Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 14:42:19 -0500 Reply-To: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Sender: H-NET List on German History From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Subject: Re: Victimization There are three messages below: 1) Submitted by: Don H. Tolzmann As a follow-up to Prof. Wagner's comments, it should be noted that the Expulsion (Vertreibung) of 15 million Germans from eastern and southeastern Europe, which resulted in 2.6 million deaths, was not only a violation of international law, but a crime against humanity by any standard. Don Heinrich Tolzmann 2) Submitted by: James Bacque People interested in the recent postings on the World War Two and post-1945 history of the ethnic Germans of the east, and of the national Germans of the seized territories will profit from reading Dr. Alfred de Zayas' brief but remarkably thorough and balanced *Nemesis at Potsdam,* U Nebraska Press, 1977, 1979 and 1988, which I believe is still in print. This is pioneering work, but balanced and accurate, as might be expected from the Senior Legal Counsel to the UN sub-Commission on Human Rights, and a graduate of Gottingen and Harvard Law School. The book has a brilliant Foreword by former US High Commissioner Robert Murphy, a friend of de Zayas. De Zayas has also recently published *The German Expellees,* Macmillan and St Martin's Press, 1992, with a fine Foreword from Charles Barber. Prof. Otto Kimminich of Regensburg has also written expertly on the subject. In relation to that, do any subscribers know of any writer who has published anything from the Robert Murphy Papers which have been recently declassified (1989 and 1992, I think) at the Hoover Institution, Stanford? The most important that I saw were related to the CFM preparatory papers, many of them prepared by Brad Patterson (not to be confused with Robert Patterson, then Secretary of War.) Similarly, the archivists at the LC declassified for my new book a number of fascinating letters and copies of phone conversations etc from the Robert Patterson Papers. One of them said that so far as he knew, very little has been published based on most of the RP papers. The parts that interested me the most were about food supply and the massive efforts made in the US and Canada to send food to the starving round the world except Germany in 1945-46, and the efforts of Patterson among others to supply food for Germans starving in the western zones 1946-48. And it seems that the classification of many of these RP papers has been effective IE that little or nothing has been published based on EG letters or memos by Patterson received by EG Hoover or Truman on closely-related topics that perhaps inadvertently were declassified while the (Patterson) copy remained classified. I know that such a contradiction seems unlikely, but I have been assured by the archivists at the State Department and at the Hoover Institution that certain sections of the Murphy Papers re Germany 1945-1949 were declassified at different times in each place, so that for at least a while, some papers at one place were available, while at the other, they were not. I made no exact notes of these papers and their declassification dates, because what I needed was (apparently) made available to me, but I mention it as a matter of interest to scholars of the period. I am interested in the topic because my new book due from Ullstein Verlag in August under the title *Verschwiegene Schuld* demonstrates, among other things, the high number of deaths among the ethnic German expellees and among non-expelled German civilians in occupied Germany, east and west, from 1945 through 1950. 3) Submitted by: Michael Hughes Roland Wagner is quite right to deplore the horrible experience of the ethnic Volksdeutsch in the Soviet Union. But however innocent they may have been (and they scarcely had the opportunity to decide how to react to Hitler and his invading army before they were deported), they were not the only ethnic Volksdeutsch. Other communities of Germans in other East European countries (including Rumania) did include people who were supporters of Hitler. The innocent in those communities, and among German war-damaged who had lived within the 1937 borders of the Reich, most certainly deserve our sympathy. But one prerequisite for any analysis of the fate of German war-damaged does have to be establishing some sense of degrees of culpability, not issuing implicitly or explicitly blanket declarations of innocence--or of guilt. Michael L. Hughes, Wake Forest University .