The Unwanted

Eastern Europe's roads were already flooded with the harried, homeless & hungry when, last week, another vast tide was unloosed into the swollen streams. Winter would bring history's greatest migration. Millions of Germans and many of their masters prayed that it would be a mild winter.

The U.S. Military Government completed plans for repatriation of Germans and Austrians. About 200,000 Germans would come from Austria into the overcrowded U.S. zone of occupation. All Austrians in Germany would plod back to hamlets and cities from which war had wrenched them.

The remnants of more than 1,000,000 German D.P.s (displaced persons), ousted from Czechoslovakia, were drifting westward and northward. They had fled Silesia before the Red Army. Now their homes were Polish-owned, Russian-ruled. Some hitched rides--on carts, trucks, freight cars, anything that moved on wheels. Others moved gypsy-fashion in creaking covered wagons. Like 60,000 Sudetenlanders expelled with them (and like the Germans from Austria), they were the unwanted children of enforced marriages of nations, now dissolved.

There were some 3,000,000 more to go from Czechoslovakia within the next year, if the Big Three approved the transfer as "orderly and humane." Where would they go? That, said Czechoslovakia's Premier Zdenek Fierlinger with cool detachment, was not a Czech problem. "It is the duty of the Germans to care for their own."

And More & More. But the migration was an Allied problem as well. In London, Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced his worry, hoped that further expulsions of Germans would not be made before the Allied Control Council in Germany could consider how to handle more hundreds of thousands.

In Berlin, where refugees arrive at the rate of 17,000 a day, more burdeas were added. The Russians would release 413,000 more German prisoners of war this month. Most of them were in the O.K. (ohne Kraft) class.* Desperately, the Berlin Social Welfare Department informed the Allied Control Council that no more refugees could be handled and begged for a halt to the mass movement of the dispossessed.

Germany has already absorbed about six million of its D.P.s from territories taken over by the Poles and Czechs. Two million more now jam the roads to Berlin.

Six million are still to come, including refugees from the once-German Baltic port of Stettin. The major part of Stettin lies west of the Oder River, provisional Polish-German frontier. But, with Russian consent, the Poles moved over the Oder, took over all of Stettin. Now 200,000 Germans there have been ordered to clear out. There was one Polish concession: they would not eject the Germans until after the harvest is in.

*Russians divide German war prisoners into four classes: 1) skilled, able to work; 2) unskilled, able to work; 3) ohne Kraft-- the sick, wounded, invalided; 4) bed cases. Most of the first two classes service Russian labor battalions. The second two classes are being dumped into the Reich

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