German exodus from Eastern Europe
Encyclopedia
The German exodus from Eastern Europe
describes the dramatic reduction of ethnic German
populations in lands to the east of present-day Germany
and Austria
. The exodus began in the aftermath of World War I
and was implicated in the rise of Nazism
. It culminated in expulsions
of Germans from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II
. These were arranged by the victorious Allies when they redrew national borders and arranged for "orderly population transfers" to remove ethnic group
s that they viewed as "troublesome".
Migrations
that took place over more than a millennium led to pockets of Germans living throughout Eastern Europe as far east as Russia. By the sixteenth century, much of Pomerania
, Prussia
, the Sudetenland
, Bessarabia
, Galicia, South Tyrol
, Carniola
, and Lower Styria
had numerous German-majority towns and villages. By the early nineteenth century, every city of even modest size as far east as the Volga had a German quarter and a Jewish quarter. Travellers along any road would pass through, for example, a German village, then a Czech village, then a Polish
village, etc., depending on the region.
The rise of nationalism
in Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century spread the concept of a "people" who shared a common bond through race, religion, language, and culture, and had a right to form its own state. In these circumstances, various situations could lead to conflict. One such was when a nation claimed territorial rights to land outside its borders on the basis of a common bond with the people living on that land. Another was when a minority ethnic group sought to secede from a state, either to form an independent nation or join another nation with whom they felt stronger ties. A third source of conflict was the desire of some nations to expel people from their territories on the grounds that those people did not share a common bond with the majority in that nation.
, there were isolated groups of Germans or so-called Schwaben as far southeast as the Bosphorus (Turkey
), Georgia
, and Azerbaijan
. After the war, Germany's and Austria-Hungary's loss of territory and the rise of communism
in the Soviet Union
meant that more Germans than ever constituted sizable minorities in various countries.
German nationalists
used the existence of large German minorities in other countries as a basis for territorial claims. Many of the propaganda
themes of the Nazi regime against Czechoslovakia
and Poland
claimed that the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche
) in those territories were persecuted.
The Nazis negotiated a number of population transfers with Joseph Stalin
and others with Benito Mussolini
so that both Germany and the other country would increase their ethnic homogeneity. However, these population transfers were not sufficient to appease the demands of the Nazis. The "Heim ins Reich
" (Home into the Country) rhetoric of the Nazis over the continued disjoint status of exclaves such as Danzig was an agitating factor in the politics leading up to World War II
, and is considered by many to be among the major causes of Nazi aggression and thus the war. Adolf Hitler
used these issues as a pretext for waging aggressive wars against Czechoslovakia and Poland.
suffered more during the Great Depression
, because they were more dependent on foreign trade and economic conditions in Germany.
Sudeten German nationalist sentiment affected their politics during the early years of the republic. In 1926, however, Chancellor
Gustav Stresemann
of Germany advised Sudeten Germans to cooperate actively with the Czechoslovak government. In consequence, most Sudeten German parties changed from negativism to activism, and a number of Sudeten Germans accepted cabinet posts. By 1929, only a small number of Sudeten German deputies - most of them members of the German National Party (propertied classes) and the Sudeten Nazi Party (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei) - remained in opposition.
On October 1, 1933, Konrad Henlein
created a new political organization, the Sudeten German Home Front which professed loyalty to the Czechoslovak state but championed decentralization
. It absorbed most former German nationals and Sudeten Nazis. In 1935 the Sudeten German Home Front became the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP) and embarked on an active propaganda campaign. In the May election the SdP won more than 60 percent of the Sudeten German vote at the expense of the German Agrarians, Christian Socialists, and Social Democrats who each lost approximately half of their constituencies.
The SdP became the fulcrum of German nationalist forces. The party represented itself as striving for a just settlement of Sudeten German claims within the framework of Czechoslovak democracy. Henlein, however, maintained secret contacts with Nazi Germany and received material aid from Berlin. The SdP endorsed the idea of a führer and mimicked Nazi methods with banners, slogans, and uniformed troops. Concessions offered by the Czechoslovak government, including the transfer of Sudeten German officials to Sudeten German areas and possible participation of the SdP in the cabinet, were rejected. By 1937, most SdP leaders supported Hitler's pan-German objectives.
One historian estimates that 25% of the ethnic German population in Poland belonged to Nazi-sponsored organizations that supported the Nazi conquest of Poland. Selbstschutz
and German nationalist organizations created in Poland and Czechoslovakia by Germans took an active part in various actions (sabotage, etc.) which targeted the Polish population. For example, Selbstschutz
took part in and itself conducted mass executions of Poles in Operation Tannenberg
. The Selbstschutze counted 82,000 to 100,000[ members,while the 1931 census showed 741,000 Germans living in Poland, over 10% of Germans living in Poland were members of this organization.
Polish historians estimate that, in areas that were incorporated into the Third Reich, 40,000 Poles were murdered and 20,000 were sent to concentration camps during the Intelligenzaktion
, in which Selbstschutze also took part. Only a few percent of those sent to concentration camps survived.
In the early days of the occupation, 90% of those who were sent to concentration camps were targeted by ethnic Germans The overwhelming majority of those victims were selected by local ethnic Germans who identified them as enemies of the Reich. Ethnic Germans living in Poland made lists of Poles targeted for execution, as well as hunting down and illegally imprisoning Poles.
At the time of the expulsions, many German nationals and ethnic Germans still supported Nazism. For example, according to polls conducted among Germans in the American Zone of Occupation from November 1945 through December 1947, the percentage of the German population that supported the view that "National Socialism was a good idea, but badly implemented" averaged 47%, while in August, 1947, the percentage increased to 55%. Additionally 37% supported genocide of Jewish and Polish nations as "justified". However, there is low confidence in that interpretation, since this is based on the confusing questionnaire question "Extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was not necessary for the security of the Germans", which included an implicit double negative to which the response was either yes or no, and can have confused respondents. The reliability of the negative interpretation of the responses to this question is also lowered by the fact that it is at odds with the 77% of Germans who agreed to the questionnaire statement that "actions against Jews were in no way justified", and the 0% of Germans who agreed with the questionnaire statement that "Hitler was right in his treatment of the Jews".
in 1939 and 1940 as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
of August 1939, notably from Bessarabia
and the Baltic states
of Estonia
and Latvia
, all of which had large German minorities. The majority of the Baltic Germans had already been resettled in late 1939, prior to the occupation of Estonia and Latvia by the Soviet Union in June, 1940. These Volksdeutsche
(ethnic Germans) were then resettled in place of expelled Poles both in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany
and in Zamość County
in line with the Generalplan Ost
.
Winston Churchill was convinced that the only way to alleviate tensions between the two populations was the transfer of people, to match the national borders. As he stated in a speech to the House of Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, insofar 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."
, Britain
, and the USSR at the Yalta Conference
, shortly before the end of the war. The precise location of the border was left open; the western Allies also accepted in principle the Oder River as the future western border of Poland and population transfer as the way to prevent future border disputes. The open question was whether the border should follow the eastern or western Neisse
rivers, and whether Stettin, the traditional seaport of Berlin
, should remain German or be included in Poland.
Originally, Germany was to retain Stettin
while the Poles were to annex East Prussia
with Königsberg
. However, Stalin eventually decided that he wanted Königsberg as a year-round warm water port for the Soviet Navy
, and argued that the Poles should receive Stettin instead. The wartime Polish government in exile had little to say in these decisions.
