Hate, naked and unashamed, stalked through Poland and Germany. By order of the Polish Government, 15,000 German families were arbitrarily deported for the sole reason that in 1921 they had fearlessly voted in a plebiscite to remain German citizens. By order of the German Government, 12,000 Polish families were likewise arbitrarily deported as a reprisal. In two days of last week the exodoi were completed.
In the old world the brutal oppression exercised by Byzantines, Tartars, Turks was, from the nature of the times, understandable enough. That the fierce hatred of the Greeks and the Turks in the present era led to minority expulsions was comprehensible, considering the semi-civilization that permeates those countries. But in Poland and Germany, whose peoples pride themselves on their culture, who would bitterly resent the slightest imputation that they were uncivilized, the mournful spectacle of thousands of Germans and Poles driven from their homes—gloomy men, weeping women and frightened children—must have caused the great Herald to draw a bar sinister across the escutcheon of civilization. Thus averred unbiased critics.
For two days, trainloads of refugees arrived in each country. The brutality of the Poles was unsurpassed. Allegedly women with week-old babies were forced to join the German exodus. Many adults and a number of babies died. German families, settled in Upper Silesia for life, as they thought, were forced on only a few hours' notice to vacate their dwellings, leave their jobs, their household belongings, and go to a country that was so ill-prepared to receive them that many thousands had to be lodged in filthy barracks. And if the Germans were less inhuman, they were guilty of the same false pride, with the consequence that numerous Poles in Upper Silesia, many of whom were in the same position as the Germans in Poland (except a number of recent immigrants working in the Ruhr mines and elsewhere) , had to leave everything they held dear and travel against their will to the land of their forebears.
The genesis of the dispute which led to the evictions dates back to 1921, when a plebiscite was held under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to determine the sovereignty of Upper Silesia. The result of the plebiscite was that 717,122 Upper Silesians voted for German rule while 483,514 voted for Polish. The Treaty stipulated that the result of the plebiscite was to be determined by communes with regard to the wishes and to the geographical and economic conditions of the area.
Germans claimed with overpowering logic that the whole area, rich in coal and other minerals, was geographically and economically indivisible; but divided it was. "Never," said that great German Jew, Walther Rathenau, "has such a hard fate befallen our land." An economic condominium was successfully negotiated which had for its object the preservation from chaos of the highly organized industrial area; but, in view of the fact that the Poles were agitating to oust all Germans from the country, it was not surprising that dual control was a failure, resulting in tremendous diminution of output.