Pilgrims of the night
Date: 2026-04-20T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Political refugees

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Title: Pilgrims of the night

A study of expelled peoples

Author: Edward Ernest Swanstrom

Author of introduction, etc.: Francis Spellman

Release date: April 20, 2026 [eBook #78506]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78506

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT ***

Pilgrims of the Night

PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT

A Study of Expelled Peoples

by

RT. REV. EDWARD E. SWANSTROM

with a foreword by

HIS EMINENCE
FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN

SHEED and WARD
New York ··· 1950

Copyright, 1950, by Sheed & Ward, Inc.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Foreword

The Holy Year of Our Lord, 1950, comes at mid-century of an era of anguish for the children of men. The precious blood of millions of men, women and little children of nearly every country has been spilled in a world still torn by suffering and strife, and other millions of maimed, sick and destitute still roam homeless throughout lands disfigured by wounds of war.

Monsignor Swanstrom has personally visited many of these lands and been witness to the grief and sufferings of many of these misery-ridden peoples. Of them and their desolation and agony he writes with understanding and compassion, and I pray that those who may be fortunate pilgrims to the Shrines of the Apostles during the Holy Year, and all who live in our blessed land of liberty and bounty, will remember with prayers and active charity God’s pitiful pilgrims who, with heart-rending truth, have been called, “Pilgrims of the Night.”

Archbishop of New York

Cardinal’s Residence
452 Madison Avenue
New York 22

Contents

Chap. I. | The Dispossessed | 1
II. | Men and Work | 11
III. | Men and Slave Labor | 24
IV. | The Women | 36
V. | The Children | 47
VI. | The Priests | 58
VII. | Two Bishops and Their Burdens | 74
VIII. | The Long Procession | 90

Pilgrims of the Night

CHAPTER I
The Dispossessed

It was shortly before the halfway point in this our twentieth century that I drove through thousands upon thousands of tons of rubble, the undifferentiated remains of an ancient city. What were once the homes of man, his houses of worship, all the gathering-places of a city that had sheltered the spirits and bodies of men down through the ages, were now anonymous and monstrous heaps of ruin.

As I drove to the home of His Eminence, Cardinal Frings, the Archbishop of Cologne, I realized more vividly than ever the effects of total war on the inarticulate people of the many nations; on the men who were obliged to take part in this organized killing, on the women, mothers of families, and on their children, whose bodies moulder under the broken stones of so many towns and villages of an old continent. I felt about the violent half-century already drawing to a close (five decades of the most intensive destruction yet seen on the planet), as the poet had felt about an earlier era: “May it rest in peace, as it has lived in war.”

When Cardinal Frings received me, I thought he might make a point of the necessity of rebuilding a destroyed country, or of finishing the repairs on the ancient, partly bombed Cologne Cathedral. But his concern was for a more urgent problem, that of the living temples of the Holy Ghost, who have been herded into the ruins of Germany since May 1945, when the shooting war ended. War Relief Services-National Catholic Welfare Conference, as the official agency of the Bishops of America for relief to devastated countries, has done all in its power to ease the lot of these late refugees, but despite the earmarking of the majority of relief shipments for these dispossessed peoples, the problem is still staggering in its immensity. The Holy Father appointed Cardinal Frings as Special Protector of all these refugees within the borders of Germany.

As a result of a special agreement reached at Potsdam, the Germanic groups living in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were to be sent back within the borders of Germany in “an orderly and humane manner.” The Allies only took responsibility for the expulsion. German welfare organizations, both public and private, were to take care of all housing, food and other needs of the expellees. German authorities were told to expect an influx of 6,000,000 people.

However, the idea of mass expulsion, so much used by the Nazis during the course of the war, now took hold of the Councils of the Allies, and before long, the Yugoslav citizens of German origin who had settled in certain sections by special invitation more than three hundred years before were gathered into camps or driven across the border into Austria. Groups of people were likewise expropriated in Rumania and driven into Austria and Germany. Native Germans living in East Prussia, in Pomerania in Silesia, were also driven from their homes, while those who had fled before the Russian armies in what they thought was a temporary exodus were forbidden to return to their businesses, their homes and their well-kept farms.

With its welfare set-up weakened and without adequate resources, with its housing already damaged or destroyed by 40 per cent, with all social life in chaos, ‘rump Germany’ accepted a flood of nearly 12,000,000 men, women and children. They were destitute, carrying with them hardly more than the clothes on their backs. Leaving behind as barren deserts the areas that became productive because of their agricultural and productive skills, these unfortunates brought increased chaos and greater want into the areas that had to accept them.

These new Refugees are known as the Expellee Group. Their problems are not as well-known as those of that other homeless, exiled group, the Displaced Persons, because the DPs rightly became the concern of the Allied Nations and are being resettled under the direction of IRO (International Refugee Organization).

Since 1943, War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. has followed and cared for the exiles thrown off by a world at war. The Catholics of the United States have, through their delegates, been at the side of the Polish exiles who escaped after their unspeakable sufferings in Siberia and Asiatic Russia. Priests and lay Catholics from the United States went to such areas as Iran, India, North and East Africa, Mexico and British Isles to set up more than 250 welfare centers for those deported and exiled peoples.

As soon as it was possible to serve the Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and other groups liberated from the Nazi yoke, a wholehearted program of aid was initiated. Now nineteen offices staffed by American directors serve the DPs throughout Germany, Austria and Italy. Thousands upon thousands of Catholic DPs are being resettled in new homes in the United States and other countries through the emigration programs of the N.C.W.C.

At this moment, about 300,000 DPs remain, out of the enormous total of 1,500,000 which UNRRA took over after the war. The donations of the Catholics of America in the Bishops’ Laetare Sunday collection have made it possible to give these important services and also to approach a final solution of the DP problem.

The IRO has been an expression of international concern for DPs and has been the means of coordinating emigration plans and providing transportation to lands of resettlement. This specialized agency of the United Nations is now planning with private charitable agencies for the welfare of those DPs who cannot emigrate, the so-called “Hard Core.”

But no international agency has protected the millions of expellees. No group of governments has banded together to solve this problem which was, after all, internationally created.

The Expellees have been solely the concern of local German agencies, including the public welfare agencies, private welfare agencies, notably Caritas, the Catholic Charities of Germany, and the Evangelical or Lutheran Aid Society.

It was for these, the Expellees, that Cardinal Frings pleaded, like a father pleading for helpless stricken children. He told me that the relief supplies of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. had saved countless lives among this almost forgotten group, and he expressed his most earnest wish that we would not consider the problem solved and withdraw our help. He told me how heavily the problem of the Diaspora Catholics (those expelled Catholics who live in the northern areas of Germany without churches or schools) lay on the heart of each and every Catholic Bishop. For this reason a special Catholic Study Committee has been set up to find ways to meet the problem.

I told the Cardinal that I planned to see with my own eyes, as a means of giving a firsthand report to the Bishops of the United States, how these Diaspora Catholics lived in dioceses where one out of two Catholics is a homeless, destitute expellee.

The problem of expellees was not new to me, since I had been in Germany in 1945, right after the end of hostilities. I had come to set up a program for the Displaced Persons, innocent men and women and even children who had been impressed into slave labor for the Nazi war machine, or who had fled from such areas as the Baltic States before the second arrival of the armies from the East.

I had seen the cattle cars come into various towns of Germany. I had been present when these first transports were opened up, and the weary people, from aged grandmothers to little babies in their mothers’ arms, emerged into the daylight, into the ruins of railroad stations. I had stood with other witnesses as the dead and the dying were carried from the cars, and I had seen nameless expellees die right before my eyes on the cold stone of the station floor. These mass expulsions were the result of a theory of mass guilt, a theory which makes every single human being, in a given group, responsible for the actions of the leaders of the group. Thus even babies and little children are punished as guilty entities, in the same way as Hitler killed even little Jewish children as members of a race that he, in the obscenity of his racial hatred, considered guilty as a whole.

The Bishops of the United States spoke up against these mass expulsions in no uncertain terms. In 1946, when the deportations were at their height, and few voices were heard in defense of a recent enemy, the Administrative Board of N.C.W.C., in the name of the Bishops of the entire United States, made the following statement:

“Something has been happening in Europe which is new in the annals of recorded history. By agreement among the victors, millions of Germans who for centuries have lived in Eastern Europe are being forced from their homes, without resources, into the heart of Germany. The sufferings of these people in their weary travels, the homelessness of them, and the hopelessness, make a sad story of the inhumanity of their transplantation. Had there prevailed in the councils of the victor nations a right appreciation of the dignity of man, at least arrangements would have been made for transplanting these people in a humane way. We boast of our democracy, but in this transplantation of peoples we have perhaps unwittingly allowed ourselves to be influenced by the herd theory of heartless totalitarian political philosophy.

In the first days of peace they were locked in the cattle cars. Here the steps are placed against the locked cars so that the people can emerge into exile.

Owning only the clothes on their backs, the Expellees walk into the night of homelessness and destitution.

Child Expellees, thrust across frontiers, descend from a transport.

Some, mostly the helpless aged and the helpless young, died on the way; others arrived like this and died later.

The reports of the deportation of thousands in areas of Soviet aggression to remote and inhospitable regions just because they cannot subscribe to Communism tell of a cruel violation of human rights. These men are men and have the rights of men. Our sympathy also goes out to the technicians and skilled workers in enemy countries who have been seized and forced to work for the strengthening of the economy of victorious nations. It is not in this way that peace is made and the nations are united in mutual cooperation. No lasting good can ever come from the violation of the dignity of the human person.”

In the same year, the World Protestant leaders made a moving protest in these words:

“The Provisional Committee of the World Council of Churches is persuaded that this policy, aggravated as it is by the compulsory transfer of large numbers of people from other countries into a smaller Germany, ought to be re-examined, lest, by condemning millions of Germans either to be fed by charity for an indefinite period or to die from starvation until the population fits the new frontier, it bring ruin, not only upon Germany, but on Europe.”

The Catholic Bishops of America, as Fathers of the Poor, spoke out for all the poor—and who could be more poor than those driven like herds of cattle across frontiers without homes, or bread? They denounced the deportations of Eastern Europeans to Siberia, and of conquered peoples to slave labor in Nazi Germany, and of masses of Germanic Europeans to post-war Germany, in exactly the same terms—as a violation of the rights of man. These same Bishops had supported the war effort of the United States precisely because our country, in company with its Allies, was fighting a war to vindicate the common humanity of all men of all races.

They had called for the utmost sacrifice in the country’s service so that the bestiality of aggressive warfare, of extermination camps, of mass expulsions, could be erased from our generation. Their whole denunciation of persecution, and call to retribution, was based on the principle that men have rights that are inviolable, and they included in the category of men, all our enemies.

A man’s moral principles are put to the test, not so much in his treatment of his friends, of those he loves, as in his treatment of his enemies. All the qualities of forbearance, of respect for human personality, of obedience to strict justice, are strained when he has in his charge those who have been or are his enemies. This is equally true of nations. If there is any general acceptance of the thinking that the innocent men and women and children among the Expellees deserved their fate because of their racial stock, then it would seem that a moral catastrophe has come upon those who fought in the name of moral principles.

There are those who, unconsciously sharing the un-Christian concept of mass guilt, do not press for help to the expellees, or for a solution of the immense problems. Because of lack of full information, many people do not yet realize the crucial importance to the recovery of Europe of an organized approach to the whole matter of integration and resettlement of the millions of expellees now living in camps and barracks, airless bunkers and barns. It is not yet understood that this group hangs like a dead weight to impede the recovery of all of Western Europe. Many Catholics do not appreciate the moral and religious implications of the problems.

Sometimes it is easier to make a vivid and realistic picture of a problem if we describe it in terms of our own environment. The impact of the Expellee problem on a Germany reduced to three quarters of its former size, bombarded almost to a standstill, deprived of millions of its manpower by death and detention in Eastern Europe, would work out like this if it were applied to the United States. Suppose, God forbid, that one quarter of the wheat-producing and industrial territory of our country were ceded away, and that the greater part of our larger cities, including Detroit, Chicago, and all the port cities, were battered by bombs. Suppose that millions of men of active arms-bearing age were detained for years as Prisoners of War in other areas of the world. And then, suppose that all the populations of Canada and Mexico were driven into the United States as destitute refugees, having been forced to surrender their homes, their businesses, their farmlands, without compensation. It is easy to imagine the sufferings of so great an army of the dispossessed if they came wandering the roads of our nation, and it is easy to see how many of them might perish of cold, of hunger in the desolation of their enforced exile.

It is just such a situation that I shall write about in Europe. It is a situation from which our leaders and people alike have tended to turn away their heads. But no solution can ever be found unless we force ourselves to face problems in their reality—whether that reality be pleasant or not. By this time, the Expellees who could not survive the terrors of the road or cattle car, or the rigors of the first years of being homeless, have already perished. Estimates generally agree on the figure of a mortality of fifteen percent during the first year of expulsion. Now, the situation has settled down to a struggle for existence on the part of the Expellees—a struggle that would have resulted in death for many more were it not for the fact that charity still exists as a moving force in the world.

In the darkness of their bitter exile, their homelessness, their abandonment, in the hopelessness of their outlook toward the future, these Expellees, driven so heartlessly across frontiers, are, in the words of the old hymn, “Pilgrims of the Night.”

I shall try in a few short chapters to penetrate the terror and sorrow of their night of exile and to delineate for you a few of the experiences of these silent, joyless pilgrims. I shall record my visits to the various areas where the expellees live, and shall attempt to picture from these visits and from the special reports of various workers of our relief agency, the plight of little children, of women, of men, of priests, and even of Bishops, who make up this vast army of pilgrims of the night.

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.”

“We thought we would try to get to Hamburg ... there might be some kind of work.”

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.

CHAPTER III
Men and Slave Labor

There is a large camp near the center of Germany, close to the demarcation line between the Western and Eastern Republics of that divided nation, where the men held in slave labor by the Soviet Government are turned over once again to their families, to freedom. This collection of barracks is known as Camp Friedland, or Land of Peace. For some time, the Russian authorities have liberated between twenty and thirty thousand men every month through Friedland. In general, the men returned recently are adequately dressed and have received more or less the same food as Russian workers. Their appearance is vastly different from that of the skeleton-like creatures with bloated heads and feet that used to be returned in trainloads to their home country.

The day that I visited Friedland, there was no homecoming, so I had time to look at the installations of the camp—notably the Search Service. This is a Red Cross Service to help these men, often separated from their families for anywhere from four to seven years, to locate them again. The Search Service is located in a large Red Cross barracks, whose walls are decked with pictures of the missing. One picture showed a gang of slave laborers rebuilding a city of Eastern Europe. One man was facing the camera, and his features could be clearly distinguished. A notation underneath read:

“This is my husband. I have had no word from him for four years. Does anyone know where he is now or whether he is still among the living?”

