Chapter II: 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.

“We want to live! Stop the dismantling!”—Reich Works
Salzgitter-Wattenstedt.
]

“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.”
]

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.