The Nemesis of Potsdam

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The Nemesis of Potsdam. The Anglo-Americans and the expulsion of the Germans (in reference to “punishing justice”); Nemesis, the goddess of revenge and retribution is a book by the American jurist and historian Alfred de Zayas, published by the British publisher Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1977. The book takes up the role of the Western Allies in dealing with the approximately 12 to 14 million Germans expelled after the Second World War, mostly from the former eastern German territories and Czechoslovakia.

Content of the work

The first chapter “Population Resettlement as a Political Principle” describes historical and political backgrounds to the phenomenon of the expulsion of the Germans, the “most consequential mass resettlement of the 20th century” after Alfred de Zayas p. It examines the status of German minorities who have lived for centuries, especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia. They had rights under the Minority Protection Treaties. Their multiple petitions to the League of Nations and several rulings by the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague show that they were systematically discriminated against. The German minorities were defamed as “disloyal minorities”, later even accused of treason. The key to the problem lay in the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain, according to which two million Germans were to leave Poland as minorities outside the borders of Germany, and three and a half million German Austrians were put under Czechoslovak rule against their will. Although the US delegation in Paris in 1919 argued against the artificial creation of minorities, the power-political idea of George Clemenceau prevailed. In this chapter, de Zayas also explores why the Anglo-Americans abandoned the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

The second chapter deals with the prehistory surrounding the Sudeten question, the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Munich Agreement and the Anglo-American attitude to the Beneš Decrees.

The third chapter discusses the files on the German-Polish border from the Tehran and Yalta conferences. The fourth chapter describes escape. The fifth chapter analyses the British and American memoranda on the question of the “transfer” of East Germans, with a resettlement of three to four million, which was to be regulated by a Population Transfers Commission. The sixth chapter documents how the expulsion of the Germans actually took place, especially on the basis of archival documents from the USA and Great Britain. The seventh chapter describes the Marshall Plan and describes the integration of displaced persons. The eighth chapter deals with the displaced persons in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR, the ninth chapter with the Eastern Treaties and