Evidently no one had word of the fate of this man, and in the country where he is held for forced labor, communication with families is forbidden. I saw many other such appeals, mostly printed by the family of the lost man, and carrying a copy of his picture. These appeals are attached to walls and gathering places wherever former Prisoners of War congregate, and are a pathetic testimony to the power of human beings to hope against all hope.

One picture would show an ordinary middle-aged man, and underneath would be such a notice:

“This is our father. He wrote to us from the Eastern front and his comrades say he was captured near Orel. Our mother has died. Write to us if you have seen our Father. Greta and Johann Moschle.”

Then follows the address of the children.

Another such flimsy poster carried a picture of a young man and an appeal from a mother:

“My son Gerhard Foerster was never reported dead, but some of his comrades say he was taken prisoner at Rostov. Has anyone seen him in any mine or camp in Russia? He is my only child. He was born in 1926.”

The returned Prisoners of War scan these pictures, and if they have knowledge of the persons’ whereabouts, or of their death in captivity, they use the Red Cross Services to notify the families. Even a death notice is far better than the day-to-day anguish of waiting and not knowing. The Red Cross Search Services, as well as the Search Services of the Catholic and Lutheran Churches, all of which are integrated by exchange of cards, operate on a scientific basis. Every returned prisoner, after giving the number of the regiment in which he served, must go to the file where all men missing from that regiment are listed. He will then give information to a trained Red Cross worker about every one of the missing men he has seen at any time during his captivity. This information is annotated, and the family is informed without delay.

The room that is of the most urgent concern to the returned prisoner is that busy room with the teletype machine. Many of the men just returned do not know the precise addresses of their families, since so many were bombed-out during the war or expelled since the end of hostilities. As the men searching for their loved ones enter the teletype room, the information they have listed on a form is relayed to the Red Cross Headquarters in Hamburg. Here at Headquarters is the master file of all expelled families, unified with the files handed in by Caritas (Catholic) Search Service, and by the Lutheran Service. In as little as three hours, a man whose family has been expelled from Silesia, or the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, Danzig, East Prussia, Hungary, Rumania, or Yugoslavia, may hear the joyful news of their new address—even though this new address is clearly that of a barracks settlement.

But for many men, there is no news at all. They know that their families have been expelled. They sometimes learn that a daughter or a son has died in some place or another. But some wives or sons or daughters have died en route, or shortly after arriving, and have left no trace. In the terrible chaos of the great waves of expulsions, no listings of the dead and missing were possible. The men then wait around in the camps while additional searches are made, and finally if no news comes through, they wander back into an empty world and try to take up life again. Many, moreover, are sick. These are gathered into special homes for sick POW’s. Caritas in the diocese of Hildesheim has such a convalescent home, as has the diocese of Paderborn—as have most of the areas of Germany. This is the last bitter end of the double tragedy of expulsion and slave labor—two of the things for whose obliteration we entered the war in the first place.

There are many such men in hospitals, and it is hard to meet the misery of their eyes. They tell how they wrote to their old address in Silesia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or Poland proper, and how the letter was returned, or how no answer came back at all. Among this group there is a well of misery whose depths no one can plumb—a misery only equalled by that monstrous suffering inflicted by the Nazi regime on innocent people during the years of the war.

In Friedland that day there were some of these men—men who had been lost four or five years in the depths of Russia, and now upon liberation were doubly lost, because life had taken away all trace of those who were dear to them, even their children. The Caritas Director translated their stories for me, stories that in any other age would have been so extraordinary that the teller would have been doubted by his fellows, but today have become the everyday tales of drafted, deported, dispossessed and brutalized humanity.

One, I remember, was a young man in his twenties. He was drafted from his home in Silesia. After being captured on the Eastern front, he was put to work in a Soviet mine even while the war was going on. The food, he said, was indescribably bad those first years, but it was similar to the food of the Russian miners themselves. In 1946 and 1947, as conditions in Russia improved, so did the food served to the slave laborers in the mines. The working hours were shortened, and life became more bearable physically. All the weaker among the forced laborers died during the first three years of captivity, he explained. Men dropped on all sides of him, and no one was informed of their deaths. Those who survived the first two years were the hardiest and the toughest. The hope of being reunited with their families, of seeing again their native villages, helped these men to cling to life in the most desolate hours.

For this young man there was no return to his native village, since it had already changed hands. Ever since the day of his return, the Red Cross had been trying to locate his mother and father and sister, but not a trace of them had been found anywhere. The whole village had been evacuated, and other Expelled families from the same area were listed with the Search Services.

As his parents were rather old, they might have perished anonymously as did so many older people, during the hard days of the flight of the millions from the East to the West. As for his sister, she also had vanished without trace. There had been at that time, many transports of women towards the East, and perhaps this man’s sister was one of the thousands of women of the vanquished who had been carried off almost like the booty that pagan barbarian armies carried off after battle so long ago.

It was hard to say anything to this young man, because words of comfort would sound unreal. He is one of many who, after each transport of returnees, wait behind for word that does not come, for reunions that will never happen.

I asked a delegate of War Relief Services to meet one of the large transports of Heimkehrer (returnees) at Friedland. I received a short report of the human aspect of the event:

“We had been told to expect the release of the 1,700 POW’s at 11 o’clock in the morning. I was at Camp Friedland in time to see Father Krahe set up his supplies—cigarettes, cakes (given by citizens of the localities nearby), cocoa, bread, and such prized amenities as soap and shaving cream.

“Father Krahe always meets the men of the transports as they come past the barrier into the Western zones, and he told me that many men were already informed in Moscow that a priest would be stationed there to greet them. Actually, Father Krahe is not “stationed” there in the strict sense of the term. He has volunteered for this job because his own locality suffered little during the war years, and as a young priest, he wanted to be of some service to the seething mass of humanity displaced since the peace. He has set up a very practical barracks chapel decorated by a striking painting of Our Lady protecting by her mantle the dispossessed and the homeless. Father Krahe gives real service to the “Hard Core” of returned prisoners—those whose families are missing.

“A message came through from the Soviet barrier that the men would not be released until three o’clock in the afternoon. We toured the Camp and inspected the Red Cross Search Service and at three P.M. we were ready at the barrier for the men to start streaming through. Camp Friedland is several miles from the barrier where the men are set free.

“Between the Soviet and Western Zones of Germany there is a No-Man’s Land, the width of about two city blocks. The road is blocked off by sentry boxes and by wooden barriers at each end of the No-Man’s Land.

They came back from slave labor in Russia broken in body, embittered in spirit.

Camp Friedland. The men began to stream through. They were dressed in remnants of Wehrmacht uniforms four years after.

Camp Friedland. The boy at the right is 21 and has known five years of slave labor. He kneels with a comrade to thank God for deliverance.

The doctor, so tired from the return journey that he could hardly walk, was the one who had to give the news of the death of a 25-year-old prisoner during the trip.

“At three o’clock we saw the men lined up beyond the Soviet Zone barrier. They made no sound, and stood quite still. It was not until nearly six o’clock that evening that the barrier was raised on the Soviet side. I stationed myself inside the No-Man’s Land and the men began to stream through. They were dressed in remnants of old torn Wehrmacht uniforms, four years after. Many of them had a sort of blue outfit, with Russian type padded jackets. Under their arms or on their back they carried shapeless bundles, or wooden valises. For more than half an hour they trudged by, and as they came they cried out many things. One young man yelled: “Now after five years, we can laugh again!” Many, seeing a priest standing at the barrier in the Western zone, called out the Catholic greeting “Gruss Gott,” and some shouted, “God be thanked that we are here.” An old man and his daughter who were waiting at the side of the road suddenly entered the line and put their arms around a young prisoner. Until that moment, he had marched like anyone else, but he was so overcome with the joy of seeing them, that they had to help him walk the rest of the way. Sobs broke out from him, and the sister and father wept with him as they walked along.

“Lastly came the sick, who were transferred from Soviet trucks to waiting ambulances, and last of all came an old bearded man. He was a doctor who had been taken prisoner, and he was so tired that he could hardly walk. His wife, who had been waiting for him, saw him just as he left the Russian barrier, and she ran all the way to the Russian side to greet and support him. He had been in captivity five years, and he was worn and ill.

“As he came slowly up the highway in the No-Man’s Land leading to the barrier, I could see how heavily he leaned on his wife.

“All this time, a tired thin man had been sitting on the grass on the opposite side of the road from me. He had taken off his shoes, as though he had walked a long way to get to Camp Friedland.

“When the doctor finally reached the barrier, this man got up, and with his shoes still in his hand, approached him to find out if there were any more men on the transport. The doctor explained that he was the oldest, and the last. All the sick had preceded him.

“The inquirer explained that he had come to Camp Friedland because his son, a young man of 25, had been able to notify him that he would be released on this special transport. The doctor asked for the young man’s name. Then the tired old doctor performed his last sad duty of the return journey, a journey that had taken 14 days in all, including the trip in rough, wooden coaches from Moscow. The young man, he explained, had died on the train, before loving arms could welcome him home.

“The father, who had waited so quietly and patiently all the day long, and for the years preceding this day, walked quietly back to where he had been sitting and sank down on the grass, his face grey.

“Back in Camp Friedland the men who were well enough were lining up for their first meal as we drove in. The sick were being served in the barracks hospital. Even the men who look well often have serious internal disorders, especially heart and kidney diseases.

“They did not mind our photographing them outside the sickrooms, or on the food line. They made many jokes, and told us how grateful to God they were for being liberated from Paradise.

“Meanwhile, a few men gathered quietly in the Catholic Chapel. The greater part of the transport, however, was composed of Protestant men from the northwestern sections of Germany.

“One young man with a child’s face knelt quietly in the chapel. He was just twenty-one and had endured five years of slave labor in the Soviet mines. He had been impressed into the Wehrmacht at the age of sixteen. He was serene and composed, partly because he had been in touch with his parents during his captivity by means of the special Postcard service permitted in some forced labor areas. He was to go to his home the very next day, right after his registration and his checking of the file of men still missing from his unit.”

There are uncounted men still held in slave labor. Some maintain that 1,500,000 men have died in Soviet camps and mines and that their deaths have been unreported, thus leaving a labor pool of 400,000 men still in Russian hands. Some of these, who are classified as war criminals, will not be freed, but it was expected that all ordinary drafted soldiers, whose actions of attack and defense were substantially the same as those of any drafted soldier, would be released in the regular transports.

The figures, however, are hard to reconcile, as this excerpt from a New York Times release will show:

“One year ago the Western allies recapitulated the situation according to communiques issued on the Russian side during the war. The total of 3,730,995 prisoners mentioned differed sharply from Deputy Premier Vyacheslav Molotov’s figure of 890,532 still in the Soviet Union in March, 1947.

Prisoners repatriated from Russia to March 1, 1948, totaled 252,395 by Mr. Molotov’s reckoning. That would have left 3,478,600 still detained there by Western reckoning. Even after deducting 500,000 for possible Austrians and ‘Volksdeutsche,’ almost 2,000,000 Germans would still have been awaiting discharge.” (New York Times, Jan. 11, 1950.)

These figures do not include the approximately 80,000 Italian soldiers still listed as being held in Russia, nor the Hungarians, Rumanians, or other men captured in war and never released.

A sizeable percentage of the men released from forced labor are dispossessed and homeless, and find their expelled families in one-room homes in wooden barracks, or even in mass quarters in old castles and hotels. But the return of these men is the signal for the family to take heart again and to begin a new life with the increased strength of the family unit. Each father who returns home decreases the bitterness of some among the millions of German children who knew their fathers were slaves, and whose resistance to teachings of democracy stemmed from a knowledge that the democratic nations of the West had given their name to slave labor at Yalta. Reparations in blood was not one of the ways to erase the crimes of the warring German nation.

Mass homecomings such as the one described above are now no more. The Soviet authorities have made an announcement that has caused a pall to descend over hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the length and breadth of Germany—the simple announcement that repatriation of German prisoners of war from the Soviet Union has been concluded. The mothers, the wives, the children who hoped against hope for an eventual reunion have gone into mourning. The fate of a vast host of men is unknown.

There are so many who are still held in the far reaches of Siberia and Soviet Asia in forced labor, not only Germans captured in war, but Austrian and Hungarian soldiers and unnumbered innocent civilians from Poland and the Baltic States, that we who can help in no other way must at least join in the great prayer of the Vicar of Christ for the Holy Year:

“May the Holy Year be for all men ... the year of the great return and of the great pardon.... Grant, O Lord, to the Refugees and Prisoners a homeland, and to all men, Thy grace.”

CHAPTER IV
The Women

If there is not complete moral chaos and nihilism among the Expellees of Western Europe, I would give most credit to the tremendous spiritual strength and homemaking capacity of the women and mothers in the Expellee group.

After they—with their children, with the old people of the family, and with or without their husbands—were thrust out of their homes and farms in such sections as the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia, Silesia, and East Prussia, these women found themselves unloaded into almost uninhabitable barns, half-destroyed hotels, or barracks, often temporary structures put up for unfortunate prisoners of war or slave laborers in Germany. The world knows that for these slave laborers, there was little comfort or sanitary convenience from their Nazi overlords; and it was because of this that so many of them died or came out broken in health at the end of hostilities.

It is hard to imagine that in time of peace, innocent families, including millions of women and children and old people, were crowded obscenely into these same slave labor and PW barracks which were the shame of the Nazi regime. Having been thrust into the left-over shelters in Western Germany, forty per cent of whose housing had already been destroyed or damaged by bombing, these families were made the care of already overburdened local welfare agencies.

I saw these swarms of people in the camps right after they came out of the cattle cars that brought them from their ancestral homes. I saw the agony of the mothers as they tried to keep alive the spark of life in dying babies, or as they sat over the straw bed of a feverish boy or girl. In those days the homes of the Expellees were called “Lagers” (camps).

Again in 1949, five years later, I visited the Lagers and found the same people living in these same buildings that should never have housed human beings. I referred to their quarters as Lagers, and I was told, “These are now barracks-homes” (Wohnungs-Baracken). In my visits I found out why that name had been changed. There was far less mass living than before, because of the almost superhuman efforts of men and women who had often no income and no supplies, but merely the unquenchable desire to preserve family life. Partitions consisting of all types of brown paper, of waste wood, of blankets were put up in the large barrack halls so that each little family could live in its own orbit. When the camps were located in rural areas men and women got permission to chop down trees, and out of these they made regular walls that divided the long barracks into completely separate rooms. This meant that ten or more door openings had to be made so that the family could come and go through its own private entrance. The skilled carpenters among the expellee men made these door openings and doors so that in some camps there is no more mass living, and each family has its own separate home though that home be only one room that serves as bedroom, kitchen, living room, and wash room.

