R. Gerald Hughes
Unfinished Business from Potsdam: Britain, West Germany, and the Oder-Neisse Line, 1945-1962
The German question lay at the heart of the Cold War in Europe:[1] the Oder-Neisse line and the fate of Germany’s former territories to the east of it lay at the heart of the German question.[2] Of post-war Europe’s disputed boundaries, the Oder-Neisse line was the most prominent and divisive; its uncertain status, in the words of Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons in January 1948, a ‘complication and a dark cloud over the map of Europe’.[3] As the British ambassador at Warsaw, Sir George Clutton, remarked in February 1962, ‘there can be no détente in Central Europe until there is some form of recognition of the ... Oder-Neisse line’.[4]
The historiography of Anglo-German relations since 1949 presents the fate of the Oder-Neisse line as an irritant symptomatic of issues such as Britain’s disinterest in the reunification of Germany and Germany’s dislike of Britain’s détente policy.[5] This article sets the issue in the context of Britain’s stance towards the Continent during the Cold War demonstrating how unfinished business from the Second World War affected policy formulation towards friend and foe alike in a fundamental manner.
What attitude to take towards the Oder-Neisse line, and the expulsions of the Germans who lived to the east of it, was a question first asked at the Potsdam conference in July and August1945.[6] British officials soon found themselves trapped between their need to integrate West Germany economically and politically, which obliged them to humour German sensibilities, and their wish to lower the political tension throughout Europe by means of a durable detente with the Soviet bloc, which pointed to accommodation with Poland and the Soviet Union. Thus, in 1962, Britain secretly guaranteed the inviolability of Poland’s western frontier. Had the guarantee become public knowledge, it would have jeopardised Britain’s relations with West Germany. The history of the Oder-Neisse line illustrates not only Britain’s stance in the Cold War but also the limits to its power and influence in central Europe, where. Brokering frontiers had always been beyond its capabilities.
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Even before Konrad Adenauer became the first chancellor of West Germany in September 1949, he publicly declared of the Oder-Neisse line: ‘This frontier we will never recognise!’[7] He reiterated the statement in his first speech in office. The Adenauer government’s refusal to recognise the Oder-Neisse line was a central plank of its Politik der Stärke (‘Policy of Strength’). West Germany had little to gain from negotiations likely to lead to recognition and the postponement Germany’s reunification in the interest of better relations between East and West. Adenauer's greatest fear was the implementation of the Potsdam agreement of 2 August 1945 as the basis for a Carthaginian peace against Germany. The Cold War, by dividing Germany, also saved it from the punitive peace foreshadowed by the Potsdam agreement, which implied that the Western allies and the Soviet Union agreed about Germany. The implementation of the terms of the Potsdam agreement would have meant the irrevocable loss of all German territories beyond the Oder-Neisse line and the very probable permanent division of Germany into two sovereign states as the Soviet Union would never allow a free and united Germany (even within truncated frontiers). The Soviet Union, the chief opponent of any revival of Germany, never hid the fact that it saw the Potsdam agreement as the basis for a final peace settlement with Germany. The Soviet Peace Note of 10 March 1952, which proposed a neutral reunified Germany, stated that ‘The territory of Germany is fixed by the borders which were specified by the resolutions of the Great powers at the Potsdam conference.’[8] Adenauer well understood the danger of a revival of the Potsdam ‘consensus’ amongst the wartime allies. The chancellor believed that ‘every Soviet reference to [the Potsdam] agreement constitutes a Soviet invitation to the West to conclude such a bargain on our backs … Bismarck spoke about his nightmare of coalitions against Germany. I have my own nightmare: Its name is Potsdam.' Adenauer thus acknowledged that 'the foreign policy of the Federal Republic has always been geared to an escape from this danger zone. For Germany must not be lost between the grindstones. If it does it will be lost.[9] Thus, when West Germany acceded to NATO in 1955, Adenauer could declare on 11 May that ‘We are now part of the strongest alliance in history. It will bring us unification.’[10]
Josef Joffe has noted that while the ‘grand settlement’ prevented any ‘autonomous’ West German policy towards the east, it also prevented the West from having a ‘free hand’ vis-à-vis Moscow and Eastern Europe. This was derived from the fact that the West had endorsed Bonn’s ambitious goals with regard to Germany’s boundaries, the GDR and the question of German unity. Thus, the problem of Germany would remain the decisive ‘barrier’ to better East-West relations and the Federal Republic was instrumental in ensuring that this remained the case.[11] As Pyotr Abrasimov (Soviet ambassador to East Germany, 1962-1971), noted in his 1981 memoir, ‘The cold war planners in Bonn … had always vigorously opposed any negotiations between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union on a German peace settlement’.[12]
Membership of NATO did not remove the tension between Britain and Germany. After all, as The Times noted in an editorial, ‘it does not follow that Europe accepts and supports all-Germany’s claims for frontier revision.’[13] Britain did not share West Germany’s wish to avoid negotiating with the Soviet bloc; it wished to negotiate from strength. The treasury noted in June 1955 that ‘a satisfactory détente leading to a general scaling down of armaments offers the best prospect of relief for the heavy burden of defence expenditures.’[14] Without the acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line the chances of a détente with the Soviet Union seemed remote. In December 1958, the charismatic Labour Party maverick Aneurin Bevan expressed Britain’s dislike of the Politik der Stärk with typical bluntness: ‘what we are seeking is … to be strong enough to be peaceful. We are not seeking strength for its own sake.’[15]
Nevertheless, British officials had few doubts about the Adenauer government’s peaceful intentions. On 20 October 1953, for instance, Adenauer told the Bundestag that ‘The problem of the Oder-Neisse line is not to be solved by force but by peaceful means only’.[16] Nevertheless, his refusal to recognise the line made Soviet bloc charges of West German revisionism difficult to refute. Adenauer’s room for manoeuvre was restricted by the large numbers of expellees from beyond the line;[17] eight million living in West Germany by 1950 and four million in East Germany.[18] Thus, he had both to renounce the use of force in redrawing the Oder-Neisse line, for reasons of international politics, and, for domestic political reasons, to refuse to recognize it.
