Their new leader, Klement Gottwald, who became prime minister, was intent on securing their hold on power and delighted to play by rules set in Moscow. Revolution rolled across the country, fueled by a desire to conquer the past and run through “the wide-open gates of the millennium.”53 Czech politicians, who acted without being pressured by the Kremlin, led the surge toward a more collectivist future, carried along by ideas shared by Communists, Social Democrats, and members of other parties. A land reform in May confiscated large tracts of property, and in July the state nationalized the banks and large industry. The Communists, surprised at winning such hearty support, reported to Moscow that they had made breakthroughs among the workers and even in the countryside.54
Regardless of such backing, the Czech Communists and their Soviet advisers assumed that control of the security apparatus would be crucial to getting and holding power. The Communist minister of the interior, Václav Nosek, set out to centralize and control Czechoslovakia’s security apparatus and its secret police—the State Security StB (Státní bezpečnost).55 Although after the elections of 1946, the minority parties persisted in trying to limit Communist control of the StB and other branches of the security system, neither Gottwald nor Rudolf Slánský, the general secretary of the Czech Communist Party, would hear of such a thing. With remarkable speed, they succeeded in having party comrades appointed to key security positions all over the country. They used materials gathered from all sources, including incarcerated Nazi police, to blacken the names of political opponents.56
The new regime gained considerable popular support by driving out the German minority. In the 1946 elections, people who moved into formerly German-dominated regions of Czechoslovakia voted overwhelmingly for the Communists, especially in what used to be the Sudetenland. There the party got three-quarters of the ballots.57 Moreover, the new regime won both legitimacy and gratitude from the new residents, who were more deeply tied to and dependent on the state. A similar pattern of reliance on, and solidarity with, the government can be discerned for the Poles who moved into parts of their new country that had formerly been German.58
The Czechoslovakians wanted still more ethnic cleansing and yearned to get rid of their Hungarian minority, which exceeded 400,000 people. Given those numbers in the southern part of Slovakia, the operation would have been another brutal one. Stalin initially told the Czech leaders he would support such a “transfer,” but the idea was gradually dropped because of objections from the Hungarian government, as well as Soviet officials on the spot.59
The big news on the national scene in 1946 was that Czechoslovakia would be taking its own “special path” to socialism and would not have to follow the Soviet model. Prime Minister Gottwald made this announcement after meeting with Stalin in September. The coalition government soon convened and agreed unanimously on a two-year plan. That measure did not go far enough for the Communists, and in January 1947 they proclaimed their intention to win an absolute majority in the next elections. Even so, their opponents were unable to form a unified front to stop this looming threat to their existence.60
WINNING SUPPORT THROUGH ETHNIC CLEANSING IN POLAND
When Władysław Sikorski, president of Poland’s government-in-exile, went to Moscow in late 1941, Stalin took him aside and offered German lands in the west as compensation for what Poland would lose in the east. In a speech back in London, Sikorski promised his people protection from the “German horde that for centuries had pressed to the east.” His government would obtain secure borders, and it would grant full legal equality to all—with the exception of the ethnic Germans.61
Churchill shared some of Stalin’s ideas on “transferring” populations. As early as December 1940, the prime minister mused in private that certain “exchanges of population would have to take place.”62 He was transfixed by the allure of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, which had ended the bitter conflict between Turkey and Greece. It mandated an exchange of populations from the contested regions. The process resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the enduring misery of the resettlers on both sides. Nevertheless, Churchill and others in the anti-Hitler coalition overlooked the costs and pointed to the benefits. As he had put it in a speech to the British House of Commons on December 15, 1944, expelling the minorities would mean there would “be no mixture of the populations to cause endless trouble.”63
Given such attitudes in the West, which were matched and outdone in Moscow, the Polish government had a green light to proceed with the expulsion of those Germans who stubbornly refused to flee on their own. At a February 1945 sitting of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, First Secretary Władysław Gomułka declared that all forces in society had to focus on “removing completely the Germans from historically Polish lands.” In May he told the party’s Central Committee “that if we don’t Polonize the formerly German areas, then we will have no basis to take what they [the Allies] don’t want to give us. We have to work out all the details of a plan for the resettlement action. We will have to provide the means. Extending the country to the West and a land reform binds the nation to the system.” He said that unless they managed to move Poles into the new western parts, the administration would fall into the hands of the Red Army, and the Germans who had fled might be allowed to return. Gomułka said they had to throw out all the Germans to create a country built on a national, and not on a multinational, basis. Stalin most certainly approved, and indeed the Soviets were already evicting their own “Poles and Jews” from former eastern Poland. Many of those people were encouraged to move to the new west of Poland.64
Polish officials, in cooperation with the Soviet Union, took over those liberated areas in eastern Germany. In the spring of 1945, the British and Americans objected that they should not take such far-reaching steps until after a peace conference. Molotov answered that they were only entrusting the administration of the areas to the Poles “as a matter of convenience,” and since nearly all the Germans had left, the Poles had become the “basic population.”65
For Gomułka, the link between driving out the Germans and winning support for Communism was self-evident. He told the party’s Central Committee that it had to station guards at the new borders and “throw out the Germans, and for any that remain we must create such conditions that they do not want to stay.”66
In June, Polish authorities were alarmed to learn that some Germans who had been driven out were beginning to return, unhindered by the Red Army, which was unable to cope with the influx of refugees into its occupation zone in Germany. Warsaw wanted the returnees stopped and ordered expulsions, initially along the new border up to a distance of 18.6 miles. The orders, like those issued to the Polish 5th Infantry Division on June 21, were prefaced with the statement that “a great day in Polish history has arrived: the expulsion of the Germanic vermin.”67 An army report expressed mild “surprise” at the “ever greater increase” in the number of rapes committed by soldiers. It mentioned the “development of a psychosis as to the legitimacy of rape as an act of retaliation” against German women.68