Over and over again I was amazed at what the women were able to do with these rooms. Paint brightened the rough, unfinished walls, and pictures were placed strategically to cover cracks or unsightly defects. Wooden lamp stands were brightened by homemade lamp shades of painted paper. Frankly, I wouldn’t know how a woman keeps a room tidy when its furniture consists of seven beds (two-and three-decker), a table, a primitive stove, a couple of chairs, and clothing boxes for each member of the family. I suppose it merely meant that the woman worked all day and every day to tidy up after the children washed, ate and did their studies. The drabness of these rooms, whose beds are almost all covered with the same grey or olive-drab blankets, is lightened only by the bright table cloth or the few pictures on the wall. However, the very transformation from camp living to home-barracks is a proof of the unquenchable spirit of the women of the expellees to preserve the integrity and the unity of their homeless, abandoned and often broken families in the face of a world which has meted out to them a terrible, though unofficial, punishment.

Tracing Service of Red Cross still tries to locate the more than 100,000 women taken for forced labor and never returned.

For so many the end of their wandering is not in sight. These dishevelled women by the roadside try to find a place of safety for their children after fleeing with them westward through the forests.

A one-room home for an Expellee family is bare, but bright and shiny.

A valiant woman of today—she saved her eight children in a flight that took her across a continent.

There are some expellee centers where the conversion to separate dwellings is not at all possible. These are the hotels and old castles with forty-foot ceilings. For four years hundreds and hundreds of people have tried to make homes out of such centers as the sixteenth century castle in Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein. It is a common thing in such centers as these to see four women share the same cooking arrangements. The stove, over which someone is hovering all the day long, becomes not a center of peace and warmth, but rather a source of strife and bickering. Tired and harassed mothers find that this sharing of cooking facilities, year in and year out, is a sore strain on already overtaxed nerves.

Though a camp is the easiest place to see at a quick glance the many problems of the women among the expellees, one can only know the whole picture when one realizes that millions of them are also dispersed among the populations in the towns. Our delegates have gone out to visit these families and have found women making homes for their loved ones in the cellars of partly destroyed homes. Others are able to rent one room of an apartment, with the privilege of sharing a kitchen. All over such towns as Kiel, the expellee women have set up housekeeping for their homeless families in these one-room arrangements. As rebuilding proceeds slowly, this one-room living goes on for years and brings on, in some cases, grave social and moral problems.

The material tragedy of living for four, going on to five, years in such conditions is quickly seen and easily understood by anyone who visits the expellee centers. It is only by talking with individual expellees in and out of camp that one sees into the almost unbelievable tragedies that these women have faced in their personal lives since that great mass expulsion began in 1945, after the Potsdam declaration of the heads of the three greater allies. Let us take as an example a young girl from East Prussia.

A young girl

Her name is Margarita Kopsky and she lived with her parents in the lower section of East Prussia. After this area changed hands, the new regime put her aged mother and father along with hundreds and hundreds of other helpless people into a former munitions factory near Bromberg. Hunger raged over all of Europe in 1945, but it raged particularly in camps such as this one near Bromberg where former enemies, guiltless or guilty, who were marked for expulsion, were temporarily kept. When Margarita came to claim her parents so that they could all cross the border together into Western Germany, she found that they had both died of hunger along with an untold number of other people whose deaths were never announced. Margarita now works as a catechist to help an expelled priest bring Christ’s message to the children among his uprooted flock.

A mother of eight children

One group of unfortunates whose expulsion was so complete that little trace is left of it was the Volga Germans who lived in a whole section of the Ukraine. These descendants of Germanic stock were only in Russia because their ancestors had been invited to settle and work the soil of that area. These industrious people lived in scores of villages where they preserved their dialect and their special traditions. Almost all of these people, whether men, women or children, were deported to Asiatic Russia and Siberia in one of the first mass deportations that marked the last days of the war. I visited a woman who escaped these mass deportations by leaving her native village with her eight children and walking by stages to Poland in the confusion that accompanied the retreat of the German army. She did this because she knew her husband had already been deported to Siberia, and she wanted to save her boys and girls from a similar fate. Let us call her, for the sake of her family’s safety, Mrs. Barbara Walt. She, with her eight youngsters, now lives in a one room home-barracks in an expellee camp in the diocese of Paderborn. When she reached Poland, Mrs. Walt was expelled into Germany and found herself, with her children, in the Russian sector of Berlin. She was spotted immediately as a Russian citizen and found that she was marked for another deportation, this time back to some unknown destination in Russia. Fleeing with her eight children into the British sector, she persuaded the military authorities to accept her as a political refugee. And wonder of wonders, she and her eight children were loaded on to an army plane and taken into the British zone of Germany.

I think that in all my life I have never seen a more industrious family. The diocese of Paderborn had immediately given to Mrs. Walt some of the clothing donated to War Relief Services by the National Council of Catholic Women. Right away, Mrs. Walt and her daughter set about and remade the clothing until it was exactly the right size. Though only five weeks in the British zone, the Walt family were neatly dressed and everything in their one room home was in order. The two oldest boys have work with a local carpenter; the younger boys cut wood and fix up the family dwelling place. Mrs. Walt introduced me to her children one by one: Candita, Josef, Mathilde, Agnes, Bruno, Matthias, Emilia, and Anton. They were handsome, normal children. The terrible experience of fleeing and of being homeless had been softened for them by the tremendous protective power of a mother’s love. These children were secure and well balanced. I asked them if they wanted to emigrate to some other country and they all agreed that until they knew the fate of their father they would make the best of life in Germany and not plan any emigration. I have pictures of this family busy about their sewing, their mending, their wood-chopping and all their other activities. I have a picture, too, of a real heroine and a Catholic mother who might qualify as a valiant woman of today.

Mourning for children lost

Perhaps the most inconsolable women are those who lost children during the expulsion, either by death or disappearance, or whose children were deported into unknown regions for forced labor. This is not uncommon at all, and is particularly true of the women who have come from such areas as East Prussia. In a casual conversation with a woman in an expellee camp near Neumuenster, one of our delegates was told that two of her daughters had been deported into Russia at the time that she and her husband and four other children were expelled. Her daughters at the time were 19 and 21. She has never heard from them and does not know if they are still alive.

The mortality of children during the expulsions is something that no one can ever write about statistically, but there is no doubt that it must have been very high. A woman named Mrs. Drescher, who is now in a camp in the bleak isle of Fehman of Schleswig-Holstein in the Baltic Sea, spoke for many more when she said to a War Relief Services delegate, “I started from Danzig with four children and I arrived here with two. A little boy and a little girl died on the way, and yet we could not stop because they were always driving us on. We had to save the other two.”

Mourning for children about to be born

Caritas directors and social workers told me that one of the greatest tragedies in an Expellee family is the knowledge that a new life is expected—that a child will be born into the world. The mother often has not even a scrap of material for covering the newly born, and she is considered lucky if she is given a packing case to serve as a cradle. With daily living confined to one small room, or a part of a room, and sanitation difficult to maintain for lack of soap, it is easy to understand the anxiety of a mother who must care for a new born child in the midst of the shortages and the confusion. It is particularly difficult for Catholic mothers in the Diaspora areas, where Catholic teaching on birth control seems to the ordinary citizen as utter folly. Yet Catholic mothers accept the children that God sends to them, even in their desolation. They tell the Caritas directors that they know that Providence will be with them if they bring the new souls into the world.

Often, Providence acts through the gifts of infants garments, sent in such number by the Catholic Women of the United States. So many layettes, sent directly or through the hands of the Holy Father, have reached these mothers just in time for them to cover the body of a child born into homelessness.

When an American visitor entered a barracks-room housing four complete families (two with teen-age children) and asked, “Do you have any small children here?”, he was struck by the vehemence of the answer, “No babies or little children here, thank God.” These were Catholic expelled families, from Yugoslavia and Rumania, who in normal circumstances would want to raise happy families in their flourishing villages. In the horror of exile, each child is a tragedy.

A Catholic leader, working among younger Expellee families, said quite frankly that if we urge Catholics to live up to their faith in matters of birth prevention we must stand ready to help the mothers to accept their burdens. “It is layettes or Birth Control,” she told us quite frankly.

Much has been done by Catholic women in this regard, but much must still be done if each new life is not to be looked on as a tragedy. There are so many separated families, so many widows, among the Expellees, that it is almost a form of genocide when the parents who might be producing children are dissuaded therefrom by the terrifying material conditions of their lives.

Mourning for husbands

The number of young women of the expellees whose husbands are still in slave labor in Russia is enormous. Again in Schleswig-Holstein, one of our delegates went into the country to see how the expellees were living when they worked on the large estates of the area. A simple little woman from East Prussia, named Mrs. Kupsch, lived as did five other families in rooms back of the barn, one family to a room. It took her fourteen days to get to Schleswig-Holstein with her four children after she was expelled from her farm. Her husband wrote to her every few months from his slave labor camp in Russia. She did not even know where he was located. Her sole income is 93 Marks monthly from the local welfare agency, and whatever gifts come to her through charitable agencies. The well of misery among the women whose husbands are laboring in the night of slavery in unknown Asiatic areas is something that no one can attempt to describe.

Old women waiting for death

The plight of the aged women among the expellees could be the subject of a book. It is enough to say that these old women and old men were herded into cattle cars and dumped out as callously as were all the other expellees. Caritas operates 168 homes for the aged among the expellees, but even with the greatest efforts on the part of local Catholics, the lot of the dispossessed aged is still a cruel one. Here and there, by almost a miracle, Caritas has managed to set up Old People’s Homes that are cheerful and happy places—such is the Old People’s Home at Wewelsburg in the Diocese of Paderborn. But hundreds and hundreds of damp cellars, bunkers, or air-raid shelters also house the old people dislodged by mass expulsions in the twilight of their lives. Sometimes, one barrack in a camp is set aside for the aged and there one sees the old women busy with their beads, if they are Catholic, or possibly doing some sewing or knitting. Often, they have no knowledge of the whereabouts of the rest of their families; often they know that they are already dead. So many of them are gentle and without bitterness. So many of them await death as a blessed and happy deliverance.

Thus, the plight of the women among the expellees is a particularly bitter thing; from the young women who have lost parents, to the wives who have lost husbands, the mothers who have lost or are separated from their children, even to the aged women who sit quietly awaiting death in a world which has shown to them its most cruel face. The examples of tireless work and a boundless heroism among these women give one faith in the better qualities of humankind.

CHAPTER V
The Children

“These Little Children are looking for Their Parents,” was a printed announcement that met me all over Germany. Underneath this announcement were the haunting faces of fifty little children—little ones separated from their parents and relatives during the mass expulsions. The little faces on the poster stared at me in railroad stations, in welfare offices, on church doors, and in public buildings.

The children who do not know their own names and whose parents are being sought; the children who know their names and who still search for their parents; the thousands upon thousands of children who have vanished without trace and may all be dead—these are the problems which present themselves in any discussion of the Expellee children of present-day Germany. There are special Search Services designed to reunite these tragic little victims with their parents and many thousands of happy reunions have been brought about.

No one was able to count the number of children, especially infants, who died in the course of the expulsions, although many have stories to tell of children who died on the roads. Often the cold, lifeless bodies of infants and small children were the first to be handed out of the windows of the deportation trains.

There are no adequate reports on the health and welfare of the millions of children who survived, and who as innocent, unknowing Pilgrims of the Night were led to the dismal barracks and shelters that were to serve as their homes from then on.

The little lost children

But to return to the faces on the poster, the children were too young at the time of flight to remember their last names or the address of their parents. The descriptions underneath each picture highlight the unimaginable suffering that is meted out to the innocent in any mass expulsion.

One little child was found on the road by a soldier; another two children knew that their mother was taken to Russia from East Prussia. Another child knew that his first name was Gerhard and that he had a telephone in his house in Pomerania. Under every photo is written in a few words an individual tragedy which was implicit in the Allied decision to uproot millions of human beings in the days of chaos that followed a world war.

This poster of little lost children searching for parents more than four years after the end of the war, symbolized for me all the guiltless who have suffered in the mass expulsions of close to 12 million people from areas of Eastern Europe.

I asked also about other children who were expelled and found that between 160,000 and 180,000 children were lost in the course of the uprooting of Germanic minorities and German citizens from such areas as the Sudetenland, Silesia, East Prussia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.

In most cases these children, still unaccounted for, were the casualties of the peacetime war action. Many died on the road; hundreds upon hundreds of nursing babies died for lack of nourishment and warmth in the chaotic days after arrival during the terrible winters of 1945/46 and 1946/47. Parents are still searching for the children from whom they were separated and whom they believe to be alive.

Public searches conducted by posters, by advertisements and by thousands upon thousands of radio-broadcasts, have given a tone of tragedy to everyday life in Germany. There are special radio programs for those children who know their names and the former addresses of their parents. There are also special radio programs for parents who still believe that their children who were separated from them during the deportation can be located somewhere in Germany or in the neighboring lands.

Day after day, heart-breaking announcements

Day after day, one can hear these heart-breaking announcements of parents who still hope to find their children three or four years after the separation. One might reasonably ask why parents allowed themselves to be separated from their little ones. It is easier to understand, when one hears such announcements as that regarding a young boy who had walked to a nearby town to go to the store, and before he returned his whole family was forcibly loaded on to a truck and taken to a detention camp for expulsion. Other children were placed on different deportation trains from the parents.

Search services for missing children

The lost children are a very special problem of all welfare agencies which are cooperating to locate as many of them as possible and to reunite them with their families. The children who are searching for their parents and whose little faces stare at you all over Germany from the posters I described, are, in general, well taken care of by public and religious welfare agencies. It is interesting to note that many calls have come to German welfare agencies for the adoption of these children by families living in other lands, but in general expellee children are not available for adoption because they have been taken by German families. The remainder of the unaccompanied expellee children are being kept until extensive investigations are made regarding their parents and relations.

Uprooted orphanages

Two representatives from War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. for Germany sought out the institutions having expelled children and found some homes filled with uprooted orphans.

In the Bavarian countryside is one such institution for children conducted by the Sisters of St. Charles Borromeo. The children and the Sisters were included in the fiction of mass guilt and were expelled from a bordertown in Silesia. Given little time to gather their charges together, the Sisters managed to keep the little family intact on the deportation train. A home was provided for them all by the American Military.

The children sheltered in this home have been spared nothing of bitterness, or terror, or death.

Three of the orphans were a brother and two sisters, Klaus, Gertrude and Hilda. Klaus, as the eldest, had brought his two sisters to the safe-keeping of the Nuns before the evacuation from Silesia. His father was already dead, and when his mother died as a result of a bombing raid, he, at eleven years of age, presented himself at the door of the orphanage, holding a five-year-old sister by one hand and a seven-year-old by the other. The Nuns were keeping the pathetic remainder of the family intact because of the security it gave each child to be near the other.

Two little boys, Horst and Dieber Twerdon, were turned out of the family home at the height of the expulsions, and began walking toward the center of Germany with their mother. So great was the cold of the march, that the mother lay down by the side of the road and died. The two little boys walked on alone until they were picked up by authorities and added to the uprooted brood congregated in the Bavarian home.

So many tales of pitiful little children could be told; tales of the fatherless, of the motherless, from whom everything was taken except the love of those dedicated women who, of the little helpless beings entrusted to them, lost not any one.