Sabine Lee stresses the difference, for Adenauer, between an Ostpolitik he designed and controlled and a détente brokered by the United States and Britain.[19] He explained in January 1963 that ‘Britain did not have the same perception of threat as continental Europeans.’[20] The offence given to the West German government by Britain’s search for detente partly explains the failure of the Harold Macmillan government’s bid to join the European Economic Community (EEC) in January 1963. The slow reversal in attitude by the British government towards membership of the EEC was linked with its modification of policy on détente and the German question, and on the Oder-Neisse line.
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The Oder-Neisse line arose out of the diplomacy of the Second World War.[21] As early as spring 1942, V.M. Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, began to press the western allies (whilst on a visit to London) over the notion that Britain should, as an ally, allow the USSR to keep its gains in eastern Poland derived from the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.[22] (In essence, this meant the re-establishment of the old Curzon line). At the Teheran conference in 1943, Churchill duly agreed to Josef Stalin’s demand that the Curzon line form the basis of the post-war Polish-Soviet frontier.[23] Churchill now urged the Polish government-in-exile to accept this loss of territory in return for compensation from German territory in the shape of East Prussia, Danzig, and Upper Silesia as far as the Oder river.[24] Poles living on the Soviet side of the frontier would be allowed to return to Poland while Germans living within Poland’s new frontiers would be removed.[25] After it was agreed – in September 1944 - to divide post-war Germany into three zones of,[26] Churchill implied that Britain supported Poland’s expansion westwards. He told the House of Commons in December: ‘The Poles are free. So far as the Russians and Great Britain are concerned, to extend their territory at the expense of Germany, to the West … they gain in the West and North [German] territories more highly developed than they lose in the East.’[27]The Times noted that this seemed a ‘satisfactory and lasting solution’.[28]
The Yalta agreement of 11 February 1945 stated that the USA, the USSR and Britain ‘recognized that Poland must receive substantial accessions of territory in the north and west … [and] will hereafter determine the status of Germany or of any area at present being part of German territory.’[29] No territories were specified at Yalta: the specification, and transfer, of what became known as the Oder-Neisse territories were enunciated in Article IX (b) of the Potsdam agreement. This ‘provisionally’ awarded the formerly German territories to the east of the Oder-Neisse line to Poland and the USSR:
The three Heads of Government agree that, pending the final determination of Poland’s western frontier, the former German territories east of a line running from the Baltic Sea immediately west of Swinemunde, and thence along the Oder River to the confluence of the western Neisse River and along the western Neisse to the Czechoslovak frontier [excluding that area of East Prussia placed under Soviet control] … shall be under the administration of the Polish state and for such purposes shall not be considered as part of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany.[30]
Article XIII, which provided for the transfer of the German population from the Oder-Neisse territories, as well as from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland,[31] seemed to complete the post-war rearrangement of territories. The territory east of the Oder Neisse line transferred to Polish ‘administration’ included western and southern East Prussia, most of Pomerania, and nearly all of Silesia; while the northern part of East Prussia was placed under the ‘administration’ of the Soviet Union. The Germans expelled from these territories were replaced with ethnic Poles, and also with Ukrainians, Belorussian and Lithuanians, displaced by the Soviet annexation of formerly Polish lands. Poland also expelled ethnic Germans from Poland itself and the Polish Corridor.