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, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union placed the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line (In Poland, these were referred to by the Polish Communist government as the "Western Territories" or "Regained Territories") as formally under Polish administrative control. It was anticipated that a final peace treaty
would follow shortly and either confirm this border or determine whatever alterations might be agreed upon.
The effective result of the Potsdam Conference was to put under Polish administration 112,000 km² of former German territories while transferring 187,000 km² of Polish territory located east of the Curzon line
to the USSR. The northeastern third of East Prussia was directly annexed by the Soviet Union
and remains part of Russia today.
It was also decided that all ethnic Germans remaining in the new and old Polish territories should be expelled, to prevent any claims of minority rights or possible land claims by any future German government. Among the provisions of the Potsdam Conference was a section that provided for the "orderly transfer of German populations". The specific wording of this section was as follows:
was completed and ready for implementation by the middle of 1944. It comprised mostly general plans for each province and there were some detailed plans for some cities and towns. Those detailed plans which existed consisted of five parts, including a general outline and listing of concentration points, preparation tasks for local administrations, specific instructions and detailed scenarios for the two phases of evacuation. Separate plans were prepared for some industrial plants. The plans covered not only the evacuation of civilians, but also livestock, and plans existed to destroy the industry and infrastructure.
Despite these preparations, Nazi authorities were late in ordering the evacuation
of areas close to the advancing front, before they were overrun by the Red Army
. This was mainly due to: Nazi fanaticism and irrationality; a valid paranoia about the fatal consequences of even giving the appearance of being 'defeatist' (and even discussing evacuation was definitely viewed as defeatist); and Hitler's insistence on holding every square metre of territory. About 50% of the Germans residing in areas annexed by Germany during World War II and almost 100% residing in unannexed occupied areas were evacuated. While around 7.5 million Germans (both "Imperial Germans
" and "Ethnic German
s") were either evacuated or otherwise escaped East Prussia and the previously occupied territories, many lost their lives either because of severe winter conditions, poor evacuation organization, or military operations.
, Czechoslovakia
, Hungary
, today's Kaliningrad Oblast
, and other East European countries. Some reports indicate that up to 16.5 million Germans were forcibly deported. More concrete statistics regarding those who emigrated or were expelled indicate a figure closer to 12 million. Those who fled in fear of the Red Army
were subsequently banned from returning. Some ethnic Germans were expelled because of their Nazi activities during the war, yet the single most common reason for their expulsion was their German ethnicity. They were sent to makeshift camps or cities in eastern and western Germany and Austria.
According to some German sources, more than 2.5 million lost their lives during this process. Other German, Czech, and Polish sources give a much lower estimate (Czech historians arguing that most of the estimated losses stemmed from the deaths of soldiers killed at the front). Over the course of the sixty years since the end of the war, estimates of total deaths of German civilians have ranged from 500,000 to as high as 3 million. Although the German government's official estimate of deaths due to the evacuations and expulsions stood at 2.2 million for several decades, recent analyses have led some historians to conclude that the actual number of deaths attributable to the expulsions was actually much lower—in the range of 500,000 to 1.1 million. The higher figures, up to 3.2 million, typically include -all- war-related deaths of ethnic Germans between 1939–45, including those who served in the German armed forces. The debate about the number of deaths and their cause continues to be the subject of heated controversy.
The population transfer itself included about: 688,000 from Poland (1938 borders); 2,275,200 from East Prussia; 5,123,200 from the pre-war areas of Germany proper (mostly Silesia and Pomerania) incorporated into Poland (see Oder-Neisse Line
); 3,000,400 from Czechoslovakia; around 169,500 from the Soviet Union; 253,000 from Hungary; 213,000 from Romania
; and another 297,500 from Yugoslavia
. However, in no East European nation were all ethnic Germans forced to leave. Census figures in 1950 place the total number of ethnic Germans still living in Eastern Europe at approximately 2.6 million, about 12 percent of the pre-war total.
The expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe was tolerated by the Potsdam Agreement
, which stated that the process should be undertaken in a "humane" and "orderly" manner, though it failed to specify detailed rules for the population transfers, or supervision of the process to prevent crimes against the transferred populations.
Valdis Lumans indicates that no ethnic German expulsions would have occurred at all, except for the barbaric occupation policies imposed on most of Europe by Nazi Germany, which included the expulsion or slave-labor pressganging of non-Germans from most of these areas. Along similar lines, Prauser and Rees assert that the "charge laid against the German population in the Eastern European states was that of disloyalty and of supporting the destruction of the states of which they were members and of collaboration with the German occupying forces."
allowed the migration of ethnic Germans (Danube Swabians
, Carpathian Germans
, and Transylvanian Saxons
) to West Germany in exchange for hard currency. Since the Romanian Revolution, this migration has continued.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union
in 1991, large numbers of Russian Germans
took advantage of Germany's liberal law of return to leave the harsh conditions of the Soviet successor states. By 1999, about 1.7 million former Soviet citizens of German origin had emigrated, mainly from Russia
and Kazakhstan
, to Germany. About 6,000 settled in Kaliningrad
Oblast (former East Prussia
).
, civilian militia, and/or organized efforts of governments of the reconstituted states of Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were detained in internment camps or sentenced to forced labor, some of them for years. The number of wartime expellees and refugees whose fate could not be ascertained was estimated to be around 2.1 million of the total 3.2 million casualties from all war-related causes, according to two major studies conducted in 1958 and 1965, which were commissioned by the German Bundestag
. Many German women were raped (the process of flight and expulsion includes actions taken by the Red Army against German civilians). Private property
of the expelled Germans was confiscated
. More than 4 million Germans emigrated to Germany from the 1950s to the 1990s, joining the 12 million expellees and refugees.
A German expellees source from the mid-1980s gives the following estimates of the population transfers. See Richard Overy's The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich, for a more recent objective tabulation of these figures.
The integration of expellees and refugees into German society required great efforts from the 1940s to the 1960s. In some areas, for instance in Mecklenburg
, the number of inhabitants doubled as a result of the influx. Other areas, like Bavaria
, which had been predominantly Roman Catholic before the war now had to deal with an influx of non-Catholic and non-Bavarian Germans from the East.
The areas from which ethnic Germans escaped or were expelled were subsequently re-populated by nationals of the states to which they now belonged, numbers of whom were expellees themselves from lands further east.
During the Cold War era
, there was little public knowledge of the expulsions outside of Germany, and thus scant discussion over the morality of the policy. Perhaps the primary reason for this is that Cold War geopolitics discouraged criticism of post-war Allied policies by the West Germans and of post-war Soviet policies by the East Germans. There was some discussion of the expulsions in the first decade and a half after World War II, but serious review and analysis of the events was not undertaken until the 1980s. It can be surmised that the fall of the Soviet Union, the spirit of glasnost
and the unification of Germany
and now the expansion of the European Union
into the areas that experienced the expulsions opened the door to a renewed examination of these events.
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 emphasized 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 own responsibility for, and acceptance of, the decisions made in Potsdam, the speech would seem to have been motivated by a contemporary political agenda.
During the Cold War, anti-Communists in the U.S. used the expulsions to excoriate the Soviet Union and its satellites for alleged cruelty and inhumanity in the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Because of the polemic nature of these allegations, estimates of deaths due to the expulsions tended to run higher than subsequent assessments by historians. For example, in a speech before the U.S. House of Representatives on May 16, 1957, the Hon. B. Carroll Reece
of Tennessee
called the violent expulsion of German civilians "genocide
". He charged that over 16 million Germans had been expelled from their homes east of the Oder-Neisse Line
, resulting in over 3 million deaths.