Child life in barracks

The expellee children who are living in barracks and almost uninhabitable buildings of all types are subjected to constant sufferings and agonies. One room to a family is a luxury. Sometimes, this room may formerly have been a stall for a horse. One extremely large expellee camp, the Rositen Kaserne near Salzburg, was formerly a Veterinary Center for horses. Each sick horse had his own stall in which the animal was tied to a heavy post. Now, in this former horse hospital, each expellee family lives in one of these stalls and the heavy post is a reminder to each member of the family that their home is really a stable. There is little privacy for family living in such conditions. There is less privacy when 20 families must occupy sections of large halls in the former castles that have been pressed into service for expellees. What can we expect of children who live in such constant overcrowding, surrounded by daily reminders of their degraded lot as expellees?

Youth without hope

A Red Cross leader explaining that one of the most explosive situations in Western Germany was that of unemployed, homeless, footloose youth, stated that there are more than 300,000 young men, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, among the Expellee groups who are without jobs, or job-training. These young people, old enough to understand the indignity of their lot in the barracks and hovels of strange towns and villages, but too young to appreciate the cataclysm that has come to all Europe, can only look forward to nothingness. There are no places in the schools for them to learn a trade; no jobs are opening up for them in an economy that has not even jobs enough for adult breadwinners. There are at present no real chances of emigration.

These young people look backward to the day by day destruction and systematic cruelty of the war years, and to the inhumanity and chaos of the years of peace. It would not be surprising if out of this immense mass of youth without hope, there should emerge a cold dangerous nihilism. Since they have seen the depths, they might come to fear nothing, to reverence nothing, not even life itself.

The appeal of hungry and homeless children is one that goes right to the heart. No one needs to ponder, or study whether such an appeal should be answered by help even at a sacrifice. The appeal of these young people is one that must go to the mind as well as to the heart. The future of the West will have to count with these young people, whether for good or for ill. Up to now, the world has shown them by all methods possible that it does not want them, nor does it want their intelligence, or their skills. They have been driven from their homes, and driven out of participation in the business of living. Those who have parents are still under some restraints and are linked to religion, to family, to some small, eventual hope of making a contribution to society by work. But even then, the parents themselves are full of discouragement, because most of them had hoped to provide training or higher education for their teenagers, and now find themselves utterly unable to do so.

There are others who have lost all ties with family—either through death or through deportation to the East. Some young men were urged by families living in the Eastern Zone to flee to the West because of imminent danger of forced labor. Still others have come to the West after escaping from forced labor in the uranium mines. Many of these youngsters are sixteen and seventeen years of age. Were it not for the activities of Lutheran Aid and Catholic Charities in setting up homes for these boys, it is hard to say what would have become of them.

I visited such a home for homeless boys at Wewelsburg, in the diocese of Paderborn, Westphalia, and saw what stable and disciplined young citizens they become when gathered into the warm and intimate atmosphere of a home. A selfless young leader of Catholic Action directed the home, and gave each boy a sense of responsibility, a sense of belonging. A course of training, as near as possible to the capacities and desires of the boy, was provided in the neighbourhood. Forty boys lived in this Youth Home, recently rebuilt after being completely burnt out. The boys themselves worked on the building and renovation. All of the boys were Expellees, though some of them had been expelled first into the Russian Zone of occupation before deciding to cross into the so-called Golden Zone of the West. Many of them had escaped from forced labor.

“These little children are looking for their parents.”

“Parents seek these lost children.”

Home for this child is behind the barbed wire of former slave labor barracks.

An Expellee child in a camp in Schleswig-Holstein.

The one diocese of Paderborn has had to set up eight such Youth Homes, for homeless, driven youth—seven for boys and one for girls. Forty Youth Homes have already been set up by Caritas in Western Germany. Many more such homes are needed in the Western Federal Republic if these young people are to be rescued for a normal, useful and stable existence.

Children of the dispersion

From a religious point of view, the Catholic children who have been expelled into the Northern areas of Germany, where there are neither sufficient churches nor schools, are at present a very pressing and special problem. These children are served by priests who come to them on foot, on bikes or on motorcycles. They are prepared for First Communion and Confirmation in crowded barracks rooms and Lutheran churches kindly lent for the occasion. The richness of Catholic life which their parents knew before the expulsion is entirely absent. The faith is kept alive only by the heroic efforts of weary and overburdened priests and dedicated lay people from among the expellees.

Much self-help has been organized among the German Catholics to save this generation of children who are living in the Diaspora, or Dispersion areas of Germany. Every year, the dioceses of South-Germany, particularly Bavaria, bring down thousands of the expellee children from the areas of Schleswig-Holstein and North-Germany to spend the summer months with Catholic families.

Tale told at night by homeless children

Bavaria in the summer is rich in color and richer still in its expressions of Catholic life. Some of the children from Schleswig-Holstein used to sit in the evenings and tell the Bavarian youngsters what they thought of the lovely domed churches of the Bavarian countryside. The little expellee children marvelled at the colorful interiors of the churches, at the vestments of the priests, at the beautiful marriage ceremonies, at the fact that one could go to Confession and Communion at almost any time because the priest was near the church and near the people.

For the expellee children from Schleswig-Holstein, there were very few priests and their life was dark and sad. They told how they waited on the road, often without shoes and in the rain, for the priest who came to them on his cycle. They explained how their Mass was said in bare schoolrooms without any color or loveliness.

A picture of desolation

A Bavarian girl listened to these stories told in the evenings by homeless and yearning little ones. These tales impressed her so much that she painted them into a picture—a picture which in its accuracy and power is a real masterpiece. The young Bavarian girl was Veronika Reich of the diocese of Augsburg in Bavaria. Veronika painted in the lower part of the picture several crowded scenes of color and joy, a church wedding, a child being baptised, a Bishop dispensing Confirmation, children being taught Catechism by the priests, children going to Confession, children receiving Communion. Behind these scenes rise the spires and the cupolas, or “onion” towers, of the typical Bavarian churches. Towards the top of the picture, the colors grow dark, and we see two little groups of shoeless children, standing by the side of the road waving in welcome to a priest on a bicycle. The buildings are plain as schoolbuildings are. The top of the picture is absolutely black in color. In this way Veronika, hardly more than a child herself, interpreted the longings and sufferings of other little children from whom so much has been taken, even the joys of their religion. I wish that every Catholic in America had seen this most unbelievable picture that came from the hearts of some children and the hand and heart of another child. Among the Pilgrims of the Night, the expellees of Western Europe, the children are the most desolate of all.

CHAPTER VI
The Priests

One of the most significant books that was given to me during my recent tour of Europe was a bound volume containing the names and addresses of 2,700 expelled priests who were uprooted from their parishes in 1945, 1946 and 1947. None of these Catholic priests had been accused of crimes of any sort. Most of them were simple pastors of country and city parishes whose aim was the spiritual welfare and eventual salvation of their flocks. Many of them had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo.

And yet, when the theory of mass expulsion on a racial basis was applied to such areas as Pomerania, East Prussia, Danzig, and Silesia and the Sudetenland, these men of God were thrust from their parish churches, from their rectories, and joined the nearly 12 million expellees who trekked through the heart of Europe as uprooted pilgrims of the night. And they still are joined to the lot of the disinherited, for they live among them in daily service, in daily sacrifice.

The book to which I refer has been printed by the Seminary for expelled seminarians located in Koenigstein, near Frankfurt. It lists the former dioceses of the priests, their date of ordination, and their present whereabouts in Western Europe. We see in this book listings of priests ranging from young men who were just ordained to priests ninety years of age.

Some of the priests as members of such religious orders as the Franciscans and Augustinians were generally accepted by the houses of their orders in Western Germany. The vast majority of these expelled priests were simple pastors and they have gone out among their people who were expelled with them. Their life differs little from that of any other homeless expellee.

I have known a priest to live in a single room of an old house, so as to be near the former slave labor barracks where the expellees from Silesia manage to exist. I have seen pictures taken by Caritas of the dwellings of other expelled priests; one priest from the Ermland diocese was able to get a little room in the attic of a resort hotel, a room which serves not only as his study, his sleeping quarters, and garage for his only means of transport, a bicycle, but also as his parish office where he receives his parishioners.

Homeless priests—their flocks dispersed

One of the burdens that lie most heavily on these expelled priests is the knowledge that their former parishioners are scattered throughout all the zones of Germany. These driven people had no choice as to their destination; or to be exact, they had no destination. To cite an example, Father Johannes Preuss, now located in Neumuenster, Schleswig-Holstein, reported that he had a parish of 700 souls in Nossberg, East Prussia. When the expulsion came, trains took his parishioners in different directions and he has received word from them from all four zones of Germany. The largest number of his parishioners landed in the Russian zone. He does not know how many of his parishioners were deported eastward to slave labor in Siberia, nor how many died on the roads and in the cattle cars during the expulsion. He does know that exhaustive efforts to find out how many of his parishioners are still alive resulted in a total of 450 out of 700. Father Preuss also gave us another significant figure: out of the ten priests fulfilling their ministry in the area of Gutstadt, (where his parish was located), seven were killed or deported and only three live to labor among their expelled flocks in Western Germany. The particular diocese of Ermland from which Father Preuss comes suffered possibly more than any other diocese in the loss of its priests and the loss of its faithful. About 40 per cent of its priests are dead or missing.

For all the inhabitants of East Prussia, Catholic and Protestant, the total of dead or missing comes to 1 out of every 5 people. This is the cost that is paid by human beings in general, the guilty and the innocent, the aged and the children, for mass expulsion.

A priest in siberia

One of the priests of this Ermland diocese is now in the United States on a mission on behalf of the St. Boniface Society, the Church Extension organization of Germany. This young Ermland priest has told us in a calm, gentle way of his experience—experiences which are true, unfortunately, for other priests, and men and women.

Because of his opposition to Nazism, Father Gerhard Fittkau was forbidden to teach by the Gestapo, though he had earned his doctorate in theology and was needed as a professor in a Catholic High School. He was appointed as the young pastor of the parish of the Nativity of Our Lady, in Suessenberg, East Prussia. He had in his pastoral care a little flock of 91 families, numbering 460 people. They were in the main, the owners of well-kept farms, hard-working and orderly, but not rich—part of a Catholic enclave in a prosperous Protestant area.

He was there in January, 1945, when the Russian advancing army almost completely encircled the area of Central Ermland in East Prussia. Though tempted to flee, in the wake of many who had managed to get out before the arrival of the Soviet troops, Father Fittkau found in the sacrifice of the Mass, the strength to remain, though it might mean death or deportation. Every day he celebrated High Mass, and all the parishioners who remained, together with evacuees from other villages, prayed with great faith and devotion. The confessional was busy as never before. The instruction for Holy Communion was speeded up so that the little ones could also receive the Holy Eucharist; the Sacrament was carried to the old and the sick. For so many it was a viaticum, explains Father Fittkau, not only for the aged and ill, but for the young and the strong.

“When I consider,” says Father Fittkau, “all that God’s grace must have accomplished in those days of extreme distress, the price we had to pay was surely not too high. Could our parish ever have been led by any other means to such trust in God, to such resignation, and to such love?”

When the Soviet army entered Suessenberg, girls and women were immediately rounded up and taken away for “peeling potatoes for the soldiers.” They returned after being abused by the army men, broken-spirited and infected by disease. Father Fittkau was able to protect a group of several women and girls and a Grey Sister from such violation, though he came close to being executed for his deed.

Twenty-five villagers were murdered, including a seventy-three-year-old sacristan, the sixty-five-year-old church bell-ringer, the twenty-three-year-old girl organist, and four other girls under twenty-five. Six priests of the surrounding area were executed.

After burying the bodies of his dead parishioners in the hard-frozen earth, Father Fittkau had to register at the newly set-up Red Army headquarters. There, he met three elderly priests who had been herded in from the neighborhood. The four of them were sent as a special detail to go out into the fields and gather for a common grave the bodies of about fifty murdered civilians—bodies already partly mauled by animals. Before their task was fully done, the priests were arrested and marched by the Soviet Secret Police to a cellar in a neighboring town. Many civilians were locked up in other cellars of the same town and were not allowed out of the improvised cells even for any of nature’s needs. (This was a common Soviet prison procedure.)

Finally in March of 1945, two months after the arrival of the Red Army, the prisoners knew their sentence—the deportation to Siberia for slave labor. About 2,500 men and women from the area were sent off at the same time. Forty-eight other men and boys, ranging in age from 14 to 73, were in the dark, ice-cold car with Father Fittkau for a 21 day journey, which included stops at Moscow and Kotlas for delousing. The journey continued until they reached a forced labor camp near Pechora in the Tundra near the Arctic Ocean. When the freight car was opened at the destination, seven of the forty-nine men had already died. Father Fittkau staggered with the men into a large compound, filled only with bare, snow-covered barracks. Around the compound was a ten-foot wooden fence. Four large watch towers stood at each corner of the camp. It seemed as though most of the inmates of this compound had died, but the few who were left were led off shortly after Father Fittkau arrived. They were Poles and Ukrainians who had been deported to Siberia in 1940 and 1941, when between one and one-half and two million innocent men, women and children of Polish nationality were brutally uprooted from their homes for forced labor.

“They were ragged, prematurely old, pitiful human creatures,” says Father Fittkau, “the remnants of those poor people who had been removed to this forced labor district when Stalin shared Poland with Hitler.”

Father Fittkau worked with other men, and many deported women with shaved heads and men’s garments, on the earth works and timber-works for a canal. One of his only sources of comfort was the companionship of a Protestant minister. Together, they tried to force their worn out minds to hold on to spiritual realities while men, reduced to a vegetative existence, fell and died in the snow around them.

At the end of the first month, a quarter of all the inhabitants of the compound had already died. The unfortunates who could not work, but also could not die, were sent farther north to a so-called barracks hospital, where little could be done for them in the way of medical aid. They were observed by a specialist, however, for the signs of degeneration due to lack of vitamins and general malnutrition.

With his legs and feet swollen from weakness and hunger, and his entire body marked with abscesses and eczema, Father Fittkau waited for death, but unexpectedly, on the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, he was freed, and added to the first batch of freed laborers that would be returned to Germany.

Recovering in a half-destroyed hospital in Berlin, he learned of the expulsions from the East. The flock of his little parish of Our Lady’s Nativity were now homeless wanderers, mostly in the Soviet Zone of Germany. The poor little village had been scattered, says Father Fittkau, “from the Urals and uttermost reaches of Siberia, to the Rhine.” From letters and reports, he estimates that scarcely half of his former parishioners are still alive.

Father Fittkau stresses that this story of the dispersal of a parish is nothing exceptional—but rather the typical story of the atomization of thousands of parishes since the end of the war.

As soon as he had recovered, Father Fittkau was placed in charge of the Chancery of the late Bishop Maximilian Kaller. In this work, he was thrust into the heart of all Expellee problems since Bishop Kaller was named by the Holy Father as Bishop of all Expelled Catholics in Germany.

