Some time ago, this website caused a stir with accusations of Polish "democide" against ethnic Germans following WWII. The author, a professor at University of Hawaii, revised his website. Below is my response to this revision. --John Radzilowski Dear Dr. Rummel: Thank you for your note on the additions you have made to the Democide web page (http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rummel/SOD.CHAP7.ADDENDA.HTM#S5) regarding the deportation of Germans from the so-called Recovered Territories of Poland. I'm going to comment on this at some length, but first I want you to know that I'm also forwarding this message to an e-mail discussion list, the editors of two publications, and Canadian Polish Congress (all listed below). Your website was mentioned in or discussed by all of them. 1. Regarding the responses you received from Poles or members of the Polish community in North America, which you characterize as "irate" or "fuck you messages," I receive many such messages (as well as letters and phone calls) on a variety of topics from a variety people, Polish or not. Although there is no excuse for such rudeness (and I did warn several individuals to be respectful if they did contact you), to characterize or highlight such responses as typical or representative of a particular group does little to further understanding of this important issue. Also, one would hope that in presenting scholarly materials to the public, that scholars would choose to deal with the serious responses only. There is, as you have learned, a great deal of resentment and anger among many Poles in North America regarding the way they and their history are treated by American academics. Although the forms this resentment takes are often not legitimate, the basis of the resentment is real. It is very tiresome to be subject to endless pontificating from certain segments of the academy who have little knowledge of a complex past and a very old culture and simply no acquaintance whatsoever with elementary source materials. This is particularly the case when the genocide committed against the Poles in the past century is systematically ignored. The basis and origins of this problem I leave for another day. Even though I do not agree with all of your conclusions, I do appreciate very much that you have made a serious attempt to understand the problem. Fair and even-handed consideration of all the evidence is all we really ask. Your effort to do so in this case sets you apart from the pack. Nevertheless, given Poland's history and nature of things, accusing the Poles of genocide or democide against the Germans is going to be seen by many as a fundamental attack on the right of Poland to exist as a nation within its present borders. This view is not entirely without foundation. 2. Regarding the number of deaths, the West German figure is 1.225 million and for the sake of consistency, I'll assume this as baseline (I am unclear as to the criteria you use to prefer the higher number). Although this number may be plausible as a starting point, the way it is reached continues to trouble me. (Polish readers might look at Marion Frantzioch, "Socjologiczne aspekty problemu wypedzenia Niemcow," in UTRACONA OJCZYZNA: PRZYMUSOWE WYSIEDLENIA DEPORTACJE I PRZESIEDLENIA JAKO WSPOLNE DOSWIADCZENIE, Hubert Orlowski and Andrzej Sakson, eds. (Poznan: Instytut Zachodni, 1997), which is a collection of papers by Polish, German, and Ukrainian scholars.) First, the figure refers to all Germans from "eastern Germany," apparently including those from the Kaliningrad territory incorporated directly into the Russian Federation, a territory that was never under the jurisdiction of "People's Poland" (PPR). Thus, it seems as if Poles are being held responsible by you for deaths that occurred in the USSR. Second, your site notes that the figures include "Germans [who] died in Germany from what happened to them during the expulsion." What troubles me here is not that these deaths are counted, but that 1) this criteria is not applied across the board to other democide/genocide cases (e.g., how many survivors of Nazi or Soviet internment died of chronic health problems after the fact?), and 2) there is no firm criteria for who should or should not be included. For example, if a victim of illegal Nazi medical experiments dies 20 years after the war, is this death included in the total of Nazi carnage? Why 20 years, for example, and not 15 or 25 or no time limit at all? What about survivors who suffer mental illness and commit suicide later? In short, where does one draw the line? Thanks to the efficiency and political motives of the German authorities, they did count these cases and they are certainly right to do so, but it opens a large can of worms and unless the same criteria is applied across the board to other cases, the net effect is to inflate the numbers in this case alone. While I'm on the subject of numbers, I also have to take some exception to the citation of numbers for pre-war ethnic populations in eastern Germany. The German statistics for the non-German population in these areas are clearly wrong, but this is an exceedingly slippery matter. As an ethnic historian, I resist efforts to place people of borderland regions in simplistic, reductive categories such as "Pole vs. German." Operationally, many people were both under different circumstances. More to the point, however, they also need to be described as Silesians, Pomeranians, and Mazurs--that is as members of distinct sub groups with their own mixed dialects and cultural traits. Although the war and its aftermath may have forced them to choose one category or the other, we need not acquiesce to the logic of totalitarianism by reading their post-war identities backward onto their pre-war identities. 