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' Vechno).
In a document signed 50 years ago, the Heimatvertriebene organizations also recognized the plight of different groups of people living in today's Poland who were resettled there by force. The Heimatvertriebene are just one of the groups of millions of other ethnic Germans, from many different countries, who all found refuge in today's Germany.
Some of the expellees were active in politics and belonged to right-wing political organizations. 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.
The expellees and their descendants are still highly active in German politics, and are one of the major political factions of the nation, with around 2 million members. The president of their organization is still a member of the national parliament. Although the prevailing political climate within West Germany was that of atonement for Nazi
actions, the CDU
governments have shown considerable support for the expellees and German civilian victims.
is a non-profit organization
formed to represent the interests of Germans displaced from their homes in Historical Eastern Germany
and other parts of Eastern Europe by the expulsion of Germans after World War II. ("Heimatvertriebene": "Homeland expellees").
It represents German citizens and their descendents (today numbering approximately 15 million), who after World War II were transferred from Poland
and the Soviet Union
and former German territories, together with ethnic German
s who were transferred
from Czechoslovakia
, Hungary
, Romania
, Yugoslavia
and other countries. The current president is CDU politician Erika Steinbach
.
has its registered office in Wiesbaden
and is headed by CDU politician Erika Steinbach
. One of Steinbach's main aims is to build the Centre Against Expulsions
in Berlin, a memorial dedicated to the victims of forced migrations or ethnic cleansing
in Europe, particularly those of the Germans displaced after World War II.
It was initiated by the Federation of Expellees, with the support of the CDU
/CSU
faction in the German parliament and of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who intends to support the building of the centre.
The initiative has caused much controversy, both in Germany and abroad. Some critics of the Federation of Expellees criticize the movement to build a centre and monument against forced migration
for focusing primarily on the expulsion of Germans rather than giving more weight to expulsions throughout all Europe.
Critics argue that this focus on German expulsions "risks de-contexualizing the past, thus breaking the causal relationship between the Nazi policies of radical nationalism and racial extermination on one hand and the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans on the other hand". This line of criticism argues that the expulsion of ethnic Germans was directly a result of Nazi policies during World War II. It charges that the Centre Against Expulsions portrays expelled Germans as victims of the war and thereby downplays the German responsibility for the Holocaust, atrocities, and Nazi Germany's aggression, leading to the outbreak of the war.
Other voices point out that it is important to document every part of history in order to be accurate. Furthermore, some argue that German responsibility for World War II is and will continue to be known, thus the fear is unsubstantiated.
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 some cases, crimes against Germans were examined. One suspected perpetrator of retaliatory crimes against expelled German civilians, Salomon Morel
, fled the country to Israel
, which denied Polish requests for his extradition until his death.
as the Polish-German border was formally recognised by the East German government
with the signing of the Treaty of Zgorzelec
in 1950. The border was even referred to as the "Border of Peace" in official Communist Party propaganda. It was initially rejected as unacceptable by all West German political parties, with the exception of the Communists.
By the 1960s, this opposition had mellowed, especially within the Social Democrats
and the Liberals. A key component of Chancellor Willy Brandt's
policy of Ostpolitik
was the Treaty of Warsaw (1970)
, where the West German and Polish states committed themselves to nonviolence and accepted the existing de facto border - the Oder-Neisse line
. This was a quite sensitive topic at the time, since Poland was concerned that someday a German government would lay claim to some of the territory Germany lost to Poland after World War II
. Brandt was heavily criticized by his conservative CDU
/CSU
opposition in the Bundestag
. They were indeed in favour of such a claim for Polish territory, and accused Brandt and his party of abandoning German interests.
The Oder-Neisse line was formally accepted by the Two plus Four treaty
, effecting Germany's reunification
in 1990, and the German-Polish Border Treaty
that was signed in 1990 and came into force in 1992.
published a poll from the Allensbach Institute
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 lands that were allocated to the Polish state 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, requiring that special permission be obtained. This policy is comparable to similar restrictions in 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 restrictions are weak, and they are not valid for companies and certain types of properties.
The attempts by German organizations to build a Centre Against Expulsions
dedicated to documentation of, among other subject matter, the Expulsion of Germans after World War II has provoked strong reactions in Poland. A proposal by Polish politicians that Germany should instead build a Center for the Memory of the Suffering of the Polish Nation was rejected by German politicians, who argue that this suffering has already been documented in many memorial centers and expositions, while that of the expelled Germans has not.
is not to repeat the post-war expulsions with new expulsions, annexations, and population transfers. Most expellees accept the territorial changes of 1945 as far as territorial claims are concerned, and consider the Poles now living in the former East Germany as friends and neighbors in the European Union. However, a few of them demand compensation from the Poles and support the Prussian Trust.
At the end of August 2004, a heated debate took place in the Polish legislature Sejm
over a proposed bill calling upon the Polish government to enforce Germany's payment of reparations for damage inflicted on Poland during World War II. The issue of German reparations was raised in response to signals coming from Germany, or rather from certain German circles, which in civil legal proceedings to lay indemnity claims for property left behind in the post-war territory of Poland might be initiated. The Polish nation reacted strongly to statements made by Erika Steinbach
, chair of the Union of the Expelled (BdV), and to claims made by Prussian Trust. Polish politicians asserted that only a response in the form of Poland's own reparations claims could suppress endeavors of some German citizens and their political advocates who are attempting to claim indemnity from Polish citizens in civil proceedings. The majority of Poles have not received any compensation from either the Soviet Union or Germany for losses suffered during World War II. However, Steinbach has sharply rejected any compensation claims and distanced herself from the Prussian Trust. On 9 October 2008 the European Court of Human Rights declared the case of Preussische Treuhand v. Poland inadmissible.
, at that time a candidate for president of Czechoslovakia (he was elected one day later), suggested that Czechoslovakia should apologize for the expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II. Most of the other prominent politicians disagreed with this proposal. There was also no reply from leaders of Sudeten German organizations. Later, the German President Richard von Weizsäcker
answered this by apologizing to Czechoslovakia during his visit to Prague
on March 1990, after Václav Havel repeated his apology by saying that the expulsions were "the mistakes and sins of our fathers". The Beneš decrees
, however, remain in force in Czechoslovakia.
In Czech-German relations, the topic has been effectively closed by the
Czech-German declaration of 1997. One principle of the declaration was 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 the 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 these a pre-war state may be the cause for a general increase in fears. The issue is revived periodically in Czech politics. As in Poland, there are restrictions in the Czech Republic
on land purchases by foreigners. According to a survey by the Allensbach Institute
in November 2005, 38% of Czechs believe Germans want to regain territory that they lost or will demand compensation.
announced an initiative to publicize and formally recognize the deeds of Sudeten German anti-Nazis. Although the move was received positively by most Sudeten Germans and the ethnic German minority, there has been criticism that the initiative is limited to anti-Nazis who actively fought for the Czechoslovak state, but not to anti-Nazis in general or non-Nazis. Some also expected some financial compensation for their mistreatment after the war.
. Their number has been consistently decreasing since World War II. According to the 2001 census there remain 13 municipalities and settlements in the Czech Republic with more than 10% ethnic Germans.
The situation in Slovakia
is different from that in the Czech Republic, in that the number of ethnic Germans was considerably lower initially, and that the Germans from Slovakia
were almost completely evacuated to Germany as the Soviet army was moving west through Slovakia. Only those few who returned to Slovakia after the end of the war were expelled together with the Germans from the current Czech Republic.
has minority rights, organisations, schools, local councils, and spontaneous assimilation is well under way. Many of the expellees have visited their old homes since the fall of the Soviet Union
in 1991.
was often conducted in a violent and aggressive way by Soviet officials who sought to exact revenge for the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the Soviet Union during the war. However, the present Russian inhabitants of the Kaliningrad sector (northern East Prussia) have much less animus against Germans. German names have even been revived in commercial Russian trade. Thus, it is possible that, in the future, the name of Kaliningrad might revert to its earlier name of Königsberg
. Because the exclave was a military zone during the Soviet era and nobody was allowed to enter without special permission, many old German Prussian villages are still intact, though they have become dilapidated over the course of time.
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
describes the dramatic reduction of ethnic German
Volksdeutsche
Volksdeutsche - "German in terms of people/folk" -, defined ethnically, is a historical term from the 20th century. The words volk and volkische conveyed in Nazi thinking the meanings of "folk" and "race" while adding the sense of superior civilization and blood...
populations in lands to the east of present-day Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
. The exodus began in the aftermath of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and was implicated in the rise of Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
. It culminated in expulsions
Expulsion of Germans after World War II
The later stages of World War II, and the period after the end of that war, saw the forced migration of millions of German nationals and ethnic Germans from various European states and territories, mostly into the areas which would become post-war Germany and post-war Austria...
of Germans from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. These were arranged by the victorious Allies when they redrew national borders and arranged for "orderly population transfers" to remove ethnic group
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...
s that they viewed as "troublesome".
Background
Migrations
Ostsiedlung
Ostsiedlung , also called German eastward expansion, was the medieval eastward migration and settlement of Germans from modern day western and central Germany into less-populated regions and countries of eastern Central Europe and Eastern Europe. The affected area roughly stretched from Slovenia...
that took place over more than a millennium led to pockets of Germans living throughout Eastern Europe as far east as Russia. By the sixteenth century, much of Pomerania
Pomerania
Pomerania is a historical region on the south shore of the Baltic Sea. Divided between Germany and Poland, it stretches roughly from the Recknitz River near Stralsund in the West, via the Oder River delta near Szczecin, to the mouth of the Vistula River near Gdańsk in the East...
, Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
, the Sudetenland
Sudetenland
Sudetenland is the German name used in English in the first half of the 20th century for the northern, southwest and western regions of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans, specifically the border areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and those parts of Silesia being within Czechoslovakia.The...
, Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
, Galicia, South Tyrol
South Tyrol
South Tyrol , also known by its Italian name Alto Adige, is an autonomous province in northern Italy. It is one of the two autonomous provinces that make up the autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. The province has an area of and a total population of more than 500,000 inhabitants...
, Carniola
Carniola
Carniola was a historical region that comprised parts of what is now Slovenia. As part of Austria-Hungary, the region was a crown land officially known as the Duchy of Carniola until 1918. In 1849, the region was subdivided into Upper Carniola, Lower Carniola, and Inner Carniola...
, and Lower Styria
Lower Styria
Lower Styria or Slovenian Styria is a traditional region in northeastern Slovenia, comprising the southern third of the former Duchy of Styria. The population of Lower Styria in its historical boundaries amounts to around 705,000 inhabitants, or 34.5% of the population of Slovenia...
had numerous German-majority towns and villages. By the early nineteenth century, every city of even modest size as far east as the Volga had a German quarter and a Jewish quarter. Travellers along any road would pass through, for example, a German village, then a Czech village, then a Polish
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
village, etc., depending on the region.
The rise of nationalism
Romantic nationalism
Romantic nationalism is the form of nationalism in which the state derives its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs...
in Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century spread the concept of a "people" who shared a common bond through race, religion, language, and culture, and had a right to form its own state. In these circumstances, various situations could lead to conflict. One such was when a nation claimed territorial rights to land outside its borders on the basis of a common bond with the people living on that land. Another was when a minority ethnic group sought to secede from a state, either to form an independent nation or join another nation with whom they felt stronger ties. A third source of conflict was the desire of some nations to expel people from their territories on the grounds that those people did not share a common bond with the majority in that nation.
Territorial claims of German nationalists
By World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, there were isolated groups of Germans or so-called Schwaben as far southeast as the Bosphorus (Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
), Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
, and Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...
. After the war, Germany's and Austria-Hungary's loss of territory and the rise of communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
meant that more Germans than ever constituted sizable minorities in various countries.
German nationalists
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
used the existence of large German minorities in other countries as a basis for territorial claims. Many of the propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
themes of the Nazi regime against Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
and Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
claimed that the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche
Volksdeutsche
Volksdeutsche - "German in terms of people/folk" -, defined ethnically, is a historical term from the 20th century. The words volk and volkische conveyed in Nazi thinking the meanings of "folk" and "race" while adding the sense of superior civilization and blood...
) in those territories were persecuted.
The Nazis negotiated a number of population transfers with Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
and others with Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
so that both Germany and the other country would increase their ethnic homogeneity. However, these population transfers were not sufficient to appease the demands of the Nazis. The "Heim ins Reich
Heim ins Reich
The Heim ins Reich initiative was a policy pursued by Adolf Hitler starting in 1938 and was one of the factors leading to World War II. The initiative attempted to convince people of German descent living outside of the German Reich that they should strive to bring these regions "home" into a...
" (Home into the Country) rhetoric of the Nazis over the continued disjoint status of exclaves such as Danzig was an agitating factor in the politics leading up to World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, and is considered by many to be among the major causes of Nazi aggression and thus the war. Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
used these issues as a pretext for waging aggressive wars against Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Support of Nazi invasion by German population in invaded countries
As Nazi Germany invaded first Czechoslovakia and later Poland and other European nations, some members of the ethnic German minorities in those countries aided the invading forces and the subsequent Nazi occupation. These acts would cause an enmity against Germans, and later be used as part of the justification for the expulsions.Czechoslovakia
According to the 1920 constitution, German minority rights were to be protected and their educational and cultural institutions were to be preserved in proportion to the population. Local hostilities were engendered, however, by policies intended to protect the security of the Czechoslovak state: border forestland, considered by some to be the most ancient Sudeten German national territory, was expropriated for security reasons, and Czech soldiers, policemen and bureaucrats were stationed in areas inhabited only by Germans. There were also economic tensions, as Sudeten GermansSudeten Germans
- Importance of Sudeten Germans :Czechoslovakia was inhabited by over 3 million ethnic Germans, comprising about 23 percent of the population of the republic and about 29.5% of Bohemia and Moravia....
suffered more during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, because they were more dependent on foreign trade and economic conditions in Germany.
Sudeten German nationalist sentiment affected their politics during the early years of the republic. In 1926, however, Chancellor
Chancellor
Chancellor is the title of various official positions in the governments of many nations. The original chancellors were the Cancellarii of Roman courts of justice—ushers who sat at the cancelli or lattice work screens of a basilica or law court, which separated the judge and counsel from the...
Gustav Stresemann
Gustav Stresemann
was a German politician and statesman who served as Chancellor and Foreign Minister during the Weimar Republic. He was co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.Stresemann's politics defy easy categorization...
of Germany advised Sudeten Germans to cooperate actively with the Czechoslovak government. In consequence, most Sudeten German parties changed from negativism to activism, and a number of Sudeten Germans accepted cabinet posts. By 1929, only a small number of Sudeten German deputies - most of them members of the German National Party (propertied classes) and the Sudeten Nazi Party (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei) - remained in opposition.
