Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950): Difference between revisions

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	* It was an "act of ]", because, for example, Sudeten Germans strongly contributed to ]. The Czech public opinion saw this act as betrayal.		* It was an "act of ]", because, for example, Sudeten Germans strongly contributed to ]. The Czech public opinion saw this act as betrayal.

	* Even before former German territories were captured by the Red Army, around 2 million Poles from the east part of Poland (behind the ]) were expelled by the Soviets to Poland or ] camps in ]. Additionally, an estimated 800,000 people from ] were deported by the Germans to special work camps. After the end of the war, these people returned and needed housing in a country devastated by war.		* Even before former German territories were captured by the Red Army, around 2 million Poles from the east part of Poland (behind the ]) were expelled by the Soviets to Poland or ] camps in ]. Additionally, an estimated 800,000 people from ] were deported by the Germans to special work camps. After the end of the war, these people returned and needed housing in a country devastated by war.

	* German minority organisations assisted the German Reich in its invasion in Czechoslovakia and took part in the September 1939 Campaign in Poland. ] and German nationalist organisations created in Poland and Czechoslovakia by Germans took part in various actions (sabotage, etc.) against Polish population. The fears of disloyalty of German minority were made stronger by the creation after the end of the war of a German resistance group called "]". Atrocities committed by Selbstschutz against Poles and its help towards German war effort against Poland were later among the historically doubtful justifications for the violent expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland. Every tenth German living in Poland was a member of ], while 25% of German population belonged to Nazi sponsored organizations aiding in the Nazi conquest of Poland.

	* Poland had lost 43 percent of its pre-war territory due to the fact that the Soviet Union insisted on keeping what it had incorporated after the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. While some cities, like Gdansk (then ]), were transferred to Poland as part of the "clean sweep" (see above) that eliminated minorities and strategically risky borders, others, like Wroclaw (]) or Szczecin (]), would hardly have been transferred to Poland had it not lost Vilnius (Wilna, Wilno) and Lwiw (Lemberg, Lwow).		* Poland had lost 43 percent of its pre-war territory due to the fact that the Soviet Union insisted on keeping what it had incorporated after the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. While some cities, like Gdansk (then ]), were transferred to Poland as part of the "clean sweep" (see above) that eliminated minorities and strategically risky borders, others, like Wroclaw (]) or Szczecin (]), would hardly have been transferred to Poland had it not lost Vilnius (Wilna, Wilno) and Lwiw (Lemberg, Lwow).

Revision as of 08:03, 10 May 2006

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Expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland

The expulsion of Germans after World War II was the mass deportation of people considered Germans (both Reichsdeutsche and Volksdeutsche) from Soviet-occupied areas outside the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, and is a major part of the German exodus from Eastern Europe after World War II.

The process, which aimed to ethnically homogenize nation states, began before the Potsdam Conference, which would call for it to be conducted in an "orderly and humane manner". Due to the postwar atmosphere of chaos, famine, disease, cold winter, deliberate abuse by milicians, deliberate malnutrition by Soviets and Poles, and because of senseless killing, German civilian casualties during the expulsion were very high. The estimated number varies by source, from circa 500,000 to over 2 million. The German deportation and migration according to Allied information sources revealed after 1990 affected up to 16.5 million Germans and was the largest of several similar post-World War II migrations orchestrated by the victorious Western Allies and the Soviet Union, which also included the resettlements and expulsions of millions of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews.

German citizens remaining after the war, some of whom had become German citizens during the war, and people considered ethnic Germans were expelled from historically Eastern German areas in present-day Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia (mostly from Vojvodina region), the German province of Eastern Prussia, the later Kaliningrad Oblast (formerly Königsberg area) of Russia, Lithuania, and other East European countries, whose borders — as well as those of Germany itself — were drastically changed after the war, sometimes drastically and with little input from any government, as was the case of Poland. Many German citizens fled in fear of the Soviet Red Army. Some were persecuted because of their activities during the war; most were persecuted solely because of their German ethnicity.