Father Fittkau wants to make known the sufferings of the priests of the disinherited, so that special help can be sent to them to aid them in their holy and heroic tasks. He wants to make known, too, his strong feeling for the reconciliation of all Christians, especially former enemies, who have suffered so much that they should have no hatred left—only love and compassion.

Uprooted Catholics without churches

One of the least understood problems concerning the expellees is that of the Catholics who were expelled into the Protestant areas of Germany, where there are neither churches, parish centers, nor schools. Here the task of the homeless priest is made a thousand times more difficult, because he must find places to say Mass and he must find ways of getting to his poverty-stricken flock. They cannot come to him over great distances because they lack means of transportation and money. They lack strength often to walk the miles necessary to reach the town center where Mass is being said. There are three Catholic dioceses in Germany which have received in the last few years, hundreds of thousands of destitute Catholics whose spiritual and material needs are overwhelmingly great. The two dioceses of Osnabrueck and Hildesheim in the north of Germany found their Catholic populations increased almost overnight by more than a million Catholics. These dioceses, which are located in the predominantly Protestant areas of Germany and which have received so tremendous an influx of Catholics, are known as the Diaspora dioceses. The diocese of Paderborn was also affected in this way as well, as we will make clear later.

The diocese of Osnabrueck extends all the way up to the Danish border and includes within its area the entire province of Schleswig-Holstein which juts out into the Baltic and North Sea. Schleswig-Holstein has been since the 16th century an almost wholly Protestant area. As a result of the mass expulsion, the population of this province rose from 1,500,000 to 2,700,000. The Lutheran expellees from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia came into an area where their spiritual needs could be met in some measure by the local Lutheran churches and Lutheran Pastors. The thousands upon thousands of Catholic expellees found themselves living not only in material misery in wooden barracks and in rooms in back of barns, but in the deepest spiritual misery because of the lack of the consolations of religion. Bishop Kaller immediately stationed more than sixty-five expelled priests in the area of Schleswig-Holstein. These devoted men were helped by the Lutheran Pastors who gave them the use of their Lutheran Churches to say Mass, and by local public authorities who allowed them to say Mass and to give instructions in public schools on Sundays and in the evenings. The Bishop of Osnabrueck has also transferred some of his best equipped priests to this area to help in the organization of new parishes. Several wooden churches and parish centers have already been erected.

The efforts of the priests to cover great tracts of territory are supported by the work of selfless women, who trudge on foot, or go by bicycle, to teach Catechism in the most remote settlements. A group of young women have even grouped themselves into a new society to meet the needs of the times. In a barracks on a lonely section of Schleswig-Holstein, they pray and study to prepare themselves for their apostolate as pastors’ helpers.

I sent one of the delegates of War Relief Services up to Schleswig-Holstein to make a special survey of the struggles and needs of these priests, and among other reports, I received one on the typical Sunday of an expellee priest in Schleswig-Holstein.

It might be well to mention in this connection that the Diaspora area of the Lutheran expellees is in Bavaria and Southern, predominantly Catholic, Germany. Here the Lutheran homeless find themselves without churches. Their pastors often use Catholic halls and establishments to give the ministrations of their belief to Lutheran expellees. One sees them on their bicycles moving over the roads of Munich and the southern German countryside on their visitations. I am sure that studies have also been made of the struggles of these Pastors, but I would like to present to you this living picture of a priest and a pastor, who in the dark night of exile, tries to keep alive the light of faith.

Almost never off his motorcycle

Father Francis Motzki, the report states, was an expellee from the diocese of Ermland in East Prussia, who was sent in 1946 by Bishop Kaller to care for the souls of the expellees in northwestern Schleswig-Holstein.

He found a room in the town of Bredstedt. It is a little room which contains besides his bed, his desk, his clothing, his work table, his book case, and his parish supplies, a locked tabernacle on the wall which contains the body and blood of the Lord of all the world. Father Motzki works and eats and receives his local parishioners in this one room. As there is no Catholic Church in the town of Bredstedt, he must keep the Most Blessed Sacrament in this tabernacle so that he will be ready to go to the sick and dying when called.

Catholic expellees are located in camps and villages all around Bredstedt, and Father Motzki says Mass in eight different places and gives religious instructions to children and young people in thirteen places. Though he is well under forty, he looks like an older man. He is almost never off the motorbike on which he commutes between the various places where he gives instructions and visits his parishioners. He has recently developed a serious kidney ailment but cannot curtail his work for souls.

He has known great personal tragedy, since one of his sisters was deported for slave labor in Siberia, in 1945, and was never heard from again. A second sister was also deported, but was returned to Germany in 1948. She rented a room in the same house, and prepares Father’s meals and acts as housekeeper for his furnished room.

I came early one Sunday morning to the town of Bredstedt where Father Motzki said his first Mass in the Lutheran Church at 7:45 in the morning. He had a full congregation consisting solely of expellees. Because there was a three-hour interval before his next Mass, Father Motzki was allowed to take liquid refreshment—some hot coffee. After his cup of coffee, Father Motzki set out for his second Mass station at Lutjenholm. This was in a public school. When he arrived the women from the nearby expellee barracks were already there and the teacher’s desk was covered with clean linen and with fresh flowers for the celebration of the sacrifice of love. Most of the congregation at this Mass were grown-ups. Confessions, heard in the open hallway of the school, preceded the Mass, which began at 11:30 o’clock.

Immediately after the second Mass, Father Motzki proceeded to Bargum and arrived there in time to say his third Mass in a school at 1 P.M. There were many camps in the vicinity, and the school room was crowded with a congregation that consisted of more than half young people. The clean linen and the flowers just picked from the fields were already there, and one could see the joy with which these forsaken people welcomed the priest of God. At this Mass Father Motzki delivered a special sermon for the children and young people, because a large number of them were to be confirmed on the following Thursday by the Bishop of Osnabrueck. The confirmation of these and all the other children of the entire area would take place in the Lutheran Church of Bredstedt.

Father Motzki reminded the children what confirmation meant as the strengthening of the faith of the Christian to meet the trials of the world and to resist sin. He explained to them the entire ceremony, including the making of the sign of the Cross with the chrism, and the slap on the cheek by the Bishop as a reminder to each child that it is his duty to accept trials for Christ.

Children who knew Christ’s Cross

“It may be,” said Father Motzki, “that I have not been able because of the difficulties of our life here to instruct you adequately in all the aspects of the faith for your Confirmation. It may be that there are many points about Catholic doctrine that I could have taught you more thoroughly, my beloved children. When the Bishop makes the sign of the Cross first with the holy oil on your forehead and then over you, I know that you will understand what he means by it. You know so well, though you are only children, what the Cross means in our life of every day. You are homeless, you are exiled from your farms and your home towns. You must go out without shoes, and you have known terrible hunger. You understand all these things. You know the way of the Cross!

“And so, when the Bishop, who represents to you Christ himself, makes the Cross over you, you will know from your own sufferings, not from my teaching, what Christ meant by the Cross.

Confession in the school hall.

“Oh Mary, help us all, out of the depth of our need.”

Though he may be hungry and tired, the Expellee priest is a tower of strength to the people whom he visits in their barracks homes.

Father’s fourth Sunday Mass in a Lutheran Church.

“When the Bishop slaps each one of you on the face to remind you to be willing to suffer for Christ’s sake, you must remember to offer up willingly all the suffering of your own bodies and of your family for Christ. He took His Cross and offered His life for each one of us.”

After the Mass the children and young people joined in singing the beautiful and touching hymn of Maria Hilf. As they sang, “Oh Mary, help us all, out of the depth of our need,” it was clear from their faces and from their sad voices that they knew what the Cross really meant, and also what it meant to accept the trials of the world.

There were tears in the eyes not only of the Expellees but also of the War Relief Service delegate as this hymn was sung.

No food before evening

Father Motzki then visited some of the sick and aged in the nearby barracks. I could not help but notice as we drove along throughout the day, following Father’s route, how rich and lovely was the countryside, with its flat, well-cared-for fields, fine barns, and neat little cottages. Everywhere we saw the magnificent cattle for which the area is famous. Every now and then, we would pass an impressive establishment, owned by a larger landowner, and we would admire the tremendous, solid brick barns. By contrast with all this comfort and solidity, the clusters of unpainted, greyish-brown wooden barracks in which so many of the expellees lived seemed even more desolate and forlorn.

After his visits, Father took to the road again and headed for the town of Langenhorn, where at 3 o’clock in the afternoon he said his fourth and last Mass of the day in a Lutheran Church, kindly lent to him by the minister. The main aisles of the church were filled and many people went to communion, particularly younger people and children. Again Father Motzki gave his sermon on confirmation and again the voices of children who knew the misery of separation and homelessness filled the building.

At 6 o’clock that evening Father Motzki was back in Bredstedt and sitting down to his first solid food of the day.

To save a whole generation

You who read may think that this case is very unusual. It is not at all. Other priests go through the same heart-breaking schedule, covering regularly six thousand three hundred Mass stations in Lutheran churches, movie houses and schools, only because they want to save a whole generation for the Church. Priests know that men and women and children who have been deprived of everything may become bitter and cynical if they are not given the consolations of religion. It is only to prevent the loss of a whole generation in the Diaspora areas, that the expellee priests, like true apostles and true pilgrims, wear out their strength in saying Masses and giving instructions over wide areas. In the province of Schleswig-Holstein alone there are 341 Mass stations for the expellees where 83 priests say Mass as often as is humanly possible. Already young priests have died under the strain of this schedule. This is an area where Catholic relief from America can play a vital role in saving for the Church a whole generation, a generation of the uprooted, of the disinherited.

Our Lord has put so often into our hands here in the United States the bounty that we can share so that these children, so deeply wounded by separation and suffering, may not also be disinherited from the Kingdom of the Lord.

CHAPTER VII
Two Bishops and Their Burdens

While I was in Germany, a striking photograph on the cover of a German pictorial magazine caught my eye. It was the picture of a tall Bishop in his robes. There was hung about his neck, just above his pectoral cross, a miniature wooden house into which the faithful were putting their offerings of money. The picture was that of His Excellency, the Most Reverend Lawrence Jaeger, Archbishop of Paderborn, who dramatized the need for new houses in today’s Germany by striding with this odd collection box among the 500,000 faithful assembled at a great Catholic festival in Bochum, a Ruhr mining town. The Archbishop was begging in person for the homeless, the bombed-out, the expellees, and just as he actually carried around his neck the miniature wooden house, so he carries, and is weighted down by, incredibly heavy burdens. His immense diocese, stretching across the heart of a battered continent, illustrates every conceivable post-war problem.

I had the privilege before I left Germany of spending several hours with Archbishop Jaeger in his modest home in the midst of a ruined city. Paderborn was eighty per cent destroyed in the bombings that accompanied the end of the fighting on German soil. While not a military objective, the city stood squarely in the path of the army. A Nazi mayor fled for safety with his own family without transmitting to the residents an offer for the cessation of hostilities in exchange for the surrender of the city. The cathedral and the episcopal residence were only part of the losses of the Church. Also destroyed were the headquarters of the St. Boniface Society, the century-old organization for helping mission area parishes; the great seminary of the diocese; various hospitals; the motherhouse of the Sisters who serve the blind; and the diocesan Caritas headquarters. Around the Archbishop are the other destroyed cities of his diocese, including the famous industrial targets of Dortmund, Bochum and Gelsenkirchen, as well as many smaller towns. It was the thousands upon thousands of family dwellings which had met complete destruction that brought anguish to the heart of this “Father of the Poor.”

Before the war the flock of Archbishop Jaeger numbered 1,900,000. Since the war 1,200,000 expellees have flooded the area of his diocese, of whom 800,000 are Catholics. Archbishop Jaeger invited me to drive to one of the new villages made up of these expellees. It was founded on the site of an old prisoner of war camp and consisted largely of barracks and quonset huts. Most of the barracks had seven rooms and in each room is an expelled family, or what is left of the family group. One of the quonset huts had been made into a chapel and a priest comes to say Mass each day and to instruct the children. Another serves as a hospital in which five nurses supplied by the Caritas of the diocese do all they can to minister to the spirits and bodies of these exiles. It is to camps such as these that the millions of pounds of food, clothing and medicines of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. are channelled. This camp at Eselheide is just one of the many villages of exiles whose care and welfare lie so heavily on the public and private welfare agencies. Father Dietrich, the Director of Charities for the archdiocese of Paderborn, accompanied us on this visit and outlined some of the other burdens of his Archbishop.

Of the 800,000 Catholic refugees, a large number have been settled in those parts of the diocese that are not equipped with Catholic churches or schools. Hundreds of new service and welfare centers have had to be opened so that priests may have a meeting-place to instruct children and celebrate Mass. The greater number of the Catholic expellees were dumped from the transports into the large section of the Paderborn diocese that extends into the Russian Zone. Archbishop Jaeger makes regular visits to the Russian Zone, and I was shown a map of the towns and villages at which he stopped on his last visitation. More than 300 Catholic centers of various types have been set up in the Russian section of the diocese for these unfortunate expellees. In the main, they are administered by priests, themselves expelled. They are helped in their day-to-day needs by a commissariat established at Magdeburg, the largest town of the diocese in the Russian Zone. This tremendous diocese extends into three occupation zones, British, American and Russian, its furthest point being less than twenty miles from Berlin.

The proportion of expellees among the Catholics of this diocese is higher than one in every three. What struck me with tremendous force was the outlay of the diocesan Caritas on behalf of these destitute newcomers to a scene of destruction. Seventeen homes have been opened for aged expellees, including one for the aged blind. Two large orphanages have been set up for the hundreds of homeless expellee children, and eight youth homes for teenagers who are studying crafts and professions.

A recuperation center for returned Prisoners of War, who are still being returned daily, allows these men to search for their expelled families while they are regaining their strength. All these are extra burdens, accepted courageously by a Bishop who is an example to all of Christian hope.

In talking with me of the past, Archbishop Jaeger told me of the losses among his younger priests during the war. The Nazis took countless priests and impressed them into the army as medical corps men and stretcher-bearers. Others went as chaplains to the soldiers. In this way, one hundred of the active younger priests of the Paderborn diocese died during the war years. Another twelve are still prisoners of the Russians. There is no word about their return. Father Dietrich, the dedicated diocesan Caritas Director, was himself a prisoner of the Gestapo for not supporting the war; while the rector of the Salvatorian Fathers, Father Reinold Unterheld, perished in Dachau for the same reason.

Archbishop Jaeger and his entire flock are now working with the release of energy that comes to men who have regained freedom.

This diocese, which embraces the very heart of Germany, was coveted by anti-Christian leaders. Himmler set up his SS headquarters and his own dwelling in a picturesque and ancient village, Wewelsburg, that commands a long view of the Westphalian landscape. For himself and his SS, Himmler bought the entire village, including the ancient triangular castle. The lovely Catholic Church was expropriated and the sacrifice of the Mass was discontinued. The inhabitants were told to find homes outside the village. Himmler considered this village, Wewelsburg, the center of Germany and of the future. He boasted that from a high conference room in Wewelsburg Castle, marked symbolically with a radiating star as the “Middle-Point of the World,” the ideas of the future would radiate, and that Rome as a center of spiritual leadership would be replaced.

Wewelsburg is again a Catholic village, host to expellees from the East, to young men in its Catholic Youth Home, to homeless old people in a home for the aged, to orphan children, to productive artisans and to families.

Such Christian hospitality to so many victims of the peace came from the generous impulses of Archbishop Jaeger, Father Dietrich, the Catholic Charities Director, and the sorely-tried flock of the Archdiocese of Paderborn. Both the Archbishop and his Charities Director stressed again and again the importance of the relief goods from Catholic Americans in saving the lives of the helpless, the sick, the aged and the fatherless, both among the local population and among the expellees. Large amounts of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C. supplies were channelled into the Paderborn area at regular intervals by the central office of Caritas.

This story of this Archbishop presiding over the needs of an immense diocese in the heart of Europe, is only one of many. I have given it in some detail because it represents the problems and struggles of many other Bishops of Christ’s Church, who, groaning under the burdens of their suffering flocks, the homelessness of them, the terror and the hopelessness of them, must nevertheless serve as towers of strength, and sources of help in a cruel and destroyed world. Similar stories could be gathered about the brave Bishops of Poland, of Hungary, of Yugoslavia, of the war-shattered dioceses of Italy.

An expelled bishop

On the grounds of the Seminary of Koenigstein, in the peaceful valley not far from Frankfurt, is the grave of an expelled Bishop—a Bishop who carried one of the most stupendous burdens ever given to any shepherd since the beginning of Christ’s Church. His flock were the more than 7,500,000 Catholics who were included among the Expellees from such dioceses as those of Ermland and Breslan, which were denuded of their Germanic flocks.

Bishop Maximilian Kaller, an exile also in death, is buried at Koenigstein because it is here that the newer generation of priests for the Expellees, drawn as they are from among the young men of the Expellee group, are being trained.

Bishop Kaller was appointed by the Holy Father as Bishop of all the Expellees. He was to coordinate all spiritual resources to ensure the unbroken continuance of the Church’s ministry to this destitute, nomadic flock, spread all over Germany. He was to plead the cause of his disinherited millions at all doors.

When the Expellees were denuded of their possessions, Bishops were turned out of their dioceses, not by any church authority, of course, but by men who usurped all authority, both of God and of man.

Bishop Kaller was thrown out of his Ermland diocese, and came to central Germany, as poverty-stricken, as homeless, as buffeted by men, as were the first bishops of the Church in apostolic times.

Joined by Father Gerhard Fittkau, whose experiences were described in a preceding chapter, he opened an office in Frankfurt. It was an office that consisted of one room, where he and Father Fittkau stored all the records they had, where they answered the tremendous volume of mail, and where they slept when they called a halt to the work that was never done.

In 1945, Germany was a place of chaos and misery, though we who saw it feel we can never communicate anything of the reality of that chaos or that misery. Bishop Kaller, without funds, without a car, travelled the roads of Germany to visit those who had been given into his care. He would stand up in the obscenely overcrowded trains, he would walk great distances to meet with priests and lay people; he would fast and go sleepless on his way so that the organization of spiritual care for the homeless would not be hindered. And then he would return to the crowded room in Frankfurt where hundreds of letters awaited him—letters filled with anguish and terror and the blackest misery. Night after night he would work answering these letters, not only offering words of comfort, but planning works of relief.

So many of the letters told of urgent material needs—even for blankets to cover the homeless at night, for food for sick and dying children. So many letters begged the Bishop to help find a mother, lost in a railroad station in the terror of a mass exodus; to find a child lost on the road when the mother became ill; to find a father who had disappeared into the void of captivity in the East.

But what tore at his Bishop’s heart especially were the repetitions of anguished appeals like this: “If you can’t help us, won’t you send us priests; won’t you send Christ to us, here in our wilderness.”

The priests he sent, those priests who labor as we tried to describe in an earlier chapter. The Sacraments were brought to the homeless in the camps and settlements all over Germany. The daily anguish of his task, and the daily privation of his life, showed in the emaciated face and frame of Bishop Kaller. He pressed his poor body on beyond its powers.

And finally, one day in 1947, before he could see any lightening of the burden, before any real improvement in conditions had been noted in the lives of his people, he died. His death came on the eve of his trip to Rulle in the diocese of Osnabreuck, where homeless faithful and priests of his former diocese were gathered together to hear the message of their shepherd. The priests, the men and women and children, who had come to Rulle to be strengthened by their spiritual father, were stunned to hear that they were, in a sense, fatherless. Bishop Kaller’s Vicar-Capitular announced the death of the saintly Bishop, saying “How rich we were to have such a Bishop—to have a Bishop who was so poor.” The Vicar-Capitular pointed out that Bishop Kaller imitated St. Francis in his poverty.

To the tired exiles, so many of whom had come on foot great distances, the Vicar-Capitular said:

“The road will not be easy for us. The road to every great pilgrimage leads through Stations of the Cross. And we are all pilgrims, on every day, not only today. We must daily walk many miles to quiet our hunger, but there is one road we must seek and see every day, the road to which the shepherd’s crook of our Bishop pointed over and over again, the road which brings us near to God, the road on which we must place ourselves every day with the Sign of the Cross.

“On that road our Bishop Maximilian preceded us.”

In his last pastoral letter entitled, “The Contribution of the Homeless to Peace,” written in Lent of 1947 to all expelled Catholics, Bishop Maximilian Kaller drew the real lessons from the mass homelessness of the millions, and asked them to offer up their sufferings as a contribution toward peace. After stating that “the criminal policy of the German leaders had been judged by history,” he asks the Expellees to join with the Saviour in carrying “the terrible accumulation of guilt in this world.”

We have a translation of his words to his people:

“In humble, repentant prayer we will accept whatever God wills. Through prayerful participation in the divine sacrifice of Our Lord, we will always find again the strength to crucify our heart with its wicked passions, with its greed and envy, its vengefulness and its hatred.

“Our sacrifice must be joined to our prayer. For us, this consists especially in the patient, voluntary endurance of the injustices which have been done to us. In that manner, we follow the Saviour, and we carry with Him the terrible accumulation of guilt in this world. Only in this way do we break the power of evil in the world....”

It is a marvelous testimony to the memory of Bishop Kaller that these lessons have not been lost on the Expellees. So many of them, particularly their priests, repeat those sentiments, using almost the same words. They stress their role in the eventual achievement of peace as one of willing acceptance of their daily want and long exile, and some have openly expressed their belief that this sharing with Christ of the terrible accumulation of the world’s guilt may be the Christian alternative to war.

By the time that Bishop Kaller fell dead, broken in body by his heavy burdens, he had laid the foundations for the spiritual care of the Expellees. The supply of priests for the future was assured through the foundation of Koenigstein Seminary where the students from the seminaries in the East were accepted as well as the new vocations, many from the ranks of the demobilized army.

One might ask how Bishop Kaller, on the call of the Holy Father, was able with so clear an understanding, so sure and quick an analysis of the problem, to assume so appalling a task of the Church on the move. It has been brought to my attention that, in almost a prophetic manner, Bishop Kaller had published at the beginning of World War II, a brilliant study called “The Wandering Church.” In it, he told priests of the special problems that were coming upon the church as a result of the movement of populations.

Service among migratory Catholic workers had been, providentially, a very important part of Bishop Kaller s experience. For eleven years, as a country priest, he had served among the Polish sugar-beet workers who came to Pomerania. His command of the Polish language was excellent, and he loved his Polish flock as a father. That they loved him in return was proved by the fact that out of their seasonal earnings, they gave him enough money to build three churches so that their sacramental life would not be interrupted during their work in Pomerania.

Considering the unforeseen displacements of population that came during and after the years of the war, it would seem that Bishop Kaller’s words had the ring of prophecy in them when he stated that “... it is by no means impossible that the title ‘Wandering Church’ will come to be regarded as the characteristic name of the Church in our time.” I shall quote an entire paragraph from the early part of the late Bishop’s magnificent analysis:

For, strictly speaking, this “Wandering Church” is only a part, though a very important one, of a very significant general movement which is going on in the whole Church. From an original migration of a considerable number of young people, there has developed in Germany a huge migration and resettlement of the entire people and, with it, of the Church. Only by tackling the entire problem of this migration from a pastoral point of view, can the thorny work of the “Wandering Church” proper hope to reach its goal. The work done thus far in the “Wandering Church” is therefore only the beginning of the solution of much wider problems, and has become a rousing call of the greatest concern for the entire pastorate. The center of gravity of the problem of the “Wandering Church” has tended ever more to move from the care of the “extraordinary,” transitory migration of groups of young people, to that of the great interior migration, wandering and resettlement of the German people, which has grown from year to year. This phenomenon is of such far-reaching importance that it is by no means impossible that the designation “Wandering Church” will come to be regarded as the characteristic name of the Church in our time.

These words were meant for the whole church, and the whole church has come to know their meaning. Bishop Kaller himself, came to have in his pastoral care, the greatest and heaviest burdens of the “Wandering Church.”

As if he foresaw this, he wrote; “It is taking too much for granted to suppose that, in a few years, our entire Church in Germany will, on account of this migration, have completely altered its appearance.”

He analysed the types of ordinary and extraordinary migration that economic conditions and war might bring on the Church everywhere and pointed out the grave dangers to the faith. He remarked the strange fact that priests often withdraw into their sacristies and fail to see the coming catastrophe. Even parishes that have already suffered from the emigration of the faithful for this or that cause fail to take the appropriate measures to reach out after the souls who have left. The priests tend to “... meet the situation with speechless dignity or with a sudden fervor of desperate activity.”

The Bishop suggested, instead, a calm analysis of the situation, and appropriate measures on the part of the parish priests to explain the changed status of the church by instructions, sermons, retreats, and the revivifying of parochial societies. The priests and the entire community must be educated to the care of migrating members, to welcome them, to make them feel they have found a home, to lead them to church. Specific organizational measures relating to a faultless system of registration of new and old parishioners, of reports to other parishes of parishioners who are expected to settle there, are outlined. These measures have served well the Expellee priests who know the location of their former flocks, and are thus able to give a sense of continuity in Catholic life even to those who might seem to be swallowed up in the anonymity of mass living. This long-distance pastoral care, even though the Expellees are now settled in other parishes and new areas, is a great source of moral strength to scattered Catholics.

But the sublime message of this overwhelming article is not its organizational message, which is of the practical order, but rather its prophetic vision, that out of the chaos of modern war a new era of the Church should come forth.

A tall Bishop in his robes—about his neck hangs a miniature wooden house into which the faithful were putting their offerings of money.

An expelled Bishop blesses his homeless flock. The miter with the message of peace was made of cardboard.

His Eminence Cardinal Frings, Papal Protector of Expellees, examines with Monsignor Swanstrom, Executive Director of War Relief Services-N.C.W.C., and Mr. James J. Norris, European Coordinator for the Organization, a booklet on the Expellee problem prepared by the Catholic Refugee Council of Germany.

The village of St. Stephen grows every day.

“Is it not the will of God,” asks Bishop Kaller, “that the final result of the terrible turmoil which has come over mankind should be to point out with urgency to the Church her true vocation as pilgrim and stranger on the journey towards the perpetual Sabbath rest of her only home in Heaven?”

We who have seen the destruction visited upon the great edifices that were left to us by the Church of the Middle Ages, and who hear now of the future necessity for decentralization (and therefore immense migrations from great centers of population) due to the threat of Hydrogen and Atom bombs, can understand what Bishop Kaller must have seen through grace when he wrote the foregoing words, and when he said:

“‘The Wandering Church’ is the Church of the future.”

There was faith in his heart when he stated “we must look on the ‘Wandering Church’ and its miseries with the eyes of faith. By it, God visits and arouses us. Does not the innermost being of the church reveal itself, though not perhaps at first sight, in the ‘Wandering Church,’ namely as the ever-living Christ? ‘The foxes have their lairs; and the birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has not whereon to lay his head.’”

And Christian hope speaks through him when he says near the end of his unforgettable article:

We should lose no more time in the realization that the age of the “Wandering Church” is an age of Salvation.

Sympathy with those who suffer was so deep in the heart of the saintly Bishop that he fought the ministry of evil, the Gestapo, until during the war years, he was taken out of his diocese by Gestapo officials as a prisoner. He was not interned, as he had expected to be, but it was thought that he would scarcely dare to return to his See, the town of Frauenberg. Exiled to central Germany, he was free to move after the arrival of the Allies, and he returned to Frauenberg as a pilgrim, on foot.

But perhaps the most Christ-like aspect of Bishop Kaller’s life came to light after his death when two letters were discovered in his correspondence. One is a letter from the Bishop to the Apostolic Nuncio and the other the answer from the Nuncio.

There had been a discussion regarding the possibility of having a priest enter the Concentration Camp of Theresienstadt, where thousands of Jewish men, women and children were interned. Some of these innocent victims of racial hatred were Catholic Jews, or the half-Jewish offspring of mixed marriages. The only way that they could be ministered to was to have a priest enter Theresienstadt and live with the inmates, partaking of their hunger, their daily terror, their bonds.

In a letter so beautiful, so selfless, that it reads like a letter of one of the Saints, Bishop Kaller, on the 27th of February, 1942, offered to be the priest to enter Theresienstadt, to give testimony of his complete identification with the innocent victims of persecution, and to bring Christ’s ministry to the Jewish Christians.

“I would want to be the priest who will minister to the Non-Aryan Christians,” writes Bishop Kaller.

The Bishop explains how he has meditated upon this offer, and has come to the decision that he himself, and not some delegated priest, must accept the task. He even analyses a section from a book of meditations entitled, “Concerning the Disposition to Martyrdom,” and expresses the hope that no human considerations at all enter into his decision.

Not even his closest friends, no member of his Chancery or of his diocese, was to know of this letter until after Bishop Kaller had died. The letter goes on to say:

“I believe and hope that this will of mine corresponds to the Will of God. But I will always comply with the opinion of superiors.

“The highest fidelity must embrace everything. I will keep nothing for myself, will have no reservations. I want to fulfill my office according to the order which I receive. St. Francis of Assisi shall be my model; he who took the words of God completely literally and fulfilled them. I will not actually be able to fulfill all to the fullest extent.

“It will require a long practice, but I may say that the will is there.

“Whether I judge rightly about myself, and about my wish, I do not know, because selfishness and temptations are so tightly interwoven with human nature that one often does not know and does not guess how deeply these two enemies are hidden.”

These are the words of a man selling himself unto slavery for his poor enslaved brothers. His offer was refused.

This letter is only now revealed to show the character of the first real Bishop of a truly “Wandering Church,” a Bishop whose example still inspires the millions whose wanderings are not yet over.