Ryzard Piotrowicz argues that the post-war tension between West Germany and Poland arose from the fact that the ‘Potsdam Protocol was subject to two very different interpretations.’ Advocates of the German case stressed the ‘fundamental, non-negotiable condition’ that the ‘final delimitation’ of Poland’s western frontier awaited a peace treaty: as Poland, at Potsdam, had only been granted ‘administration’ not ‘sovereignty’, it might face ‘competing claims.’ ‘The only competing claim, of course, would come from Germany.’[32]
The head of the east European division at the US state department, Elbridge Durbrow, who recalled in 1973 the search for an equitable frontier between Poland and Germany, wondered whether ‘this grab of basically historic German territory would be the seed to World War III? Perhaps, because the Germans will want to retake these territories in the future? Most of that area had been either Germans (sic), or Prussians (sic) for centuries. The Polish government-in–exile had agreed to the transfers only at the insistence of the state department officials, Jimmy Dunn and Chip Bohlen (the state’s department’s assistant secretary for European affairs and chief interpreter respectively), in the hope that Stalin could be made to keep the promise he made at Yalta of free Polish elections.[33]
Speaking in the House of Commons in August 1945, the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, warned the Poles not to repeat their mistake in 1920: ‘last time, they made a mistake ... in going too far East … this time, I fear, they are making a mistake in ... going too far West.’[34] Eden later recalled meeting his successor, Ernest Bevin, while the Potsdam conference was in progress, and advising him not to agree to the extension of Poland as far west as the western Neisse: ‘I repeated, as I had often done to them and the Russians, that in their interest I was sure they would be unwise to claim land so far to the west. They would only lay up trouble thereby for the future. Bevin listened and said that he would do his best, which he did, but he could not prevail.’[35] Churchill, who told the house of commons that the decision taken at Potsdam was ‘not a good augury for the future map of Europe’, later wrote: ‘One day the Germans would want their territories back and the Poles would not be able to stop them’. Being in opposition, and not having to stand up to the United States and the Soviet Union, he could claim that he would never have agreed to the transfer.[36]
As early as March 1944, Eden had acknowledged a ‘growing apprehension that Russia has vast aims, and that these may include the domination of Eastern Europe and even the Mediterranean, and the "communizing" of much that remains.’[37] Such concerns over expanding Soviet power meant, of course, that any British disposition to support Polish claims to the Oder-Neisse territories would be much reduced if Poland became a satellite of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s decision in July1944 to recognise the Lublin Committee (under the communist Boleslaw Bierut) as the legitimate local authority in the liberated areas of Poland thus only increased British unease as Stalin’s ability to dictate the future of central and eastern Europe increased with every Soviet military advance.[38]
Given the fears of Soviet intentions, British officials, faced with popular criticism not only of the expulsions of Germans living in Poland and Czechoslovakia, but also of the reasons for them, protested at their brutality.[39] Less than a year after Potsdam, Harry S. Truman described them as a ‘high handed outrage’,[40] and, in September 1946, the secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, in a speech at Stuttgart, questioned the validity of the Oder-Neisse line:
With regard to Silesia and other eastern German areas, the assignment of this territory to Poland by Russia for administrative purposes had taken place before the Potsdam meeting. The heads of government agreed that, pending the final determination of Poland's western frontier, Silesia and other eastern German areas should be under the administration of the Polish state and for such purposes should not be considered as a part of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany. However, as the Protocol of the Potsdam Conference makes clear, the heads of government did not agree to support at the peace settlement the cession of this particular area.
Although the United States would ‘support revision [of Germany’s eastern] frontiers in Poland's favor … the extent of the area to be ceded to Poland must be determined when the final settlement is agreed upon.’ Furthermore, ‘Except as here indicated, the United States will not support any encroachment on territory which is indisputably German or any division of Germany which is not genuinely desired by the people concerned.‘[41]
Byrnes’ dovetailing of the rhetoric of self-determination with the needs of Cold War politics (mirrored by many American statements in Germany itself) provided a template for West German state policy after 1949. It also provided the British with food for thought and their embassy in Washington requested clarification of the position of the United Stats vis-à-vis the Oder-Neisse line. The embassy stated that, while there seemed no ‘practical alternative’ to a permanent frontier on the Oder-Neisse, the British had made no final decision.[42] The state department replied, formulaically, saying that the land to be granted to Poland was ‘still under consideration.’[43]
The nascent Cold War worked in West Germany’s favour by destroying the consensus on the future of Germany that existed at Potsdam. In February 1948, Britain informed the Soviet Union that the occupation of part of East Prussia (agreed to at Potsdam) was evidence for its being ‘an expanding imperialist power.’[44] Thus, the Carthaginian peace implied at Potsdam, and feared throughout West Germany, never arrived. Both the Soviet Union and the Western allies, fearful of unification, cultivated their own German client states. John L. Gaddis notes that once the Superpowers had established their respective German states both Washington and Moscow were content to allow Bonn and East Berlin to shape their respective policies on Germany. Furthermore, the need to maintain alliance ‘solidarity’ meant that the USA and the USSR made little real effort to solve the root causes of the problem.[45]