Wording of Article XII of the Potsdam Conference (Protocol of the Proceedings, August l, 1945)

Orderly transfer of German populations

The Three Governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.

Discussion of the reasons

Various groups, including the public in affected countries and historians, perceive the reasons for the Potsdam decision and subsequent transfers differently. Some more frequent opinions include:

The actual purposes of the policy were to punish the Germans for Germany's actions during World War II, including its expulsion of Poles and Czechs from territories annexed to Nazi Germany; and at the same time to create ethnically homogeneous nation states that would not give rise to the kind of ethnic tensions that had preceded the war.

The Potsdam participants believed this to be the only way to prevent ethnic violence. As Winston Churchill expounded in the House of Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble... A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions…" From this point of view, it may be possible to conclude that the policy achieved its goals: the 1945 borders are stable and ethnic conflicts are relatively marginal, although this stability can also be explained by the rigidity of the Iron Curtain. In his famous Iron Curtain speech of March 1946, Churchill condemned the expulsions .

The purpose of this policy was to prevent German expansion to the east. German nationalists had historically used the existence of large German minorities in other countries as a basis for territorial claims; Adolf Hitler used it as a pretext for waging aggressive wars. By this reasoning, removing Germans from territories of other countries would remove potential causes of future problems.

It was an "act of historical justice", because, for example, Sudeten Germans strongly contributed to the destruction of pre-war Czechoslovakia. The Czech public opinion saw this act as betrayal.

Even before former German territories were captured by the Red Army, around 2 million Poles from the east part of Poland (behind the Curzon line) were expelled by the Soviets to Poland or gulag camps in Siberia. Additionally, an estimated 800,000 people from Warsaw were deported by the Germans to special work camps. After the end of the war, these people returned and needed housing in a country devastated by war.

Poland had lost 43 percent of its pre-war territory due to the fact that the Soviet Union insisted on keeping what it had incorporated after the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. While some cities, like Gdansk (then Danzig), were transferred to Poland as part of the "clean sweep" (see above) that eliminated minorities and strategically risky borders, others, like Wroclaw (Breslau) or Szczecin (Stettin), would hardly have been transferred to Poland had it not lost Vilnius (Wilna, Wilno) and Lwiw (Lemberg, Lwow).

One can thus say that one of the reasons, seen from the Polish-nationalist, communist and Western-Allied view point, for the expulsion of the Germans was the territorial compensation of Poland for what was kept by the Soviet Union; of course, this was ultimately a decision not only of Stalin, but with the tacit consent of Great Britain and the United States.

Also, there was little empathy for German victims after the World War II experience, especially since the German government had itself ethnically cleansed a large number of areas (e.g. Reichsgau Wartheland) during the war.

The results

Up to 12.4 or even 16.5 million Germans of the postwar population were forced to leave. The estimates of people that lost their lives differ. According to Federal Statistics Bureau of Germany in 1958 more than 2.1 million had lost their lives during this process. The monumental statistical work of the Gesamterhebung zur Klärung des Schicksals der deutschen Bevölkerung in den Vertreibungsgebieten, Bd. 1-3, München 1965, confirms this figure. The standard study by Gerhard Reichling "Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen" concludes that 2,020,000 Germans perished as a result of the expulsion and deportation to slave labour in the Soviet Union. One German researcher, Rüdiger Overmans, has claimed that only 1,100,000 people lost their lives. These lower figures and the methodology for obtaining them are disputed by some scholars including Dr. Fritz Peter Habel and Alfred de Zayas, who maintain in the newest editions of their publications that the death toll was well over two millions. Czech and Polish sources give a much lower estimate (Czech historians arguing that most of the estimated population drop is because of the soldiers that were killed at the front). It is worth noting that the only detailed effort to count the casualities was made by ethnic Germans from Yugoslavia, who documented all their victims, resulting in a figure half the estimate of the Federal Statistics Bureau.

