THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 423Route C - Kalawsk-Mariental/Alversdorf 20 February 1946
Route D - Kalawsk - Friedland Date to be decided- ACCEPTANCE ARRANGEMENTS
Expellees will be accepted by the British authorities on the border of Poland and the
Soviet Zone, and for this purpose British Repatriation teams will be stationed at
Stettin and at Kalawsk ... to ensure that trainloads will not be turned back into the
Soviet Zone... - DISINFESTATION: All expellees will be dusted with DOT Powder... British
Authorities will immediately make available to Polish authorities at Berlin 3 tons of
DDT. .. - TRAIN GUARDS: Polish authorities will supply guards, approximately 10 per train.
7. SCHEDULES: It would gteatly facilitate dispersal arrangements ... if all trains
could arrive at reception points in the British Zone before noon daily...
8. BAGGAGE: Expellees will be permitted to take as much as they can carry...
9. CURRENCY: Expellees will be permitted to take a maximum of 500 RM per head. - RATIONS: Polish authorities will supply two days' rations, plus one day's reserve.
.. on the rail route from KALAWSK, each train will leave with 3 days' rations, plus
one day's reserve... - MEDICAL
(a) The first shipments will be confined to expellees in good health...
(b) Pregnant women will not be shipped 6 weeks before and after confinement.
(c) ... In the event of sickness, families will not be moved until all members are fit
to travel. - DOCUMENTATION: Expellees will be in possession of individual papers. A nom-
inal roll will accompany each train, together with a Movement Order suitably
endorsed to the effect that all on board are free from communicable diseases.
T. KONARSKI F. L. CARROLL
Commander Lt.-Colonel,
Polish Representative, C.R.X. British Representative, C.R.X.^16
German sources describe this 'barbarous exodus' in the darkest possible tones. In
West Germany, the Bund der Vertriebener (League of Expellees) has documented
their sufferings in the minutest detail. They see the expulsions as a simple act of
revenge, inspired by the same sort of racist and chauvinist motives that drove the
Nazis to behave in like manner. They claim to be the victims of acts of atrocity
and genocide, and count their martyrs in millions. Yet something in these argu-
ments is seriously wrong. The number of the victims of 'Polish Revenge' as
claimed in the 1950s exceeded the total figure of expellees as admitted by official
Polish sources. On the German side, statistics were systematically exaggerated as
a means of boosting the campaign for the recovery of the 'Potsdam territories'.
On the Polish side, basic facts were regularly overlooked by people who pre-
tended that Germans born in Silesia, Pomerania, or Prussia were bound 'as of
right' to cede their homes to imported Polish 'autochtones'. The fact is that the
Western Territories were taken from Germany and awarded to Poland as a prize
of war. Yet their German inhabitants were expelled not by Polish 'revenge' but by