CHAPTER VIII
The Long Procession

“The blight of the detention-camps in time of peace, which is the blight of innocent brothers’ and sisters’ frustrated lives, and the plight of millions who now must answer to the hideous appellation of ‘expellees,’ are no longer simply a subject for humiliation and regret. There is more here even than a stark challenge to Christian compassion. You have been able to see and judge for yourselves: more insistently than ever at this hour that the agony of the so-called ‘displaced’ is a summons to prompt and responsible community action.”—His Holiness Pope Pius XII to group of American Congressmen studying problems of the displaced and expelled of Europe.

Opposite the railway station in the town of Salzburg, Austria, is a tremendous hotel, now partly ruined by bombing. The large sign on the front of this hotel reads: HOTEL EUROPE—REFUGEE CENTER.

This sign is symbolic of all Europe and more particularly of Western Europe. The entire Western continent is crowded with people who have fled from their homes, or who have been forced out of their homes and homelands. There are the regular Displaced Persons who are cared for in camps; the new displaced persons who are fleeing from tyranny and persecution in Eastern Europe; there are the thousands of displaced Jews, the pitiful remnants of a race which has undergone the most terrible holocaust of blood of the ages; and finally, there are the Expellees, close to 12 millions of them. I have tried in these chapters to give a realistic picture of life among these Expellees because, from the point of view of large-scale help, they are the most abandoned, the most helpless, the most inconsolable of the refugees of our day.

Expelled without relation to individual guilt

The HOTEL EUROPE—REFUGEE CENTER contains close to 500 of these refugees within its partly destroyed walls. These men, women and children were evicted from their homes and farms in Yugoslavia without relation to any individual guilt or crime. They were dumped into a partly destroyed Austrian hotel in 1945, and they are still there. The men have all found some kind of work because they are energetic people and are willing to do anything to keep their families alive. The women try to make homes out of the corners of draughty rooms. They look to the world for a word of recognition of their plight. Up to now, they have found little recognition or understanding. This symbolic HOTEL EUROPE is the end of the road for these expellees whom we call the Pilgrims of the Night.

It happens that the Expellee group in and around Salzburg represent one aspect of the whole problem, that of the Volksdeutsche, or ethnic Germans. These had been, for centuries, the citizens of such countries as Yugoslavia, Rumania and Hungary. Their ancestors had been invited to settle in uncultivated regions in an earlier age in European history, when boundary lines were not so sacred as they are now, and when racial and national distinctions had not attained the tremendous importance now granted to them. Three hundred years ago the ancestors of the Germanic minorities drained swamp-lands of the Voyvodina area of present-day Yugoslavia, and laid the foundation for making this area one of the most productive of the entire region. Though the descendants of the settlers continued in most cases to speak a dialect of German (owing to the compactness of their village colonies and the lack of communication facilities) they were considered Yugoslav citizens on an equal basis with the other heterogeneous nationalities that were joined together after World War I to form the new country of the South Slavs. Similarly, the German ethnic groups in the Banat region of Rumania and Hungary were citizens of those countries, with the same duties and rights as other citizens, including the duty of conscription into the armed forces of the country in which they lived.

Expulsion was particularly bitter for the Volksdeutsche groups of South-Eastern Europe because to them Austria and Germany were alien lands. There was little or no feeling of kinship with the local populations which were forced to receive them. Besides their different mode of speech, it was found that even their manner of dress was distinctly alien. It was as though the United States descendants of the first settlers from England and Holland were driven back into English and Dutch communities precisely because their ancestors in some rather remote past had originated there. The kinship would certainly have been lost over the centuries even though similarity of language remained.

These Volksdeutsche colonies are sometimes understood to have been planted by Hitler for imperialistic purposes. Nothing could be further from the truth, although some members of these German ethnic groups did prove themselves amenable to Nazi arguments. Because of these individual traitors, whole masses of people have now been deprived of their rights and dispossessed of their farms, their homes, their businesses and factories. Of the three hundred and ten thousand Expellees in Austria, the greater number are Volksdeutsche.

Such tracts of rich farmland, such businesses and factories carefully built up over years of patient effort, fell as rich plunder to the new regimes of these Eastern countries. They were used as booty for distribution to other settlers—innocent pawns who by reason of the acceptance of these homes and lands are now bound in vassalage to the regime that can take and give away without reference to any of man’s needs or his rights.

All savings, pensions, accumulated possessions for old age, were lost to the expelled people and they found themselves starting life as a new kind of pioneer—unwilling pioneers in already overcrowded and partly destroyed regions—pioneers not of hope, but of despair.

It is open to question how long the communities sheltering these unwilling settlers can bear the cost of this heartless dumping of human cargo into their midst.

Public welfare agencies find that their heaviest burdens in welfare and in unemployment payments, come from the presence of the expellees. Local taxes go in large measure to the upkeep of the expellees who are invalid, aged or infirm. Payments to expellee dependents of dead servicemen, to the disabled, and to the necessitous Expellee families on an emergency basis, etc., totalled one billion three hundred and fifty million D marks in the last three years. The religious charitable agencies have performed a work of rescue that is almost unparalleled in history. For example, Caritas, or German Catholic Charities, had collected up to the end of 1948, 210 million D marks for direct help to expellees. In addition to this, scores of new institutions have been opened since the war to take care of the aged, the sick, the orphaned and returned POWs of the expellee group. The Hilfswerk and the Innere Mission of the Lutheran Church have performed a rescue work of similar magnitude and Christian generosity.

However, the solution of the expellee problem is far from being found. The crisis of expellee help is now. Unless energetic action is undertaken within the next year to find basic solutions for the problem of the twelve million expellees, of whom seven and a half millions are in the Western Zones of Germany, it is unlikely that Western European recovery will become a fact.

The pyramid of chaos

As this is being written, unemployment in Western Germany is rising in such a way as to suggest the terrifying army of the unemployed in an earlier era—the era that ushered in Hitler. More than 2,000,000 men are already out of work, with prospects of a rise to 3,000,000 in the winter to come. Any economist who analyzed the pyramid of chaos in Western Germany could have foreseen the shattering of a false prosperity by so enormous a drop in employment. The pyramid of chaos of post-war Germany is a five-tiered structure, at the base of which is the indescribable destruction of modern warfare with its saturation bombing of urban centers. It would have been the task of a generation to restore life and health into a battered and almost lifeless economy, without the hindrance which came from the next tier, or block, of the pyramid—the division of this highly centralized nation into Eastern and Western zones. In addition to the sealing off of the zones from each other by artificial economic and governmental barriers, there is the graver problem of the complete detachment from Germany of large agricultural and industrial areas to the East. The products of these areas might conceivably have made the difference between solvency and economic bankruptcy to a Germany which must eventually attempt by some measure to feed its own population, and balance expenditures for necessary imports with credits earned by exports. A third tier was the dismantling of factories that had been turned to wartime uses—a program that provided much employment during the three years immediately after the end of the war. Such dismantling activity was deceptive because it gave a wrong impression of the problem of unemployment in post-war Germany. But all the time, the workers knew they were destroying their own livelihood with every day’s work; and they knew, too, that many of the plants could have been reconverted to their earlier peacetime operations.

Higher in the pyramid of chaos is the problem of the forced labor of German prisoners in Russia. By virtue of this, a labor force of enormous proportions is kept from the reconstruction of a destroyed economy.

As the highest block in the pyramid, and conceivably the block that will topple the whole structure of Germany’s economic life, is the presence of the Expellees, if we wait until the structure topples, as well it may when and if 3,000,000 Germans find themselves unemployed, there will be frantic measures, hastily rushed into execution, to meet such problems as that of the Expellees. But waiting only endangers the stability of Western Europe as a whole, because nothing can happen in Western Germany without deep repercussions in Free Europe as a whole.

It would be well then to take a realistic view of the Expellee problem and see it as the “inflammatory material” for the West that it really is. It was the High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, who stated in his broadcast to the nation entitled “Progress Report on Germany” that, “Inflammatory material exists in the vast numbers of refugees and in homeless youth.”

Whether we look on the expellee problem as a human, social, religious, or as a predominantly economic problem, we cannot escape the fact that this group of expelled and unsettled people is a danger to the recovery of Western Europe as a whole.

That little piece of earth which a man owns and from which he draws the sustenance to nourish his children, belongs to him under the laws of God and man, and cannot be alienated from him without breaking asunder those laws. The only real solution to the problem of expelled human beings is to restore the operation of the natural law, and of the moral law which used to guide nations as well as individuals, by giving back their homes, farms, and businesses which were expropriated. Regardless of any political considerations, regardless of frontiers, regardless of historical bitternesses, or desire for retribution, this fact is irrefutable. Naturally, anyone with a broad vision of Europe’s past, present and future, must see in these mass expulsions of millions of human beings from the land which gave them sustenance, the unmistakable symptoms of a deep and malignant sickness of society.

The vision of Europe with these millions of homeless driven creatures is one that must give rise to the deepest concern, since peace cannot be established without real justice, and real justice demands that all those from whom homes have been taken should have these homes restored to them—whether it be in Eastern Poland or in Eastern Germany.

Failing a solution based on real justice, there are other solutions which take the problem as it presents itself, and proceed from there.

Herewith are four ways in which we as Americans, with concern for our neighbor’s welfare, can at this moment approach the problem of expellees:

(1) Recognition of expellees as international problem

Since the expulsion of these people was begun and given impetus by international agreement, it is unthinkable that the whole burden of resolution should lie upon the people of an impoverished and destroyed nation. This problem internationally created (after the Potsdam agreement) should be studied and resolved by international action of the countries who can help or receive the expellees.

(2) Relocation within germany

The expellees were distributed in Germany and Austria on a haphazard basis. Intellectuals were unloaded in out-of-the-way villages, farmers were dumped into industrial towns, and skilled workers and artisans found themselves in agricultural sections. The land reform in Germany, with its breakup of the remaining larger estates, will allow for the resettlement in Germany of only a certain number of farming families.

A. Agricultural Resettlement

A brilliant overall study of the Expellee problem has been prepared by the Catholic Refugee Council of Germany under the sponsorship of Cardinal Frings of Cologne, the Papal Protector of Refugees. This study, published as a pamphlet in English and German, and entitled Economic Rehabilitation of Expellees in Western Germany, analyses the make-up of the refugees as regards former livelihoods, and finds that more than 250,000 families now in Western Germany (embracing a total of 750,000 persons) were self-employed as independent farmers before expulsion from their homesteads. It is estimated that in the next decade about 80,000 farm holdings in Western Germany will become available for resettlement, owing to lack of heirs and other causes. Forty thousand of these farms will be allotted to Expellee farming families. In addition to this, the breakup of larger estates, the utilization of former army and Nazi property, and the reclamation of waste land and unused farmland, will release farmsteads to accommodate another 60,000 Expellee family groups. Even the resettlement in this manner of 100,000 Expellee families would require the use of more credits than now seem available in the German economy. But granted that these 100,000 family groups are placed back in their professions on the land, there is still the problem of 150,000 family units whose accustomed mode of life was independent farming. We will mention this group again in discussing emigration possibilities.

Another 1,400,000 persons in the Western Zones were engaged in forestry and in other forms of agriculture; many of them were laborers and agricultural artisans. The resettlement of this group has been somewhat easier, since many have already adapted themselves to a life which involves working on the farm holdings belonging to the native German population. As the Expellees belong to more favorable age and sex groups than the native population, their placement in such labor was a natural solution in innumerable cases to a shortage of manpower.

B. Redistribution and Rehabilitation in Work

Very little further work can be done in the advantageous placement of workers according to their skills until the haphazard dumping process of the Expellees on the German landscape has been corrected by a planned redistribution of the newcomers in areas that can in some measures absorb their particular work-experiences. While I was in Germany, a general relocation of this type was getting under way—the process of transplanting the Expellees from their temporary haven in Schleswig-Holstein to the Southern area of Germany, or what was the French Zone. While Schleswig-Holstein, a poor province industrially, had to accept an enormous number of expelled people, the large area under French occupation did not take any of the homeless group. The argument was that as France had not signed the Potsdam Agreement, allowing for the mass expulsions, the French authorities were not obligated to accept any of the people uprooted by the expulsions. Now that the three Western occupation Zones are unified in the Bonn Federal Republic, the area of the French Zone is being used to accept settlers from the most overcrowded provinces.

The redistribution process begins with the finding of job opportunities for the working member of the family. The worker comes first, and after living quarters are found for his dependents, the family unit is reestablished. This process of relocation, while it relieves the population pressure in Schleswig-Holstein, does not solve other economic problems. Uneconomic family units, for example, widows with small children, grandmothers or grandfathers with younger non-employable family members, are not accepted in such a scheme, and must remain in the relatively poor province as heavy burdens on public and private welfare agencies. However, the relocation of the workers is in itself a great good, since many people who could not find work in an agricultural area will become producers in a more diversified economic setting.

This redistribution process must go on all over Western Germany, until the maximum number of Expellees are again made producing citizens in fields that are allied to their experience and skills. Already the native diligence of the various groups among the Expellees has manifested itself in the setting up of enterprises under the most difficult and unpromising conditions. In this connection, I would mention the St. Stephen Village, near the destroyed city of Darmstadt. Here in a sandy waste, marked by bomb craters, a group of Hungarian Expellees of Germanic origin saw the opportunity to grow vines similar to those they had cultivated on a sandy tract of Hungarian soil. With help from Catholic agencies, this group cleared the sandy expanse, and not only planted it with vines, but with the other crops, including potatoes, that are complements to the vine-growing economy. Working at first with borrowed tools, the men later found it possible to make their own cultivators and other farm tools from the scrap they found in the neighborhood of flattened Darmstadt. Three barrack structures were erected for the first settlers, and later, 14 families were placed in barracks quarters in a nearby village. The little village, named after the patron saint of Hungary, was created out of zeal and faith during the darkest days of hunger and chaos in Germany.

A similar tale of zeal and hard work comes from the village of Mottgers in Hesse, where a group of weavers from the Sudetenland found themselves placed after the expulsion. In a few abandoned army huts, they immediately set to work to fashion handlooms. When twenty had been made, and by some means the men and women were already busy weaving, these ingenious exiles were granted seven mechanical looms as long as they could manage to obtain the raw material. In a short while, the new enterprise was turning out 22,000 yards of textiles every month. This particular group was a unit under the guidance of its parish priest who, fortunately, was able to stay with his parishioners in their exile. Under the guidance of the parish priest, the workers are now able to mobilize their resources to turn rubble into bricks for the erection of new homes. Wherever some kind of work is provided, the hunger for a little home asserts itself, and every privation is endured until the four sheltering walls are raised.

Other enterprises of the Sudetenland exiles already under way are glove-making, glass-making and lace-making establishments. These growing businesses are further testimony to the traditional energy of the people of the Sudetenland area, the products of whose hands and brains were for a long time made for world markets. The taxes on the Sudetenland enterprises were a large source of the monetary support of the Czechoslovak republic.