The deaths were caused by death marches ordered by Soviet officials, banditry, famine and widespread disease that accompanied postwar conditions in that part of Europe as well as appalling conditions in the concentration camps created to hold German civilians awaiting expulsion. Probably one of the worst examples of the latter was run by Salomon Morel.

File:Historisches deutsches Sprachgebiet.PNG

Areas with predominantly German speaking populations during WW2

A recent German source gives the following details of the population transfers. Population transfers included

7,122,000 from former eastern Germany,
279,000 from Danzig,
661,000 from Poland,
2,911,000 from Czechoslovakia,
165,000 from the Baltic states,
90,000 from the USSR,
199,000 from Hungary,
228,000 from Romania and
271,000 from Yugoslavia.

The expellee population, in total 11,926,000, increased to 12,400,000 in 1950 due to the natural growth in population. In line with nationalisation made towards all citizens in communist countries, property in the affected territory that belonged to Germany and Germans was confiscated and redistributed to new Slav or communist settlers.

Allied American numbers from 1957 give a number of about 16.5 million Germans who were subject to deportation. About 3 millions, according to this study, were 'lost on the way'.

The Potsdam Agreement called for equal distribution of the transferred Germans between American, British, French and Soviet occupation zones in Germany. In actuality, twice as many expelled Germans found refuge in the occupation zones that later formed "West Germany" than in the so-called "East Germany" (Soviet Zone), and large numbers of these Eastern German refugees went eventually to other countries of the world, including the United States, Canada and Australia.

It is worth noting that the expulsion was not always indiscriminate. In Czechoslovakia large numbers of skilled Sudeten German workmen were forced to remain to labour for the Czechs . Likewise in the Opole/Oppeln region in Upper Silesia, German miners and their families were allowed to stay, though the German language remained forbidden for the next forty years. Secretly German traditions and dialect survived however, to be slowly recognized since the late 1990s.

Summary of German Expellee Population

German Expellee Population 1939-50
Description	Germany	Eastern Europe	Total
Population in 1939	9,500,000	7,100,000	16,600,000
Wartime Transfers In	500,000	0	500,000
Natural Increase 1939-1950	600,000	400,000	1,000,000
Military Losses 1939-45	900,000	550,000	1,450,000
Civilian Losses	800,000	500,000	1,300,000
Remaining in East Europe	1,450,000	1,500,000	2,950,000
Expellee Population 1950	7,450,000	4,950,000	12,400,000

Notes:
Germany-The pre-war eastern German provinces that became Polish in 1945 and Kaliningrad region that became Soviet
Eastern Europe- Includes ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Danzig, the Baltic nations, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. Does not include the USSR.
Population in 1939- Includes bilinguals who were listed as Germans.
Military Losses 1939-45 Research by R. Overmans has increased this total by 360,000 thus reducing civilian losses.
Wartime Transfers In -Wartime evacuation of persons from western Germany.
Civilian Losses -Losses primarily during military campaign in 1945, also includes 270,000 dead in the USSR after being deported as laborers. This table reflects the research of Reichling and Overmans that has adjusted the estimate of civilian deaths downward from the 1958 German government estimate of 2.1 million dead.
Remaining in East Europe-Primarily bilinguals except in the case of Romania. Research by G. Reichling has increased this total by 230,000 thus reducing civilian losses

Sources:
Gerhard Reichling. Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen. Bonn 1986 ISBN 3-88557-046-7.
Rűdiger Overmans. Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Oldenbourg 2000. ISBN 3-486-56531-1 Fritz Peter Habel Dokumente zur Sudetenfrage Langen Müller,Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7844-2691-3. Alfred de Zayas Die Nemesis von Potsdam Herbig, Munich 2005. ISBN 3-7766-2454-X. Newest statistical survey pp. 32-34.

