R.M. Douglas > Quotes

“In the end, however, he found himself “not so much concerned regarding what is happening to the German population as I am regarding our own standard of conduct, because I feel that if we are willing to compromise on certain principles in respect of the Germans or any other people, progressively it may become too easy for us to sacrifice those same principles in regard to our own people.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“a German Criminal Police investigation in 1940 calculated that 5,437 civilian members of the German minority had been killed by the Poles during the five-week-long “September Campaign”—although, typically, Goebbels inflated that figure more than tenfold in the version he released for public consumption.23 More recent scholarship suggests a death toll of 4,500 is nearer the mark.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“military government in all three zones was “anxious to do everything possible to get the Germans to accept persons coming from the East as their own people, and not to regard them as foreigners foisted upon them.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“whatever the criterion of purity for the time being, if it is to achieve the ends for which it is advocated the policy of transfer must have as its corollary a continuous policy of segregation. Migration or any free movement of people would have to be prohibited lest it should lead to the gradual creation of new unwanted and irritating minorities.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Except in a very few instances, deportations as a result of mob action did not feature in the Europe of 1945. Rather, the so-called “wild expulsions” were in almost every case carried out by troops, police, and militia, acting under orders and more often than not executing policies laid down at the highest levels. The notion that true “wild expulsions” were taking place, nonetheless, amply suited the interests of the expelling governments, which were more than happy to allow the myth to grow. It enabled them to disclaim responsibility for the atrocities that were essential components of the operation; supplied fictitious but plausible evidence for the proposition that the German minorities must be removed or face immediate massacre at the hands of their neighbors; and strengthened the argument that the only humane alternative to “wild expulsions” was a program of “organized transfers” to be carried out by the Allies themselves.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“everything that brings home to the Germans the completeness and irrevocability of their defeat is worthwhile in the end.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“by the time the operation was concluded, the number of able-bodied and skilled workers who had been included in the expulsions was described as “ridiculously low.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Under Hitler’s direct order, about five hundred Poles from the town were executed. The Security Police also carried out a search of the Schwedenhöhe suburb for suspects, in the course of which approximately two hundred more people were killed.25”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Let nobody fall back on the excuse that the Germans have done the same things. Either we are qualified to stand as their judges, in which case we cannot conduct ourselves as they do, or we are no different from them, and give up the right to judge them.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“For decades to come, these borderland regions would remain the most sparsely populated and undeveloped parts of the countries to which they belonged.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Even the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) maintained a discriminatory stance, assigning priority in the provision of aid to the children of “victims of aggression” and relegating those of German background to the end of the queue.55”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“An early portent was provided when patients in psychiatric hospitals in Gdynia, Stettin, and Swinemünde were murdered under the Nazi “T-4” euthanasia program to enable the facilities to be used as temporary accommodation for some of the incoming Deutschbalten.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“We would not be National Socialists if we did not possess the unshakable belief that we will succeed in making men with German blood into enthusiastic Germans through our leadership and education”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“It was not until 1953, however, that a residents’ building cooperative managed to construct enough dwelling units to enable most of the original camp cohort to leave. Their places were taken by more recent arrivals from Czechoslovakia, the remnants of the German minority allowed to stay in 1948 by the Prague government, so the final closure of Dachau as an ethnic German housing facility took place only in 1965.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“It was Hácha’s troops and police, not Hitler’s, that rounded up approximately twenty thousand Sudetendeutsch anti-Nazis, most of them Social Democrats, and deported them to Germany where they disappeared into concentration camps.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Whatever the true figure may have been, it is thought that no more than 15 percent of the abductees were ever reunited with their parents.7”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“the popular mood with respect to the Sudetendeutsche as “very radical…. A thorough reduction in their numbers seems to be a general demand at present.”29 This was, in all likelihood, an exaggeration. ÚVOD, the central council of the Czechoslovak resistance movement, consistently took a more extreme position on postwar matters than the majority of ordinary citizens, a reflection of the predominance of military officers among its membership.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Although both the expelling countries and the Western Allies had subscribed in 1926 to the International Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which stipulated that children were to “be the first to receive relief in times of distress” without taking into account “considerations of race, nationality or creed,” this remained a dead letter throughout.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“The main obstacle, though, was the toxic brew of bureaucratic infighting, institutional confusion, last-minute changes of plan, and clashing objectives that stultified almost every major initiative undertaken by the Nazi state. Initially, Himmler and the RKFDV—aided by two lieutenants, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“the occasionally somewhat exasperated hosts of the Czechoslovak government in exile, were most immediately concerned with trying to conform Beneš’s initiatives to Allied war aims. Philip Nichols, a Foreign Office diplomat appointed in 1942 as British ambassador to—and to a still greater extent, minder of—the London Czechoslovaks, repeatedly made clear to Beneš that the denunciation of the Munich Pact did not necessarily commit the Allies to restore the Czechoslovak borders of September 1938, or indeed any particular borders at all.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“the Allied authorities would still have to reckon with the entry of “some 6 million persons—say, 1 1/2 million families—into a country already short of well over 4 million dwellings. The new houses which the building industry, working at maximum output, could provide would hardly touch the fringe of this problem.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Even in this sphere, he remarked, the lure of easy money was becoming “a moral temptation, and the scramble for German property has been not unlike a Californian gold rush, or the distribution of the spoils which followed Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“Even a transit camp in a devastated Germany on the brink of famine offered its inmates a better prospect of survival than continued incarceration at home.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“The Hungarian case, therefore, is a vivid illustration of the truth that expulsions that could not be carried out immediately could not be carried out at all. As an unsympathetic Molotov told Rákosi in 1948, “You missed the favourable moment.”78”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“A great deal of official concern was expressed about the demoralizing effects of extended sojourns in camp environments, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung feared would lead to the appearance of a pathological sociological subtype, Homo barackensis: “Homo barackensis has taught humankind in the twentieth century a dreadful truth: progress, humanity, and self-esteem exist only in the context of an unbroken world.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“forced to wear armbands identifying them as German, and undergoing the death-by-inches punishment of “German rations” troubled an increasing number of Czechoslovak consciences. The newspaper Nová doba, for example, carried a series of articles in the summer of 1946 devoted to the plight of ethnic Czechs who were “condemned by Czechs and the Czech Republic for taking their German partner at a time when that was no treason.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“It was inappropriate, he argued, to apply Western concepts of human rights to Slavs. “Whilst the conditions under which the Polish are expelling Germans may seem to us inhumane, the Polish—like the Russians—have different standards from ourselves.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“At the suggestion of Walter Mann, State Commissioner for Refugees in Greater Hesse, part of Adolf Hitler’s complex at Berchtesgaden was used to provide housing for Sudetendeutsche.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“It seems to me inconceivable that 4 1/2 million civilians could have extricated themselves from the path of the astonishingly rapid Russian advances of the last fortnight, even if they had wished to.”37”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War

“the final closure of Dachau as an ethnic German housing facility took place only in 1965.”
― R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War