On October 1, 1933, Konrad Henlein
Konrad Henlein
Konrad Ernst Eduard Henlein was a leading pro-Nazi ethnic German politician in Czechoslovakia and leader of Sudeten German separatists...
created a new political organization, the Sudeten German Home Front which professed loyalty to the Czechoslovak state but championed decentralization
Decentralization
__FORCETOC__Decentralization or decentralisation is the process of dispersing decision-making governance closer to the people and/or citizens. It includes the dispersal of administration or governance in sectors or areas like engineering, management science, political science, political economy,...
. It absorbed most former German nationals and Sudeten Nazis. In 1935 the Sudeten German Home Front became the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP) and embarked on an active propaganda campaign. In the May election the SdP won more than 60 percent of the Sudeten German vote at the expense of the German Agrarians, Christian Socialists, and Social Democrats who each lost approximately half of their constituencies.
The SdP became the fulcrum of German nationalist forces. The party represented itself as striving for a just settlement of Sudeten German claims within the framework of Czechoslovak democracy. Henlein, however, maintained secret contacts with Nazi Germany and received material aid from Berlin. The SdP endorsed the idea of a führer and mimicked Nazi methods with banners, slogans, and uniformed troops. Concessions offered by the Czechoslovak government, including the transfer of Sudeten German officials to Sudeten German areas and possible participation of the SdP in the cabinet, were rejected. By 1937, most SdP leaders supported Hitler's pan-German objectives.
Poland
Some ethnic Germans living in Poland were activists in the groups Deutscher Volksverband and Jungdeutscher Partei, and before the war opposed any form of co-existence with the Polish state, and condemned those ethnic Germans who spoke Polish or had contact with Polish culture. Polish national events were boycotted and ethnic Germans who did not act in the required manner were branded as traitors and renegades by these organizations. Such organizations also distributed propaganda films and brochures containing inflammatory anti-Polish statements.One historian estimates that 25% of the ethnic German population in Poland belonged to Nazi-sponsored organizations that supported the Nazi conquest of Poland. Selbstschutz
Selbstschutz
Selbstschutz stands for two organisations:# A name used by a number of paramilitary organisations created by ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe# A name for self-defence measures and units in ethnic German, Austrian, and Swiss civil defence....
and German nationalist organizations created in Poland and Czechoslovakia by Germans took an active part in various actions (sabotage, etc.) which targeted the Polish population. For example, Selbstschutz
Selbstschutz
Selbstschutz stands for two organisations:# A name used by a number of paramilitary organisations created by ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe# A name for self-defence measures and units in ethnic German, Austrian, and Swiss civil defence....
took part in and itself conducted mass executions of Poles in Operation Tannenberg
Operation Tannenberg
Operation Tannenberg was the codename for one of the extermination actions directed at the Polish people during World War II, part of the Generalplan Ost...
. The Selbstschutze counted 82,000 to 100,000[ members,while the 1931 census showed 741,000 Germans living in Poland, over 10% of Germans living in Poland were members of this organization.
Polish historians estimate that, in areas that were incorporated into the Third Reich, 40,000 Poles were murdered and 20,000 were sent to concentration camps during the Intelligenzaktion
Intelligenzaktion
Intelligenzaktion was a genocidal action of Nazi Germany targeting Polish elites as part of elimination of potentially dangerous elements. It was an early measure of the Generalplan Ost. About 60,000 people were killed as the result of this operation...
, in which Selbstschutze also took part. Only a few percent of those sent to concentration camps survived.
In the early days of the occupation, 90% of those who were sent to concentration camps were targeted by ethnic Germans The overwhelming majority of those victims were selected by local ethnic Germans who identified them as enemies of the Reich. Ethnic Germans living in Poland made lists of Poles targeted for execution, as well as hunting down and illegally imprisoning Poles.
At the time of the expulsions, many German nationals and ethnic Germans still supported Nazism. For example, according to polls conducted among Germans in the American Zone of Occupation from November 1945 through December 1947, the percentage of the German population that supported the view that "National Socialism was a good idea, but badly implemented" averaged 47%, while in August, 1947, the percentage increased to 55%. Additionally 37% supported genocide of Jewish and Polish nations as "justified". However, there is low confidence in that interpretation, since this is based on the confusing questionnaire question "Extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was not necessary for the security of the Germans", which included an implicit double negative to which the response was either yes or no, and can have confused respondents. The reliability of the negative interpretation of the responses to this question is also lowered by the fact that it is at odds with the 77% of Germans who agreed to the questionnaire statement that "actions against Jews were in no way justified", and the 0% of Germans who agreed with the questionnaire statement that "Hitler was right in his treatment of the Jews".
Nazi-Soviet population transfers
Germans were resettled from territories which were occupied by the Soviet UnionSoviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in 1939 and 1940 as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...
of August 1939, notably from Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
and the Baltic states
Baltic states
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...
of Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
and Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
, all of which had large German minorities. The majority of the Baltic Germans had already been resettled in late 1939, prior to the occupation of Estonia and Latvia by the Soviet Union in June, 1940. These Volksdeutsche
Volksdeutsche
Volksdeutsche - "German in terms of people/folk" -, defined ethnically, is a historical term from the 20th century. The words volk and volkische conveyed in Nazi thinking the meanings of "folk" and "race" while adding the sense of superior civilization and blood...
(ethnic Germans) were then resettled in place of expelled Poles both in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany
Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany
At the beginning of World War II, nearly a quarter of the pre-war Polish areas were annexed by Nazi Germany and placed directly under German civil administration, while the rest of Nazi occupied Poland was named as General Government...
and in Zamość County
Zamosc County
Zamość County is a unit of territorial administration and local government in Lublin Voivodeship, eastern Poland. It came into being on January 1, 1999, as a result of the Polish local government reforms passed in 1998. Its administrative seat is the city of Zamość, although the city is not part...
in line with the Generalplan Ost
Generalplan Ost
Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing to be undertaken in the Eastern European territories occupied by Germany during World War II...
.
The Allies deliberate on the postwar German-Polish border
As it became evident that the Allies were going to defeat Nazi Germany decisively, the question arose as to how to redraw the borders of Eastern European countries after the war. In the context of those decisions, the problem arose of what to do about ethnic minorities within the redrawn borders.Winston Churchill was convinced that the only way to alleviate tensions between the two populations was the transfer of people, to match the national borders. As he stated in a speech to the House of Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, insofar 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."
The Yalta Conference
The final decision to move Poland's boundary westward was made by the USUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, and the USSR at the Yalta Conference
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D...
, shortly before the end of the war. The precise location of the border was left open; the western Allies also accepted in principle the Oder River as the future western border of Poland and population transfer as the way to prevent future border disputes. The open question was whether the border should follow the eastern or western Neisse
Lusatian Neisse
The Lusatian Neisse is a long river in Central Europe. The river has its source in the Jizera Mountains near Nová Ves nad Nisou, Czech Republic, reaching the tripoint with Poland and Germany at Zittau after , and later forms the Polish-German border on a length of...
rivers, and whether Stettin, the traditional seaport of Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, should remain German or be included in Poland.
Originally, Germany was to retain Stettin
Szczecin
Szczecin , is the capital city of the West Pomeranian Voivodeship in Poland. It is the country's seventh-largest city and the largest seaport in Poland on the Baltic Sea. As of June 2009 the population was 406,427....
while the Poles were to annex East Prussia
East Prussia
East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...
with Königsberg
Königsberg
Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945 as well as the northernmost and easternmost German city with 286,666 inhabitants . Due to the multicultural society in and around the city, there are several local names for it...
. However, Stalin eventually decided that he wanted Königsberg as a year-round warm water port for the Soviet Navy
Soviet Navy
The Soviet Navy was the naval arm of the Soviet Armed Forces. Often referred to as the Red Fleet, the Soviet Navy would have played an instrumental role in a Warsaw Pact war with NATO, where it would have attempted to prevent naval convoys from bringing reinforcements across the Atlantic Ocean...
, and argued that the Poles should receive Stettin instead. The wartime Polish government in exile had little to say in these decisions.
The Potsdam Conference
At the Potsdam ConferencePotsdam Conference
The Potsdam Conference was held at Cecilienhof, the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern, in Potsdam, occupied Germany, from 16 July to 2 August 1945. Participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States...
, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union placed the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line (In Poland, these were referred to by the Polish Communist government as the "Western Territories" or "Regained Territories") as formally under Polish administrative control. It was anticipated that a final peace treaty
Peace treaty
A peace treaty is an agreement between two or more hostile parties, usually countries or governments, that formally ends a state of war between the parties...
would follow shortly and either confirm this border or determine whatever alterations might be agreed upon.
The effective result of the Potsdam Conference was to put under Polish administration 112,000 km² of former German territories while transferring 187,000 km² of Polish territory located east of the Curzon line
Curzon Line
The Curzon Line was put forward by the Allied Supreme Council after World War I as a demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and Bolshevik Russia and was supposed to serve as the basis for a future border. In the wake of World War I, which catalysed the Russian Revolution of 1917, the...
to the USSR. The northeastern third of East Prussia was directly annexed by the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and remains part of Russia today.
It was also decided that all ethnic Germans remaining in the new and old Polish territories should be expelled, to prevent any claims of minority rights or possible land claims by any future German government. Among the provisions of the Potsdam Conference was a section that provided for the "orderly transfer of German populations". The specific wording of this section was as follows:
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.
Evacuation and flight
Some German plans for evacuation of the civilian population in some areas were prepared well in advance. Others were haphazard or purposefully neglected. The evacuation plan for some parts of East PrussiaEast Prussia
East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...
was completed and ready for implementation by the middle of 1944. It comprised mostly general plans for each province and there were some detailed plans for some cities and towns. Those detailed plans which existed consisted of five parts, including a general outline and listing of concentration points, preparation tasks for local administrations, specific instructions and detailed scenarios for the two phases of evacuation. Separate plans were prepared for some industrial plants. The plans covered not only the evacuation of civilians, but also livestock, and plans existed to destroy the industry and infrastructure.
Despite these preparations, Nazi authorities were late in ordering the evacuation
World War II evacuation and expulsion
Forced deportation, mass evacuation and displacement of peoples took place in many of the countries involved in World War II. These were caused both by the direct hostilities between Axis and Allied powers, and the border changes enacted in the pre-war settlement...
of areas close to the advancing front, before they were overrun by the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
. This was mainly due to: Nazi fanaticism and irrationality; a valid paranoia about the fatal consequences of even giving the appearance of being 'defeatist' (and even discussing evacuation was definitely viewed as defeatist); and Hitler's insistence on holding every square metre of territory. About 50% of the Germans residing in areas annexed by Germany during World War II and almost 100% residing in unannexed occupied areas were evacuated. While around 7.5 million Germans (both "Imperial Germans
Imperial Germans
Imperial Germans is the common translation of the German word Reichsdeutsche . It refers to German citizens, and by the word sense means people coming from the German Empire, i.e...
" and "Ethnic German
Ethnic German
Ethnic Germans historically also ), also collectively referred to as the German diaspora, refers to people who are of German ethnicity. Many are not born in Europe or in the modern-day state of Germany or hold German citizenship...
s") were either evacuated or otherwise escaped East Prussia and the previously occupied territories, many lost their lives either because of severe winter conditions, poor evacuation organization, or military operations.
Expulsion
Many of the remaining German inhabitants were either expelled or fled from present-day PolandPoland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, today's Kaliningrad Oblast
Kaliningrad Oblast
Kaliningrad Oblast is a federal subject of Russia situated on the Baltic coast. It has a population of The oblast forms the westernmost part of the Russian Federation, but it has no land connection to the rest of Russia. Since its creation it has been an exclave of the Russian SFSR and then the...
, and other East European countries. Some reports indicate that up to 16.5 million Germans were forcibly deported. More concrete statistics regarding those who emigrated or were expelled indicate a figure closer to 12 million. Those who fled in fear of the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
were subsequently banned from returning. Some ethnic Germans were expelled because of their Nazi activities during the war, yet the single most common reason for their expulsion was their German ethnicity. They were sent to makeshift camps or cities in eastern and western Germany and Austria.
According to some German sources, more than 2.5 million lost their lives during this process. Other German, Czech, and Polish sources give a much lower estimate (Czech historians arguing that most of the estimated losses stemmed from the deaths of soldiers killed at the front). Over the course of the sixty years since the end of the war, estimates of total deaths of German civilians have ranged from 500,000 to as high as 3 million. Although the German government's official estimate of deaths due to the evacuations and expulsions stood at 2.2 million for several decades, recent analyses have led some historians to conclude that the actual number of deaths attributable to the expulsions was actually much lower—in the range of 500,000 to 1.1 million. The higher figures, up to 3.2 million, typically include -all- war-related deaths of ethnic Germans between 1939–45, including those who served in the German armed forces. The debate about the number of deaths and their cause continues to be the subject of heated controversy.
The population transfer itself included about: 688,000 from Poland (1938 borders); 2,275,200 from East Prussia; 5,123,200 from the pre-war areas of Germany proper (mostly Silesia and Pomerania) incorporated into Poland (see Oder-Neisse Line
Oder-Neisse line
The Oder–Neisse line is the border between Germany and Poland which was drawn in the aftermath of World War II. The line is formed primarily by the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers, and meets the Baltic Sea west of the seaport cities of Szczecin and Świnoujście...
); 3,000,400 from Czechoslovakia; around 169,500 from the Soviet Union; 253,000 from Hungary; 213,000 from Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
; and another 297,500 from Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
. However, in no East European nation were all ethnic Germans forced to leave. Census figures in 1950 place the total number of ethnic Germans still living in Eastern Europe at approximately 2.6 million, about 12 percent of the pre-war total.
The expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe was tolerated by the Potsdam Agreement
Potsdam Agreement
The Potsdam Agreement was the Allied plan of tripartite military occupation and reconstruction of Germany—referring to the German Reich with its pre-war 1937 borders including the former eastern territories—and the entire European Theatre of War territory...
, which stated that the process should be undertaken in a "humane" and "orderly" manner, though it failed to specify detailed rules for the population transfers, or supervision of the process to prevent crimes against the transferred populations.
Valdis Lumans indicates that no ethnic German expulsions would have occurred at all, except for the barbaric occupation policies imposed on most of Europe by Nazi Germany, which included the expulsion or slave-labor pressganging of non-Germans from most of these areas. Along similar lines, Prauser and Rees assert that the "charge laid against the German population in the Eastern European states was that of disloyalty and of supporting the destruction of the states of which they were members and of collaboration with the German occupying forces."
Continued emigration of Germans from eastern Europe
Between 1950 and 1990, 1.4 million people emigrated from Poland to Germany claiming German ancestry (770,000 of them in the 1980s). Between 1970 and 1990 RomaniaRomania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
allowed the migration of ethnic Germans (Danube Swabians
Danube Swabians
The Danube Swabians is a collective term for the German-speaking population who lived in the former Kingdom of Hungary, especially alongside the Danube River valley. Because of different developments within the territory settled, the Danube Swabians cannot be seen as a unified people...
, Carpathian Germans
Carpathian Germans
Carpathian Germans , sometimes simply called Slovak Germans , are a group of German language speakers on the territory of present-day Slovakia...
, and Transylvanian Saxons
Transylvanian Saxons
The Transylvanian Saxons are a people of German ethnicity who settled in Transylvania from the 12th century onwards.The colonization of Transylvania by Germans was begun by King Géza II of Hungary . For decades, the main task of the German settlers was to defend the southeastern border of the...
) to West Germany in exchange for hard currency. Since the Romanian Revolution, this migration has continued.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...
in 1991, large numbers of Russian Germans
History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union
The German minority in Russia and the Soviet Union was created from several sources and in several waves. The 1914 census puts the number of Germans living in Russian Empire at 2,416,290. In 1989, the German population of the Soviet Union was roughly 2 million. In the 2002 Russian census, 597,212...
took advantage of Germany's liberal law of return to leave the harsh conditions of the Soviet successor states. By 1999, about 1.7 million former Soviet citizens of German origin had emigrated, mainly from Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
and Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
, to Germany. About 6,000 settled in Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad is a seaport and the administrative center of Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea...
Oblast (former East Prussia
East Prussia
East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...
).
The results
During the period of 1944/1945 - 1950, millions Germans fled or were expelled as a result of actions of the Red ArmyRed Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
, civilian militia, and/or organized efforts of governments of the reconstituted states of Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were detained in internment camps or sentenced to forced labor, some of them for years. The number of wartime expellees and refugees whose fate could not be ascertained was estimated to be around 2.1 million of the total 3.2 million casualties from all war-related causes, according to two major studies conducted in 1958 and 1965, which were commissioned by the German Bundestag
Bundestag
The Bundestag is a federal legislative body in Germany. In practice Germany is governed by a bicameral legislature, of which the Bundestag serves as the lower house and the Bundesrat the upper house. The Bundestag is established by the German Basic Law of 1949, as the successor to the earlier...
. Many German women were raped (the process of flight and expulsion includes actions taken by the Red Army against German civilians). Private property
Private property
Private property is the right of persons and firms to obtain, own, control, employ, dispose of, and bequeath land, capital, and other forms of property. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which refers to assets owned by a state, community or government rather than by...
of the expelled Germans was confiscated
Confiscation
Confiscation, from the Latin confiscatio 'joining to the fiscus, i.e. transfer to the treasury' is a legal seizure without compensation by a government or other public authority...
. More than 4 million Germans emigrated to Germany from the 1950s to the 1990s, joining the 12 million expellees and refugees.
A German expellees source from the mid-1980s gives the following estimates of the population transfers. See Richard Overy's The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich, for a more recent objective tabulation of these figures.
| German expellees and refugees |
|
|---|---|
| from | Number |
| Eastern Germany | 7,122,000 |
| Danzig | 279,000 |
| Poland | 661,000 |
| Czechoslovakia | 2,911,000 |
| Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania | 165,000 |
| USSR | 90,000 |
| Hungary | 199,000 |
| Romania | 228,000 |
| Yugoslavia | 271,000 |
The integration of expellees and refugees into German society required great efforts from the 1940s to the 1960s. In some areas, for instance in Mecklenburg
Mecklenburg
Mecklenburg is a historical region in northern Germany comprising the western and larger part of the federal-state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern...
, the number of inhabitants doubled as a result of the influx. Other areas, like Bavaria
Bavaria
Bavaria, formally the Free State of Bavaria is a state of Germany, located in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the largest state by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany...
, which had been predominantly Roman Catholic before the war now had to deal with an influx of non-Catholic and non-Bavarian Germans from the East.
The areas from which ethnic Germans escaped or were expelled were subsequently re-populated by nationals of the states to which they now belonged, numbers of whom were expellees themselves from lands further east.
Legacy
The psychological and social impact of the events were so immense, that even today the expulsions have entered the German language simply as "the Flight" or "the Expulsion" with no further specification needed, similar to the German reference to World War II as simply "the War" without further qualification. Added the fact that mostly only far "right-wing" organizations publicly rallied to the cause of the expellees following 1950 in Western Germany made the topic a political taboo. Anyone highlighting the grave injustice set upon the victims of the expulsion was labeled a revisionist and ultra-nationalist in the political spectrum. In East Germany no public debate was tolerated and it was officially counterbalanced with communist propaganda purporting the new frontier as a "Peace Border" or Friedensgrenze. The official German Federal government policy on the matter was that the Oder-Neisse border was only a de-facto frontier and that a final peace treaty was needed to settle the issue with the inclusion of all the Allied Powers. This kept the legacy of the expulsion alive in the minds of both the expellee population and the Polish government until it was resolved in 1990 with the Reunification Treaty.During the Cold War era
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, there was little public knowledge of the expulsions outside of Germany, and thus scant discussion over the morality of the policy. Perhaps the primary reason for this is that Cold War geopolitics discouraged criticism of post-war Allied policies by the West Germans and of post-war Soviet policies by the East Germans. There was some discussion of the expulsions in the first decade and a half after World War II, but serious review and analysis of the events was not undertaken until the 1980s. It can be surmised that the fall of the Soviet Union, the spirit of glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
and the unification of Germany
Unification of Germany
The formal unification of Germany into a politically and administratively integrated nation state officially occurred on 18 January 1871 at the Versailles Palace's Hall of Mirrors in France. Princes of the German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm of Prussia as Emperor Wilhelm of the German...
and now the expansion of the European Union
European Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
into the areas that experienced the expulsions opened the door to a renewed examination of these events.
Cold War assessment of the expulsions
In 1946, Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
delivered a memorable speech in Fulton, Missouri
Fulton, Missouri
Fulton is a city in Callaway County, Missouri, the United States of America. It is part of the Jefferson City, Missouri Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 12,790 in the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Callaway County...
in the presence of US President Truman. Churchill made the USA aware of the Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain
The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989...
coming down "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic". In this speech, Churchill also emphasized the wrongful Soviet-directed Polish incursions into Germany (that is, the land east of the Oder-Neisse line
Oder-Neisse line
The Oder–Neisse line is the border between Germany and Poland which was drawn in the aftermath of World War II. The line is formed primarily by the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers, and meets the Baltic Sea west of the seaport cities of Szczecin and Świnoujście...
) and the plight of millions of Germans refugees/expellees. However, taking into account his own responsibility for, and acceptance of, the decisions made in Potsdam, the speech would seem to have been motivated by a contemporary political agenda.
During the Cold War, anti-Communists in the U.S. used the expulsions to excoriate the Soviet Union and its satellites for alleged cruelty and inhumanity in the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Because of the polemic nature of these allegations, estimates of deaths due to the expulsions tended to run higher than subsequent assessments by historians. For example, in a speech before the U.S. House of Representatives on May 16, 1957, the Hon. B. Carroll Reece
B. Carroll Reece
Brazilla Carroll Reece was a U.S. Representative from Tennessee.-Early life and career:Reece was born on a farm near Butler, Tennessee, one of thirteen children of John Isaac and Sarah Maples Reece...
of Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
called the violent expulsion of German civilians "genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
". He charged that over 16 million Germans had been expelled from their homes east of the Oder-Neisse Line
Oder-Neisse line
The Oder–Neisse line is the border between Germany and Poland which was drawn in the aftermath of World War II. The line is formed primarily by the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers, and meets the Baltic Sea west of the seaport cities of Szczecin and Świnoujście...