Historical development

Germany

After World War II many expellees (German: Heimatvertriebene) from the land east of the Oder-Neisse received refuge in both West Germany and East Germany. Some of the expellees are active in politics and belong to the political right-wing. Many others do not belong to any organizations, but they continue to maintain what they call a lawful right to their homeland. The vast majority pledged to work peacefully towards that goal while rebuilding post-war Germany and Europe. In a document signed 50 years ago the Heimatvertriebene organisations have also recognized the plight of the different groups of people living in today's Poland who were by force resettled there. The Heimatvertriebene are just one of the groups of millions of other people, from many different countries, who all found refuge in today's Germany. In today's Germany there is little political support for reopening the border issue. Refugees who had fled voluntarily but were later refused to return are often not distinguished from those who were forcibly deported, just as people born to German parents that moved into areas under German occupation either on their own or as Nazi colonists.

Poland

Although relations between Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany were good after 1991, there remain disputes about the War, the post-War expulsion, the treatment of the current German minority in Poland and the treatment of German heritage in modern day Western Poland. Some Poles criticise that some Germans see themselves as victims rather than as perpetrators of the War, thereby forgetting, that German civilians were hit by the post-war expulsion, not German armed forces.

Some German expellees, on the other hand, criticise that the official Polish outlook on the War and post War events is mostly based on a collectivist view (of mixed communist and nationalist ideas), that does not look at the individual suffering on both sides, but emphazises the ethnic background of each individual.

Such position is viewed critically in Poland as it ignores widespread collaboration and support for Nazi Occupation by the German minority in the pre-1939 Polish Republic, and the fact that German people enjoyed privileged status during the war while Poles were classified as subhumans by German authorities. One Jewish survivor Marek Edelman said

"They say they were evil and good Germans. But why didn't I have the luck during this whole time of finding a good one ? I didn't met a single good German, only those who hit me in the face. Yes I am sorry for the girl that died during expulsions. But I have no pity for the Germans as a nation. They put Hitler in power. German society lived for five years from occupied Europe; lived from me, and my friends. To me they gave two slices of bread, while Germans ate as much as they wanted. That is why it is important that they continue penance. Let them cry for long, long time - maybe then they will finally realise that to Europe they were the executionerThey don't deserve mercy, they deserve penance. And that for many generations, because otherwise their arrogance and haughtiness shall return

Of course the view of Marek Edelman is not objective and generalises in a particular way. Only 32% of Germans voted the national-socialist party into power, even some of the German victims of Dresden sheltered Jewish families from deportation, and at the end of the war German civilians also suffered from malnutrition.

In November 2005 Der Spiegel published a poll from Allensbach Institut which estimated that 61 % of Poles believed Germans would try to get back territories that were formerly under German control or demand compensation,. There are also some worries among Poles that rich descendants of the expelled Germans would buy the land the Polish state confiscated in 1945. It is believed that this may result in large price increases, since the current Polish land price is low compared to Western Europe. This led to Polish restrictions on the sale of property to foreigners, including Germans: special permission is needed. This policy is comparable to similar restrictions on the Baltic Åland Islands. These restrictions will be lifted 12 years after the 2004 accession of Poland to the European Union, i.e on May 1 2016.

The officially proposed policy of the Heimatvertriebene is not to repeat the post-war expulsions with new persecutions, annexations and population transfers. Most Heimatvertriebene accept the territorial changes of 1945 as far as territorial claims are concerned and consider the Poles now living in former East Germany as friends and neighbours in the European Union. The attempts by German organisations to build a Centre Against Expulsions dedicated to German people's alleged suffering during World War II has led Polish politicians and activists to propose a Center for Martyrology of Polish Nation (called also Center for the Memory of Suffering of the Polish Nation) that would document the systematical oppression conducted on Polish people by German state during World War II and which would serve to educate German people about atrocities their state and regime conducted on their neighbours. However this proposal was attacked and rejected by German politicians.

The remaining German minority in Poland (152,897 people according to the 2002 census) is granted some minority rights and the German language can finally be used as what the Polish Minority Act calls a "subsidiary language" in several German-populated powiats/Gemeinden, mostly in the Opole voivodship/Bezirk Oppeln.

Czech Republic and Slovakia

In the summer of 1945 there were a number of incidents and localised massacres of the German population. 20 thousand Germans were forced to leave their homes in Brno and forced to march towards Austrian border. As the border was closed, most of the group was turned back and interned in former German children's camp in Pohořelice. There, an epidemic killed 455 people. Total number of victims is estimated up to 800, also because mistreatment and beating during the march.

Several mass murders were commited by irregular armed forces or units of the Czechoslovak army. In the Prerov pogrom 71 men, 120 women and 74 children were killed. Another well known case is the Ústí massacre, where 80-100 civilians were murdered after explosion in local ammuniton factory, some of them thrown to river Elbe and than shot. In another case which occured in Postoloprty and neighbouring area, 763 people were shot. .

In Czech-German relations, the topic has been effectively closed by the Czech-German declaration of 1997. One principle of declaration is that parties will not burden their relations with political and legal issues which stem from the past.

However, some expelled Sudeten Germans or their descendants are demanding return of their former property, which was confiscated after the war. Several such cases have been taken to Czech courts. As confiscated estates usually have new inhabitants, some of whom have lived there for more than 50 years, attempts to return to a pre-war state may cause fear. The topic comes to life occasionally in Czech politics. Like in Poland, worries and restrictions concerning land purchases exist in the Czech Republic. According to a survey by the Allensbach Institut in November 2005, 38 % of Czechs believe Germans want to regain territory they lost or will demand compensation.

The remaining tiny German minority in the Czech Republic is granted some rights on paper, however the actual use of the language in dealings with officials is usually not possible. There is no bilingual education system in Western and Northern Bohemia, where the German minority is most concentrated. The Czech authorities have enacted a unique hurdle in their minority act. While the erection of bilingual signs is technically permitted if a minority constitutes 10% of the population, the minority is also forced to sign a petition in favour of the signs in which 40% of the adult minority population must participate. According to the 2001 census there remain 13 municipalities and settlements in the Czech Republic with more than 10% Germans.

Many representatives of expelees organizations support the erection of bilingual signs in all formerly German speaking territory as a visible sign of the bilingual linguistic and cultural heritage of the region.

In 2005 Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek announced an initiative to publicise and formerly recognise the deeds of Sudeten German Anti-Nazis. Although the move was received positively by most Sudeten Germans and the German minority, there has been criticism that the initiative is limited to Anti-Nazis who actively fought for the Czechoslovak state, but not Anti-Nazis in general. The German minority in particular also expected some financial compensation for their mistreatment after the War.

The situation in Slovakia was different from that in the Czech lands, in that the number of Germans was considerably lower and that the Germans from Slovakia were almost completely evacuated to German states as the Soviet army was moving west through Slovakia, and only the fraction of them that returned to Slovakia after the end of the war was deported together with the Germans from the Czech lands.

Hungary

In Hungary the persecution of the German minority began in 22 December 1944 when the Soviet Commander-in-Chief ordered the deportations. Five percent of the German population (appr. 20 000 people) had been evacuated by the Volksbund before that. They went to Austria, but many of them returned to their home next spring. In January 1945 the Soviet Army collected 32 000 ethnic Germans and deported them to the Soviet Union to do slave labour (malenkiy robot). Many of them died there because of the hardships and cruelties. On 29 December 1945 the new Hungarian Government ordered the deportation of every people who declared him/herself German in the census of 1941 or was a member of the Volksbund, the SS and any other armed German organisation. According to this decree mass deportations began. The first wagon departed from Budaörs (Wudersch) on 19 January 1946 with 5788 people. 185-200 000 German-speaking Hungarian citizens were deprived of their rights and all possessions, and deported to West Germany. Until July 1948 a more 50 000 people went to the eastern zone of Germany. Most of the deported Germans found a new home in Baden-Württemberg, Bayern and Hessen. In 1947 and 1948 a forced population exchange happened between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Some 74 000 ethnic Hungarians were deported from Slovakia in exchange for about the same number of Slovaks from Hungary. They and the Székelys of Bukovina were settled in the former German villages of southeastern Transdanubia. In some parts of Tolna, Baranya and Somogy counties the original population was totally replaced by the new settlers. In 1949 only 22 455 people dared to declare themselves German, but the real numbers were certainly higher. Propably half of the German community was able to survive the dark years between 1944 and 1950 in Hungary. Today they have minority rights, organisations, schools and local councils but spontaneous assimilation is well under way. Many of the deportees visited their old homes after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990.

Russia

Ethnic Germans living in a small section of Russia were deported after the war. The Kaliningrad area of Russia, now a small exclave seperated from the rest of Russia by Lithuania and Belarus, was part of Germany for most of its history. Kaliningrad's former German name was Königsberg, and it was an important city in the history of Germany, as it was the capital of Prussia. Immanuel Kant, the famous German philosopher, was in fact born there, in the present-day Russian exclave. Along with a section of Poland and a very small section of Lithuania, the Kaliningrad exclave formerly formed the German province (under the Nazis: Gau) of East Prussia, which from 1918 to 1939 had been an exclave too, but of Weimar Germany rather than of Soviet Russia. After the war, the remnant of Germans still living there were expelled and replaced by ethnic Russian settlers and the families of military staff. The expelled Germans mostly headed to Western Germany. Today, in Germany many descendants of Germans who were expelled from the former city of Königsberg are still alive. Though the deportation of Germans from this northern part of former East Prussia often was conducted in a violent and aggressive way by Soviet officials who sought to revenge the Nazi terror in Soviet areas during the war, present Russian inhabitants of the Kaliningrad sector (northern East Prussia) treat history less complicated. German names are even revived in commercial Russian trade. In future the name of Kaliningrad might be changed to the old Königsberg again. Because the exclave during Soviet times was a military zone which nobody was allowed to enter without special permission, many old German Prussian villages are still intact, though delapidated due to the course of time. The city centre of Kaliningrad however was entirely built anew, as British bombs (1944) and the siege of Königsberg (Festung Königsberg in 1945 siege) had left it in ruins.

Lithuania

An extremely small portion of Lithuania was part of Germany for the length of its history until after the war. The entire modern-day Lithuanian portion of Germany, like the entire Russian portion, was part of the German province of East Prussia before 1918 and from 1939 to 1945. However, this small section that may otherwise have seemed insignificant included Memel, Germany's northeasternmost city and an important port of the old Prussia. This city was the birthplace of philosopher Immanuel Kant's father and grandfather, as well as of many German politicians and scientists. After the war, the area was ceded to Lithuania, like had been done in 1919 though with a period of French control. Most Germans fled to Germany, joining the exodus of the others from Königsberg and other cities south of the area. German civilian remnants were put on deportation trains in 1946. Ethnic Lithuanians from crowded villages replaced the former German population of Memel and surrounding formerly mixed German-Lithuanian areas. Memel was renamed Klaipėda definitively. You can still find descendants of Germans expelled from Lithuania. They are mostly found in former West Germany, like the Germans who fled from the rest of East Prussia. The fact that the section of Germany now in Lithuanian hands was small but important is reflected in the German national anthem - Von der Maas bis an die Memel ("From the Meuse to the Neman") is part of the song, referring to the Neman River (German: Memel or Memelfluss) that flows near Klaipėda.

Development

From the time that the policy was undertaken until the 1990s, there was little argument over the morality of the policy. Many of the propaganda themes of the Nazi regime against Czechoslovakia and Poland claimed that the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) in those territories were persecuted. Although expellees (in German Heimatvertriebene) and their descendants were active in West German politics, the prevailing political climate within West Germany was that of atonement for Nazi actions. However the CDU governments have shown considerable support for the expellees and German civilian victims, and the Oder-Neisse line was for decades officially considered completely unacceptable. Even the Social Democrats of the SPD initially refused to accept the Oder-Neisse line. The expellees are still highly active in German politics, and are one of the major political factions of the nation, with still around 2 million members. The president of their organizations is as of 2004 still a member of the national parliament.

In 1946, Winston Churchill delivered a memorable speech in Fulton, Missouri in the presence of US President Truman. Churchill made the USA aware of the Iron Curtain coming down "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic". In this speech, Churchill also emphasised the wrongful Soviet-directed Polish incursions into Germany (that is, the land east of the Oder-Neisse line) and the plight of millions of Germans refugees/expellees. However, taking into account his personal responsibility for and - though reluctant - acceptance of the decisions made in Potsdam, the sentence would seem to have been motivated by the contemporary political agenda.

US Congressman B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee, in the House of Representatives on May 16, 1957, called the deportation and violent expulsion of German civilians genocide, possibly because of the millions of German civilian casualties the Western Allies had counted after scientific research into the expulsion reality.

In November and December, 1993, an exhibit on Ethnic Cleansing 1944-1948 was held at Stuart Center of De Paul University, in Chicago, where it was called an unknown holocaust, which was forgotten about.

In the early 1990s the Cold War ended and the occupying powers withdrew from Germany. The issue of the treatment of Germans after World War II began to be reexamined, having previously been in the shadow of German war crimes. The primary motivation for this change was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed previously marginalised issues such as crimes committed by Russians during World War II to be raised.

On 28 December 1989, Václav Havel, at that time a candidate for president of Czechoslovakia (he was elected one day later), suggested that Czechoslovakia should apologise for the expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II. Most of other politicians of the country didn't agree, and there was also no reply from leaders of Sudeten German organizations. Later, the German President Richard von Weizsacker answered this by apologizing to Czechoslovakia during his visit to Prague on March 1990 after Václav Havel repeated his apology saying that the expulsion was "the mistakes and sins of our fathers". The Benes decrees however continued to remain in force in Czechoslovakia.

The 1991 Polish-German border agreement finalized the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish-German border. The agreement gave to minority groups in both countries several rights, such as the right to use national surnames, speak their native languages, and attend schools and churches of their choice. These rights had been denied previously on the basis that the individual had already chosen the country in which they wanted to live.

Reports have surfaced of both Czech-nationalist as well as Soviet Russian massacres of German civilians (see the book A Terrible Revenge). Also, some of the former German concentration camps were used as temporary camps for German civilians.

Both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelev, during their Soviet military service, had objected to the brutal treatment of German civilians of East Prussia. Lev Kopelev wrote about the cruel events in post-1945 East Prussia in the autobiographical trilogy To Be Preserved Forever (Хранить вечно, Khranit' Venchno).

Since 1990, historical events have been examined by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. Its role is to investigate the crimes of the past without regard to the nationality of victims and perpetrators. In Poland, crimes motivated by the nationality of victims are not covered by a statute of limitations, therefore the criminals can be charged in perpetuity. In a few cases, the crimes against Germans were examined. One suspected perpetrator of retaliatory crimes against expelled innocent German civilians, Salomon Morel, fled the country to Israel, which has denied the Polish requests for his extradition.

References

Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen. Gerhard Reichling. 1986 ISBN 3-88557-046-7
Report on agricultural and food requirements of Germany (February 1947, provides statistics about population transfer)
German statistics In 1966, the West German Ministry of Refugees and Displaced Persons published statistical and graphical data illustrating German population movements, whether voluntary or enforced, in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The Expulsion of 'German' Communities from Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War European University Institute, Florense. EUI Working Paper HEC No. 2004/1, Edited by Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees

External Links

Refugees camp 1950 Image
Refugees Image
Statistics Of Poland's Democide Democide Addenda By R.J. Rummel
THE EXPULSION: A crime against humanity, By Dr. Alfred de Zayas A transcript of part of a lecture on the Expulsion given in Pittsburgh in 1988.
Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes by William A. Schabas "genocidal intent .. at Potsdam"

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