The Perils of Potsdam: American Quaker Relief Workers and the Post-World War II Expulsions of Germans

Between the final months of World War II and the end of the 1940s, about 13 million ethnic Germans fled and were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Although the expulsions had already begun, at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Big Three sanctioned further “population transfers” of Germans from Eastern Europe, provided they were carried out in an “orderly and humane manner.” Helping to aid the expellees’ integration into Germany were relief workers of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). These American Quaker relief workers were strong critics of the expulsions, not only because they were not, in fact, “orderly and humane”—the American government agreed on that point by the end of 1947—but because, according to the AFSC workers, of the dangerous ethnic nationalist tendencies behind them. As both critics of the United States and, through their role in America’s postwar reconstruction of Europe, agents of its global reach, the Quaker relief workers developed a critique of nationalism that was deeply imbedded in the American expansionist imagination and a vision of a world structured by international organizations and reconciled by transnational encounters. Relying on research in Quaker archives in the Philadelphia area, this thesis shows that for AFSC relief workers, the word “Potsdam”—by which they meant the United States’ sanctioning of the expulsions at the Potsdam Conference—encapsulated both this critique and this vision