3. There is no question that ethnic Germans under the jurisdiction of the Polish communist state were mistreated, abused, and killed in the years right after the war (as were Poles). Nevertheless, there is a key moral question of whether this state was legitimate and legal. Despite international recognition, PPR was not a legitimate or legal entity. This does not diminish the responsibility (individually or collectively) of those who committed crimes under its auspices, but it seems to me that the acts of a legal government (such as Nazi Germany) need to be looked at somewhat differently than those of an illegal government, otherwise we end up in the position that there is no essential difference between the two. The case of Egon Krenz that you cite is somewhat misleading since his argument was about his *individual responsibility* as opposed to the responsibility of East Germans as a group. No serious person questions that individual Polish officials who committed crimes under communism should held in some way responsible (although there is considerable debate over how this should be done). That, however, is not really the question. The question your website raises is the collective responsibility of the Poles (or other groups). 4. On the matter of Soviet control in the immediate postwar period, there is a lot more research that needs to be done as archives continue to open to researchers. (Also, a point of correction, the struggle between the Communist government and non-communist resisters continued until 1956, not the late 1940s. Although major resistance forces were defeated by 1948, some continued the fight until 1956 and there are cases of individuals who held out into the early 1960s. On this, see Zolnierze wykleci: Antykomunistyczne podziemie zbrojne po 1944 roku (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Volumen and Liga Republikanska, 1999). I found this section of your site rather confusing.) However, it does seem fairly certain that direct Soviet control extended down to the lowest levels of government in Poland first through the NKVD and then the Polish counterpart, the UB. A crucial point here is the extent to which military and security arms of the early PPR were staffed by Soviet citizens. There is simply no way ethnic Poles within the PPR governing structure could have conducted a policy that was not wholly determined by Moscow, even if they had had the ability or inclination to resist that policy as individual members of society. (For a useful local study of the war and its aftermath, see Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Accommodation and Resistance: A Polish County during the Second World War and Its Aftermath (1939-1947), Ph.D. diss. New York: Columbia, 2000.) Those who were not Soviet citizens were handpicked by Soviets and a secondary consideration here is that many of those chosen were ethnic minorities, notably Jews. (This seems to have a systematic policy on the part of the Soviet--divide et impera--with the additional consideration that the Soviets saw such underlings expendable once they had done the dirty work. This is chronicled in the case of the camps for ethnic Germans in John Sack's interested but overly journalistic book Eye for an Eye. As Sack points out, many of those chosen to run the camps were themselves survivors of Nazi concentration camps and were encouraged by the Soviets to take revenge, which they did.) This same criteria could and should be applied to other countries that were component parts of the Soviet empire until 1989/90. Some in the West continue to believe that Soviet-bloc satellites could/did pursue a policies independent of the USSR. Although countries like Romania did at times engage in symbolic gestures of "independence," the governments were little more than local jailors for a distant warden. To say "Poland is responsible," is to confuse a nation with a regime on at least some level. While one may hypothetically imagine a non-communist Polish government undertaking similar actions and there was certainly a desire on the part of many Poles to take revenge for German Nazi crimes, this is pure supposition. A democratically elected government that represented the real will of the nation might also have done things very differently. 5. The case of the ethnic Germans may qualify as "democide" as you have defined it, but it does not qualify as genocide under the U.N. definition of the term. This is most obvious in the area of motivation. There is simply no evidence at this point that I'm aware of that there was a planned, systematically directed effort to kill the Germans in those areas "in whole or in part." To lump such cases together with systematically planned genocides such as the Holocaust or the Khmer Rouge genocide is to ignore or downplay some very crucial differences. This needs to be made clear. 