Rubble is turned into homes. All the family helps.

The St. Johann housing development for Expellees proceeds as the builders place their homemade bricks one upon the other.

Twenty-five thousand among the Expellees in Western Germany are said to be former owners and operators of independent industrial enterprises. About a fifth of their number have already established small factories or industries in their new environment. One of these industries I saw in operation near an Expellee village in Westphalia. An old barn had been converted into a wood-working establishment, where skilled woodworkers turned out door frames and other necessary items to convert mass barracks quarters into individual dwelling units.

Statistics reveal that there are among the Expellees, about 150,000 formerly self-employed artisans, or skilled handicraft workers. These in the main lack tools, raw materials, and places to work, and are therefore prevented from making any real contribution to the economy of their present surroundings.

The self-help projects initiated by the Expellees with such indescribable ingenuity, have been carried just about as far as is humanly and materially possible. After the currency reform, when holdings in marks were all but wiped out, the Expellee enterprises suffered cruel set-backs. It must be remembered that the small capital of the Expellees was in marks because they did not own equipment or real property. Some of the small industries, begun with such sacrifice and back-breaking work, went under after the currency reform. The capital levy (lastenausgleich) for the equalization of burdens, was designed in some measure to equate the sacrifices of the money reform over the whole community by taxing real property. But the exiles often lost their precariously organized livelihood just the same.

From all accounts, the greatest need in the setting up of productive enterprises today, is for credit. The larger, well-established industries, if they are operating at all, get help under the E.C.A. in the form of raw materials. The health of German economy, and of German social life as a whole, depends and will depend in a particular way, on the nurturing and keeping alive of the small industrial enterprises. These are the economic units that can absorb the skills of the uprooted and the disinherited, and turn them back to the ways of peace and of contribution to others—rather than to the nihilism that surely faces them if their hands are idle, their skills unused. The nurturing of these smaller enterprises would be the only way to absorb into useful work the half million youths whose lack of future imperils a whole generation. Too great a rationalization of work processes with labor-saving devices is no solution in an economy where there are so many idle hands. The small workshop would seem to be one answer. The various land governments of Western Germany already understand this and have managed to guarantee credits of 300 million D Marks for workshops and small industrial enterprises. Even this sum is only a small beginning but it shows an awareness of social and economic realities.

Now that the D Mark is more stable, and gives a real economic incentive to work because of its buying power, the availability of credit is crucial to any revival of employment in Germany, and for the increased employment of Expellees in particular. To avoid the further social disintegration of greater unemployment, I would propose that the new Ministry for Expellee Affairs in the Western German Republic be given a real role to play. This Ministry might receive through E.C.A. the means to extend credit for the continuance and initiation of Expellee enterprises and for the necessary redistribution of the Expellees according to their skills. Some counterpart funds have already been allocated for this, but it would hardly be fair to tie up a great amount of counterpart funds in this way. What I am suggesting is an entirely new grant under E.C.A. for the uprooted people of the West as a token of understanding of the urgency of the problem.

A special study of the costs of the economic reestablishment of all the Expellees within Western Germany, reveals that about twenty-seven billion D Marks, or about seven billion dollars would be needed for the task. A fraction of this sum, if allocated now, would obviate great tensions and dangers later.

Already the Expellees are forming into political units to plead their cause. If little recognition of their plight comes to this disinherited group from the West, there are fears that a nihilistic trend will seize them—a trend of thinking that nothing could be worse than their present sub-proletariat existence.

“Here is the rock on which all our plans can smash,”[2] an Allied official was quoted as saying in reference to the success of political agitation among the Expellees. Political strategists are described in this dispatch from East Germany as trying to take advantage of the fact that “the refugees largely unemployed and many of them living in desperate poverty present an area for political agitation unparalleled in any Western European country since the advent of the Marshall Plan.”

It is precisely because the Marshall Plan has not touched the lives of these forgotten people that it is proposed here that a substantial grant be made through the Western German Federal Republic to the Ministry for Expellee Affairs. The lifeblood of credit would then begin coursing through the economically moribund community of exiles.

C. Reestablishment of Families through Housing Projects

I have tried to describe the housing conditions in which the Expellees have been living these years of peace. A few figures will clarify the overall situation. Approximately five million housing units are needed in Western Germany as a whole to give a decent minimum of living space to the inhabitants crowded into the already densely populated area. Even if a quarter of a million housing units were built each year, it would be twenty years before the situation would be regularized.

The Red Cross of Switzerland surveyed the housing situation in Bavaria with reference to the Expellees, and came to a more pessimistic conclusion. Whereas in May, 1939, there were just about seven million rooms for the seven million inhabitants in Bavaria, there were in May, 1949, only six million two hundred thousand rooms (as a result of war destruction) for an increased population of nine million four hundred thousand inhabitants. To return to the conditions of ten years ago, three million two hundred thousand units would be needed. Were these to be constructed at the rate of 100,000 yearly, it would take thirty-two years to return to the housing situation of 1939.

The Catholic Church in Germany has been in the forefront of the struggle for improvement in housing conditions for Expellees, as well as for bombed-out native Germans. There existed in Germany, until it was liquidated by the Nazi regime, a Catholic Settlement Service, for the promotion of adequate family dwellings and housing developments. This Catholic Settlement Service was reconstituted on the initiative of Bishop Maximilian Kaller by the Fulda Conference of German Bishops. In every German Diocese there is an autonomous branch of the Catholic Settlement Service, whose headquarters are located in Cathedral Place, Frankfurt-on-Main. Already, housing developments for Expellees are springing up all over Germany, developments that show remarkable degrees of initiative and community cooperation.

The diocesan Settlement Committee consists of representatives of Caritas, or Catholic Charities, and lay representatives including engineers and architects. This Committee serves as advisers to the self-help group which initiate the projects. There is a three-month course given at the Frankfurt-on-Main headquarters of the Catholic Settlement Service on the planning aspects of housing developments, while another three-month course in the actual building and financing processes is given at a new housing development in Hettingen near Buchen. The housing project in Hettingen was one of the first to be realized, and is under the inspired direction of a forward-looking priest, Father H. Magnani. In Hettingen, the Church gave to the homeless some land it possessed, and a building cooperative was formed. Planning was done in the winter, and in the spring housing for 150 homeless people was begun and carried to completion.

In the diocese of Aachen, the Church deeded over enough property for 4,000 people to plan homes for themselves on a self-help basis. In the diocese of Augsburg, the “Christian Housing Aid” has rebuilt more than 1,000 homes, while in the Bamberg diocese a large housing project for Expellees is under way. This is the “St. Joseph Expellee Housing Project” in Bamberg itself, while in Erlangen, in the same diocese, the diocese has set aside a large parcel of property for a similar development.

Many more examples could be given of the Church’s tremendous struggle to put the uprooted families back into homes of their own. The Catholic Church works side by side with the Lutheran Church on this social problem, since there exists also the Settlement Service of the Evangelical Church to carry out a similar task. The mutual concern of the Christian Churches is the protection and rehabilitation of the family, and of family life.

The energy and zeal of Church leaders in this regard has been magnificent, and is matched by the hard work of the homeless, once they see there is hope of reestablishing their families outside the barracks or mass quarters. In almost every destroyed town in Germany, the visitor can see men and women making bricks, often with the aid of rubble-crushing machines. Children join in the work after school, and the houses are raised in record time. Voluntary effort, however, can only point the way. Large-scale resettlement within Germany calls for extensive credits and overall planning. A housing development plan for Expellees, wisely planned in connection with relocation according to skills and available work, would go far toward solving the unemployment problems for several years to come. Without these extensive credits, which can only come through the E.C.A., there is no real hope for so large a scheme.

(3) Planned emigration

Much has been said regarding emigration from Germany as a solution for the Expellee problem. Within limits, there is certainly much to be said for the emigration of some groups to areas of the world that could absorb them. However, one must bear in mind that the demographic picture of the German population is catastrophically out of balance now, and that any emigration which would unbalance it further, would be a disaster. Thus, any large-scale emigration of able-bodied men, already so few in relation to the dependent population (orphans, aged, war-wounded, etc.) would cause great concern to those interested in the future well-being of the people as a whole. As was mentioned before, there are about 150,000 formerly independent farming families for whom there is little hope of reestablishment within a Germany from which 28 per cent of all arable land has been taken since the end of the war.

There are among Expellees, as I have pointed out, many groups who come from far away, and who by the fact of their history and experience are natural pioneers. These are the Germanic groups from Yugoslavia, Rumania and Hungary, whose fame as hardy farmers and colonizers is well known. These people are not attached to German soil because their forebears have not lived on it for generations. In this, they differ from the native Germans who were expelled from such areas as Silesia and East Prussia. The Germanic groups from East Europe would make excellent emigrants.

At the same time, a siphoning off of about one hundred fifty thousand to a quarter of a million families by emigration would allow the remaining Expellees to be integrated into the industrial and agricultural life of Germany. The St. Raphael’s Union, a Catholic emigration organization which was disbanded by the Nazis because of its rescue work for persecuted Jews, has now been restarted and is ready to help in any and every emigration scheme. However, the St. Raphael’s Union, though helped by funds from American Catholics, has not yet been able to effectuate much in the line of emigration from Germany because of the restrictions placed by the Allies on any such plans. Since its reactivation, the St. Raphael’s Union has been able to resettle only 9,000 people in various receiving areas of the world. The inclusion of 54,744 Expellees in the latest United States D. P. bill, and the assurance of paid transportation for them as for other displaced people, give increased proof of the growing realization that active measures must be taken towards a resolution of the Expellees problem. Renewed hope for the reactivation of the program of emigration has arisen as a result of the inclusion of 54,000 Expellees in the latest United States legislation to admit DP’s.

Selected groups from among the expert farmers and technicians might be valuable adjuncts in any and every scheme to raise the living standards of peoples in backward areas—and might well be used as colonizers in connection with certain aspects of the so-called Point Four Plan for the development, industrially and agriculturally, of far-flung areas of the world.

(4) Continuation of voluntary aid

It is understandable that Americans are beginning to wonder why it is necessary to continue giving to Europe so many years after the war was ended. They know that their taxes are being used in the economic rebuilding of Western Europe. So great was the catastrophe of destruction and mass expulsions, that Western Europe needs every help that can come from governmental sources, as well as the continued support of religious relief organizations. It is hard for us to realize the staggering difference between World War I and World War II in the indescribable immensity of destruction and dislocation of life.

Caritasverband, Catholic Charities of Germany, is heavily overburdened with the large dependent groups among the Expellees. It is Caritas which reaches out to the helpless aged and the helpless young, to the orphaned, to the sick prisoner of war who comes back from slave labor to find that his family has disappeared. Three hundred and three Caritas institutions have been founded or replanned to serve the Expellees in the past five years of privation. Of these, one hundred and sixty-eight are Homes for the Aged, sixty-five are Children’s Homes, while the remainder are hospitals, Prisoner of War Hostels and other institutions to meet special Expellee needs. If the protective and loving hand of the Church of Christ were removed from these people in their hour of helplessness and need, their night of despair would be unrelieved by any light.

The religious problem presented by millions of Catholics in predominantly Protestant sections, destitute Catholics who lack churches, parish centers, schools and even cemeteries for their dead, is a problem that we Catholics can ignore only at great peril to the future of the Church. These little chapters have been attempts to bring closer to ordinary Christians the enormity of the burdens placed on other ordinary people—and to remind all who are able to help that they must give that help in this time of crisis.

The long procession

Up to now, the expellees living in their slave labor barracks, in their half-destroyed hotels, even in their stables, have not been recognized as a great international and human problem. It is because of this that they have been excluded from international help and international planning. We have called them “The Pilgrims of the Night,” because they have walked a road that was so dark and impenetrable in its misery and hopelessness. We Catholics of America, whose hearts are so open to the anguish of others, must see them as part of the long procession of those who have suffered since the beginning of the persecution in Europe in the last fifteen years. The dispossessed have been driven forth, wave upon wave, from their homes: Poles and Balts to the unknown wastes of Siberia, Jews and Poles and the rest to the ovens of the crematoriums. There are the Displaced Persons of many lands who can never walk back to their beloved homes and homelands, the men and women and even little children who flee in terror from the East to the West, and the Expellees, whose procession is so long because there are so many millions of these poor driven human beings still unsettled, still homeless.

In an article entitled “The Homelessness of God,” Ida Gorres relates the homelessness of the millions to the homelessness of God who has been driven out of our hearts. She says:

“Millions of men have been taken from their native soil and driven like loose sand over the face of the earth, refugees from every class and of every kind, defenseless strangers meeting with strangers, having a good reception from good men and a harsh one from hard men. How many new words our language has produced which would have been incomprehensible to anyone some years ago, and all intended to describe the one thing, that men are without homes any more. In every street in the world, down to the last out-of-the-way village, one can hear strange tongues and see strange faces belonging to foreign peoples and to different stocks but all betokening an encounter with the same cruel fate, both men and women, young and old. No, never since the dawn of history has the like been known. Is this not in truth a sign, a pattern and a likeness of what we have ourselves done to God?”

If we did not contemplate this long procession of anguished humanity with the eyes of the spirit, it would be difficult not to give in to despair. Only the Christian answer to the great mystery of suffering gives any clue to the understanding of the limitless anguish that has beaten its way over the face of the earth in our time. The long procession only has meaning when we remember that each poor driven man, woman or child who walked in it trod in the very footsteps of One who long ago made a lonely pilgrimage—burdened by the cut tree that is the symbol and explanation of all our suffering, and of all our hope.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] New York Times, February 19, 1950.

Transcriber’s Notes

Pg 26 Changed: | at any time during his capitivity
To: | at any time during his captivity
Pg 52 Changed: | between the ages of fourteeen and twenty-five
To: | between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five

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Table of Contents

- Pilgrims of the Night
- Foreword
- Contents
- CHAPTER I The Dispossessed

- CHAPTER II Men and Work

- FOOTNOTES:

- CHAPTER III Men and Slave Labor

- CHAPTER IV The Women

- A young girl
- A mother of eight children
- Mourning for children lost
- Mourning for children about to be born
- Mourning for husbands
- Old women waiting for death

- CHAPTER V The Children

- The little lost children
- Day after day, heart-breaking announcements
- Search services for missing children
- Uprooted orphanages
- Child life in barracks
- Youth without hope
- Children of the dispersion
- Tale told at night by homeless children
- A picture of desolation

- CHAPTER VI The Priests

- Homeless priests—their flocks dispersed
- A priest in siberia
- Uprooted Catholics without churches
- Almost never off his motorcycle
- Children who knew Christ’s Cross
- No food before evening
- To save a whole generation

- CHAPTER VII Two Bishops and Their Burdens

- An expelled bishop

- CHAPTER VIII The Long Procession

- Expelled without relation to individual guilt

- The pyramid of chaos
- The long procession
- FOOTNOTES:

- Transcriber’s Notes

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE