness will now continue working. Present plans call for
the utilization of the plant for the manufacture of mining machinery,
castings for railway rolling stock, ceramic products and pig iron
castings.
The impossibility of providing a livelihood for uprooted people who
form a quarter of the population of the Federal Republic of western
Germany is better understood when one adds to such problems as that
described above, the inescapable fact that two industrial and mining
areas have been effectively detached from Germany proper, Silesia in
the East, and the Saar, bordering France. The economy of The Ruhr, the
third and largest industrial and mining concentration, is operating at
a reduced level because of the effectiveness of Allied air raids on war
plants, and because of subsequent dismantlings.
And yet, the already swollen population of these western areas grows at
a monthly rate of about 40,000, as the _Times_ editorial pointed out,
owing to the continuous flight of people from the People’s Republic of
Germany behind the Iron Curtain.
Nothing could give a clearer view of the tragedy of uprooted people
than a visit to the transit camps where are lodged the unfortunates who
flee from the Eastern zone of Germany. During a twelve-month period,
1,300,000 persons crossed illegally. Many of these are Expellees who
were dumped into the Soviet Zone and who have fled to the West, hoping
for freedom if not security.
One of the largest transit camps is at Uelzen, located inside the
British Zone of Germany, not far from the Iron Curtain. This same camp
crowded with ugly barrack structures was the scene of the Operation
Swallow mentioned above, by means of which hundreds of thousands of the
former inhabitants of Silesia were concentrated briefly into Uelzen
and then distributed all over the British Zone of Germany, including
Salzgitter and vicinity. Operation Swallow, as callous a bit of human
engineering as the post-war west can boast, was notable for the
skeleton-like appearance of so many starved men, women and children.
A great number of those who now come to Uelzen through the forests
are men, fleeing from service in the People’s Police. Large groups of
young men present themselves at Uelzen stating that they are fugitives
from enforced labor in the uranium mines near the Czech border. For
the teenagers among these groups, and they number untold thousands,
Caritas has founded several homes and training centers, such as will be
described in a later chapter.
A board of German experts representing the various government
departments, or Lander, sits at the Uelzen camp, and examines the
pitiful stories of the newcomers and also their potentialities for
work. If the new refugees cannot prove political persecution in their
last residence, or have crossed only for economic betterment, they are
immediately turned out of the Uelzen camp and given railroad tickets
for the return journey to the Soviet Zone. If political persecution
can be proved, the man is provided by one of the representatives of
the Land governments with the promise of a job, a ration card and
transportation. If he has a family with him, he can take them with him,
or can leave them in the Uelzen camp for a stated period.
The Uelzen transit camp receives between 300 and 1,000 fugitives every
day, of whom only a small percentage can be provided with jobs. The
others are turned out into the roads, because no other provisions can
be made for them. Lutheran Aid Service has a skilled staff of social
workers to take care of emergency cases such as pregnant women, the
sick, the aged and those who are looking for relatives. Caritas also
has social work aid, while the Labor Welfare Committee maintains a
fulltime nursery for the tired and worn children of the men and women
who trek westward.
The camp is a seething overcrowded mass of desperate human beings
fighting for a ration card, a bunk on which to sleep, for the right
to life itself. But outside on the roads around Uelzen, the scene is
worse. Here are the refugees for whose problems no solution could be
found.
As we drove up and down the road in the neighborhood of the camp, we
saw the men standing, dazed and tired, their packs on their backs,
trying to beg rides from passing cars and trucks. Others sat by the
roadside as though too weary to go any further, and many were lying
stretched out fast asleep, their knapsacks serving as pillows.
One of our delegates approached a group of such fugitives. There were
two men, a child with a bandaged eye, a woman with a distraught and
agonized expression. On being approached by an American, they were
willing to talk. They had just been turned out of the Uelzen camp,
turned out into the road of a destroyed country. They could not prove
political persecution, so there were no jobs, no ration cards, no
chance of shelter. In their pockets were a few East marks, each one
worth only about 20 per cent of a West German mark. One man was alone,
but he was consulting with the other man, who had a wife and child, as
to what they could do next. The lone man told his story. Before the
war, he had been a policeman, but he had been drafted into the German
Army for duty on the Russian front. Captured by the Russians, he had
served more than four years as a slave laborer. When he was released
in early 1949, he had gone back to his old town, and was returned to
the police force. It was required of him that he join the People’s
Police, and that he carry out political rather than judicial arrests.
“If you do what you are told, you can have a good life in the People’s
Police,” he explained. “I know well what slave labor is. How could I
do the things they wanted me to do, arrest innocent people, when I am
a Christian? So I am here. I could not prove that I am a political
refugee—but I will never go back there,” and he pointed east.
“Well, what will you do now?” he was asked.
“We thought we would try to get to Hamburg. This man thinks that
someone might give his wife and boy temporary shelter there—and there
might be some kind of work.”
The other man told his story. He had always been a minor civil servant
in a town, and only decided to flee with his wife when he could no
longer carry out the orders given him. He had thought that perhaps they
would recognize his claims to help in the Western Zone, and seemed
dazed when he and his wife and son were turned out of the transit camp
without any help or advice, except the railroad ticket to return to
his place of origin. “They were going to arrest me before, because I
did not carry out all the orders I was given; they would surely arrest
me if I went back now. Even if we starve in Hamburg, we will keep on
going.”
Enough money was found for this desperate group to get them to
Hamburg, and to take care of them for a reasonable time. After that
they would join the ranks of the drifters, who manage to keep alive
from day-to-day by the Providence of God and the local and Church
agencies of welfare. But all along the roads were the others, the
tired, the disheartened, the desperate men, the disheveled women, the
uprooted children, for whom no emergency help was forthcoming. And
as they leave the roads, and disappear into the teeming life of some
half-destroyed city of the West, their places are taken by the next
wave of those who have fled, and who will not return. Never in history
have there been so many wanderers on the roads as in our decade just
past, and perhaps the trek has been accentuated in the past four years
of the peace. We can well echo the query of the thoughtful editorial of
the _New York Times_. “What can be done with them?”
Thus the problems of men and work cannot yet be resolved, owing to
the stream of people who are constantly being added to the potential
labor force, the millions of Expellees whose precarious livelihood is
threatened by dismantling, and the lowered production schedules which
result from Ruhr inactivity and the detachment of other centers of
industry from the body of Germany.
[Illustration:
“We want to live! Stop the dismantling!”—Reich Works
Salzgitter-Wattenstedt.
]
[Illustration:
“Now most of us who work, only have jobs because we are dismantling.
Every day we destroy our own livelihood. What will become of us all
when there is nothing more to dismantle? Before long everything will
be as still as the grave.”
]
[Illustration: “We thought we would try to get to Hamburg ... there
might be some kind of work.”]
[Illustration:
After fleeing through the forests they arrive at the transit camp at
Uelzen. This bleak haven is all their hope, but they are so often
turned out to scrounge in a shattered economy.
]
Another aspect of the condition of Expellee men and their work is the
fact that it often happened that transports of people from farming
areas landed in industrial centers, and thousands of human beings from
towns were herded into the agricultural areas. Men are separated for
years from the work in which their skill could be productive of much
good. They have no security in this temporary adjustment, nor
can they give any sense of security to a family living in a half or a
quarter of a barracks room. It is evident that no social peace can come
out of such conditions. It is in the hope that some solution moving
toward social stabilization of the Expellees can be found that this
study is being written.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _The New York Times_, January 6, 1950.