6. To lay the mass deaths of ethnic Germans completely at Poland's door ignores the over 800,000 Germans from other countries who died. (See point 7.) It also ignores the link to wartime killing of German civilians in the east by Soviet troops (1.1 million). The only difference in Poland was that the "Recovered Territories" contained far more Germans than lived in say, Yugoslavia. Wasn't the victimization proportional to the number of ethnic Germans in each country? If so, doesn't that suggest a variable that goes beyond the confines of Poland? 7. Although it is true that your original site did mention the mass killing of Poles by Germans and Soviets (though not I think by Ukrainian nationalists), there is a crucial difference in how you handled these cases. In the Nazi and Soviet cases, you treat the mass killing of Poles as a subset of other mega-murders, that is, as part of a larger set of phenomena. By contrast you treat the Polish-German case as a separate incident. In reality, the fate of ethnic Germans was first, not merely a Polish-German matter, and second, part of a larger series of ethnic cleansings, political conflicts, and population transfers. As it stands, you set the German case part but do not set the Polish case apart. Why not see the fate of Poles as a single phenomenon in the same way you treat the fate of Germans? Or vice versa? The same argument can be made for Jews and Gypsies. One can argue that the Khmer Rouge case stands alone, but to treat the Polish case in the same way seems to be stretching it to say the least. The net effect is to de-emphasize the killing of 3 million and over-emphasize the death of 1.2 million. This is as much an issue of definition as anything. By setting this case in its own separate category, you elevate and redefine it in a way that is not entirely accurate. There is no question that Poles do share some responsibility for what happened regardless of prior German crimes against Poles or communist domination. Nevertheless, to see it as a separate "democidal phenomenon" unconnected to events that victimized all ethnic Germans throughout eastern Europe, to the actions of ethnic Germans themselves, to Soviet and Allied policies (namely mass population transfers), and to the overall collapse of social and economic order is to distort what happened. In summary, your site raises important issues and Poles need to discuss and respond to them in a thoughtful and serious manner. As I noted above, a great deal more research needs to be done here. For example, where are the mass of graves of the ethnic Germans in eastern Poland? Nevertheless, your site also remains unconvincing for the reasons noted above. Sincerely, John Radzilowski, Ph.D. P.S. This page is confusingly titled "Statistics of Poland's Genocide and Mass Murder," which again is liable to cause a great deal of confusion. Who is doing the genocide and the mass murder? As noted above it would be quite difficult to construe the case of the ethnic Germans as genocide, so this merely looks like verbal inflation. Also, the tag line at the bottom of the page reads "Democracy (Freedom) is a Method of Nonviolence--Power Kills." This may be a pretty slogan but it makes virtually no sense. Democracy can in no way be equated to freedom. Russia and Haiti are both democracies, though hardly free. The early United States was a democracy but practiced systematic slavery. Nor is democracy necessarily non-violent. Many functioning democracies suffer violence, especially around election time, and many commit violent acts, as the indigenous inhabitants of the United States found out. The final part of the phrase makes the least sense of all. Are to we to read this to say that power does not exist in a democracy or under conditions of freedom? If so, that's easily disproved. Power may kill but it may also build schools, libraries, parks, hospitals, and sports stadiums. Power exists as a function of human groups and is neither inherently good nor bad. As such statements to do not add to the credibility of the page, I'd suggest removing them. P.P.S. In regards to Table 2.1A-B, I am curious as to whether you've taken into account more recent scholarship lowering the number of killed during the First Crusade in Jerusalem (1099) and during the Inquisition and why mass killings by Protestant England are ignored. Furthermore, to include the incidental death by disease of Native Americans after 1492 is highly questionable. In regards to Poland (2.1B), the Khmelnitsky rebellion that began in 1648 did not kill merely Jews, but Poles and Ukrainians as well. This was primarily an action by Cossack rebels, not Poles, although Polish retaliations were often very brutal (as under Prince Jeremy Wisnowiecki). The total body count is very uncertain here as is the proportion of dead of various ethno-religious groups, although it may have been as high as 500,000. The table states it as "massacres of Jews," which is not at all correct. (I'm afraid Martin Gilbert is an extremely poor source for Polish history.) It is also curious that while you include dead in Moscow during the Polish occupation of 1611 (a figure probably drawn out of a hat by nationalist Russian historians) you ignore the mass killing of Poles (and others) by Russian invasion and occupation forces in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. I see killings by Swedish forces during the Deluge of 1656-66 are omitted as well. I find the stated criteria you use to include or exclude various events highly confusing as well as the notion of "democide" being separate from war. cc: Editor, Polonia Today (Chicago); Editor, Tygodnik Polski (Detroit); R. Tyndorf, CPC; Poland-L listserv.
