Nemesis at Potsdam


Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans is a 1977 book by Cuban-born American lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas. Its title is drawn from Greek mythology; Nemesis is the Greek goddess of revenge. The implication is that at the Potsdam Conference the victorious Allies of World War II took revenge on the Germans, entailing significant territorial losses in Eastern Europe and the forced transfer of some 15 million Germans from their homelands in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, East Brandenburg, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.
The book is the first scholarly study in the English concerning the expulsion of Germans after World War II. It effectively broke a taboo in the English-speaking world, and also in Germany and Austria, thus facilitating subsequent research in the subject by other scholars. The book was dedicated to Victor Gollancz, whose seminal book Our Threatened Values had inspired the author when he was a student at Harvard. In chapter VI of the book de Zayas cites Gollancz' clear condemnation of the expulsions: "If the conscience of mankind ever again becomes sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered to the undying shame of all who committed or connived at them…The Germans were expelled, not just with an absence of over-nice consideration, but with the very maximum of brutality.. On the basis of US and British archival documents, de Zayas shows that the Western Allies were genuinely appalled at the manner in which the Germans were being expelled and that they lodged diplomatic protest notes in Warsaw and Prague—to no avail.
The theses of Nemesis at Potsdam have been condensed into a new book, 50 theses on the expulsion of the Germans from Central and Eastern Europe, published in 2012 in Verlag Inspiration, London and Berlin,...Raymond Lohne, PhD, Columbia College Chicago.

Contents

The book was first published by Routledge & K. Paul in 1977 with the title Nemesis at Potsdam: the Anglo-Americans and the expulsion of the Germans: background, execution, consequences. It contained a preface by US Ambassador Robert Murphy, a participant at the Potsdam Conference and former political advisor of General Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II and of General Lucius Clay during the American military government in Germany. Routledge published a 2nd edition in 1979. The third edition, published by University of Nebraska Press in 1989, the title Nemesis at Potsdam: the expulsion of the Germans from the East was published in 1979 by the University of Nebraska Press. A 1998 edition was published by Picton Press, Rockland, Maine, 2003 296 pp. .
The book is a revised version of a doctoral dissertation for the History Faculty of the University of Göttingen in Germany. Although a scholarly book with 761 endnotes and 47 pages of bibliography: archives, interviews and secondary sources, the book quickly became a best seller. It received praise in the American Journal of International Law, the American Historical Review, Foreign Affairs, the Times Educational Supplement, British Book News etc. However, some historians have criticized the book contending that de Zayas had not given enough space to the Nazi crimes, that he relied too much on the stories of the German victims and their political representatives, that he is too legalistic in his analysis of the Potsdam conference, and because of the tone of the "moral outrage" expressed by the author.
An enlarged German edition, with previously unpublished photographs from the United States Army Signal Corps, facsimiles of documents from the National Archives, Public Record Office, Federal Swiss Archives in Bern, and Bundesarchiv-Koblenz, was published in October 1977 by C. H. Beck in Munich, and had several editions, published under the title Die Nemesis von Potsdam.. The Herbig edition was positively reviewed in Die Presse and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Reviews

Academic

Reviews of the work include: