POPULATION TRANSFER, NO MATTER HOW WELL JUSTIFIED, IMPOSES HUMAN MISERY

The Vance-Owen plan, with its patchwork of ethnic enclaves, is to be the basis for peace in Bosnia. Implicit in the plan is the concept of "relocation" of embattled or dispossessed minorities to presumably more secure areas in other part of Bosnia. Mapmakers and relocation experts will endorse the "orderly" transfer of people as superior to the savagery of "ethnic cleansing" and as necessary to prevent the sorts of horrors that have plagued the erstwhile Yugoslavia. Before getting too deep into the relocation business, the peacemakers had better look at how millions of Germans were relocated after World War II.

Well before the German collapse in 1945, it was agreed by the Allies that there had to be a "profound change" with respect to Germans living outside the boundaries of the new Germans "in order to avoid the rise of dangerous minority problems in the states concerned."

Sudeten Germans. First up for attention were the ethnic Germans in the sudetenland who Hitler used in 1938 as the excuse for dismembering Czechoslovakia. The Allies didn't consider the relocation of 2,500,000 Sudeten Germans to be a measure of revenge, but rather ran action necessary to maintain the national existence of post war Czechoslovakia. A plan for "orderly and humane transfer" was later approved by the Allied Control Council for Germany.

Beginning in January, 1946, train loads of Sudeten Germans were deported to Germany and allowed to take only small amounts of personal effects including watches, wedding rings, and hand tools. All other property holdings were confiscated without compensation.

By the end of the year, 240,000 Sudeten Germans remained in Czechoslovakia compared to the three million who resided there in 1930. Everything had been done in an "orderly and humane manner" said General Lucius Clay, the U.S. representative in Germany.

Germane in Poland. The Allies had also agreed to a policy of "all Germans out" from the territories to be ceded to post war Poland as compensation for the western Polish regions that Stalin seized in 1939 and planned to keep. The Poles only sought, so they alleged, to accommodate expeditiously the wishes of the now displaced Germans. The truth was that threats, violence, and even torture were common ingredients of the Polish "expulsion plan."

Danzig was cleared first utilizing railroad boxcars. Then came Pomerania, Silesia, East Prussia and other historically German lands. Like the Sudeten Germans, those expelled were allowed to take only what they could carry. As the trains stopped along the way, bands of robbers would jump into the cars and steal what they could. Between November, 1945 and July, 1946, 3.5 million Germans were removed from the former German territory east of the Oder and Neisse rivers. One million stayed behind. Curiously, by 1949, Poland sought to prevent the remaining Germans from leaving in order to avoid a further diminution of Poland's economic capacity.

The Nazis, of course, inflicted inconceivable suffering on the rest of Europe and no one is suggesting that the pain endured by Germany after the war is comparable to Hitler's crimes. But the experience does show that population transfer, no matter how well justified, imposes heavy costs in human misery.

As the Bosnia peacemakers contemplate boundaries, relocation of minorities and the transfer of hundreds of thousands of refugees uprooted by war, they might consider the suffering engendered in the name of humanity after World War II when millions of Germans were uprooted and expelled from their homes.