Nemesis at Potsdam - Reviews - General - English

English

• by Craig Whitney in the New York Times, 13 February 1977, and in the International Herald Tribune 17 February 1977 : "A young legal scholar from New York, Alfred de Zayas, has written a book on a subject long taboo and ignored by German writers -- the brutal expulsion of 16 million Germans from their homelands in Central and Eastern Europe after the Red Army moved in... Mr. de Zayas, who is 29 years old and has a fellowship at the University of Göttingen emphasized: ... 'I had taken a number of courses in history at Fordham and Harvard and this was just never mentioned. I don't think people outside Germany know much about it.' Truman, Churchill and Stalin agreed at Potsdam in 1945 that the German populations of Eastern Europe should undergo 'transfer to Germany' but 'in an orderly and humane manner'. The de Zayas book makes clear that the last provision was not fulfilled."
• by Christoph Kimmich in Foreign Affairs, July 1977, Volume 55, Number 4: "An account of British and American acquiescence in the brutal expulsion of millions of Germans from their homes in East-Central Europe at the end of World War II. The author ... makes much of the legal (and moral) implications of the issue while understating its historical complexities." .
• David Steeds in British Book News: "Mr de Zayas... is surely right to dwell on their miseries and on the double standards of the victors. Some of them, after all, professed to believe in the principles of the Atlantic Charter. The book should cause argument and controversy; it deserves a wide readership."
• David Mutch in the Christian Science Monitor, 25 March 1977, p. 17. : "Mr. de Zayas is a lawyer, and is clearly opposed to mass population transfers on moral, legal and historical grounds...He argues that overreaction to the evils of the Nazis led to the principle of collective German guilt, a theory that does not protect the innocent and which ruled the thoughts and actions of many responsible British and American officials when they agreed to the expulsion demands of Stalin. Only later did they realize the inherent inhumanity of the results of their lack of perception...his short but heavily documented book (with 40 pages of notes, a long bibliography, interviews with persons involved, and a long research into unpublished U.S., British and German Documents) fills a gap."
• Norman Lederer in Worldview July/August 1978, pp. 54–55.: "De Zayas painstakingly details the manner in which Eastern European emigré governments during World War II prepared the way for Allied approval of the mass expulsion of Germans following the conflict. Their distortions of fact had a decided effect on the thinking of many Western leades. Ironically, it was Winston Churchell, the nemesis depicted in Goebbels' propagnada to the German people, who foresaw most clearly the immense human tragedy that would result from the mass expulsions and who tried to curb the Eastern European countries' desire for territorial expansion at the expense of the German state. The Russian invasion of East Prussia aided the Eastern European leaderrs in getting their way. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians hurried west before the terrifying apparition of the shockingly undisciplined soviet army. Eastern leaders stated that this exodus had cleared out all the Germans, conveniently ignoring the fact tha misslions remained. These millions were abruptly ousted once formal conflict had ended ... is an important work on an enormously important but little known aspect of World War II"
• William Guttmann in the Observer: "The author traces the genesis of the relevant territorial arrangements and ensuing population transfers and then gives a well-documented and horrifying account of the exodus, the sufferings and deaths of millions, the ruthlessness of the new masters -- a travesty of the 'orderly and humane' fashion in which the measures were supposed to be carried out."