, resulting in over 3 million deaths.
Both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
and Lev Kopelev
Lev Kopelev
Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev was a Soviet author and a dissident.- Biography :...
, during their Soviet military service, had objected to the brutal treatment of German civilians of East Prussia
East Prussia
East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...
. Lev Kopelev wrote about the cruel events in post-1945 East Prussia
East Prussia
East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...
in the autobiographical trilogy To Be Preserved Forever (Хранить вечно, Khranit' Vechno).
Expelled Germans in post-war Germany
After World War II, many expellees found refuge in either West Germany, East Germany, or Austria. Refugees who had fled voluntarily but were later refused the right to return are often not distinguished from those who were forcibly expelled, who are often not separable from people born to German parents that moved into areas under German occupation either on their own or as Nazi colonists.In a document signed 50 years ago, the Heimatvertriebene organizations also recognized the plight of different groups of people living in today's Poland who were resettled there by force. The Heimatvertriebene are just one of the groups of millions of other ethnic Germans, from many different countries, who all found refuge in today's Germany.
Some of the expellees were active in politics and belonged to right-wing political organizations. 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.
The expellees and their descendants are still highly active in German politics, and are one of the major political factions of the nation, with around 2 million members. The president of their organization is still a member of the national parliament. Although the prevailing political climate within West Germany was that of atonement for Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
actions, the CDU
Christian Democratic Union (Germany)
The Christian Democratic Union of Germany is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany. It is regarded as on the centre-right of the German political spectrum...
governments have shown considerable support for the expellees and German civilian victims.
Federation of Expellees
The Federation of ExpelleesFederation of Expellees
The Federation of Expellees or Bund der Vertriebenen is a non-profit organization formed to represent the interests of Germans who either fled their homes in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, or were expelled following World War II....
is a non-profit organization
Non-profit organization
Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...
formed to represent the interests of Germans displaced from their homes in Historical Eastern Germany
Historical Eastern Germany
The former eastern territories of Germany are those provinces or regions east of the current eastern border of Germany which were lost by Germany during and after the two world wars. These territories include the Province of Posen and East Prussia, Farther Pomerania, East Brandenburg and Lower...
and other parts of Eastern Europe by the expulsion of Germans after World War II. ("Heimatvertriebene": "Homeland expellees").
It represents German citizens and their descendents (today numbering approximately 15 million), who after World War II were transferred from Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
and the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and former German territories, together with ethnic German
Ethnic German
Ethnic Germans historically also ), also collectively referred to as the German diaspora, refers to people who are of German ethnicity. Many are not born in Europe or in the modern-day state of Germany or hold German citizenship...
s who were transferred
Population transfer
Population transfer is the movement of a large group of people from one region to another by state policy or international authority, most frequently on the basis of ethnicity or religion...
from Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
, Yugoslavia
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the abolition of the Yugoslav monarchy until it was dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav Wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of six socialist republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,...
and other countries. The current president is CDU politician Erika Steinbach
Erika Steinbach
' is a German conservative politician and president of the Federation of Expellees. She has been representing the Christian Democratic Union and the state of Hesse as a member of the Parliament of Germany, the Bundestag, since 1990...
.
Centre Against Expulsions
The foundation Centre Against ExpulsionsCentre Against Expulsions
The Centre Against Expulsions was a planned German documentation centre for expulsions and ethnic cleansing, particularly the expulsion of Germans after World War II. Since March 19, 2008 the name of the project is Sichtbares Zeichen gegen Flucht und Vertreibung...
has its registered office in Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
and is headed by CDU politician Erika Steinbach
Erika Steinbach
' is a German conservative politician and president of the Federation of Expellees. She has been representing the Christian Democratic Union and the state of Hesse as a member of the Parliament of Germany, the Bundestag, since 1990...
. One of Steinbach's main aims is to build the Centre Against Expulsions
Centre Against Expulsions
The Centre Against Expulsions was a planned German documentation centre for expulsions and ethnic cleansing, particularly the expulsion of Germans after World War II. Since March 19, 2008 the name of the project is Sichtbares Zeichen gegen Flucht und Vertreibung...
in Berlin, a memorial dedicated to the victims of forced migrations or ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
in Europe, particularly those of the Germans displaced after World War II.
It was initiated by the Federation of Expellees, with the support of the CDU
Christian Democratic Union (Germany)
The Christian Democratic Union of Germany is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany. It is regarded as on the centre-right of the German political spectrum...
/CSU
Christian Social Union of Bavaria
The Christian Social Union in Bavaria is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany. It operates only in the state of Bavaria, while its sister party, the Christian Democratic Union , operates in the other 15 states of Germany...
faction in the German parliament and of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who intends to support the building of the centre.
The initiative has caused much controversy, both in Germany and abroad. Some critics of the Federation of Expellees criticize the movement to build a centre and monument against forced migration
Forced migration
Forced migration refers to the coerced movement of a person or persons away from their home or home region...
for focusing primarily on the expulsion of Germans rather than giving more weight to expulsions throughout all Europe.
Critics argue that this focus on German expulsions "risks de-contexualizing the past, thus breaking the causal relationship between the Nazi policies of radical nationalism and racial extermination on one hand and the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans on the other hand". This line of criticism argues that the expulsion of ethnic Germans was directly a result of Nazi policies during World War II. It charges that the Centre Against Expulsions portrays expelled Germans as victims of the war and thereby downplays the German responsibility for the Holocaust, atrocities, and Nazi Germany's aggression, leading to the outbreak of the war.
Other voices point out that it is important to document every part of history in order to be accurate. Furthermore, some argue that German responsibility for World War II is and will continue to be known, thus the fear is unsubstantiated.
Polish-German relations
Although relations between the Republic of Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany have generally been cordial since 1991, there remain disputes about the war, the post-war expulsion, and the treatment and preservation of German cultural heritage in modern day western and northern Poland. Recently, a small but increasing number of German cultural heritage sites in Poland are being restored, often within the context of Polish-German cooperation. Von Moltke's palace in Krzyżowa, Świdnica County is the international youth meeting place.Since 1990, historical events have been examined by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance
Institute of National Remembrance
Institute of National Remembrance — Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation is a Polish government-affiliated research institute with lustration prerogatives and prosecution powers founded by specific legislation. It specialises in the legal and historical sciences and...
. 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 some cases, crimes against Germans were examined. One suspected perpetrator of retaliatory crimes against expelled German civilians, Salomon Morel
Salomon Morel
Salomon Morel was a Polish Communist official and an accused war criminal. After the end of World War II, he became the commander of the infamous Zgoda labour camp...
, fled the country to Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
, which denied Polish requests for his extradition until his death.
Finalization of the Polish-German border
The Oder-Neisse lineOder-Neisse line
The Oder–Neisse line is the border between Germany and Poland which was drawn in the aftermath of World War II. The line is formed primarily by the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers, and meets the Baltic Sea west of the seaport cities of Szczecin and Świnoujście...
as the Polish-German border was formally recognised by the East German government
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
with the signing of the Treaty of Zgorzelec
Treaty of Zgorzelec
The Treaty of Zgorzelec between the Republic of Poland and East Germany was signed on 6 July 1950 in Polish Zgorzelec, until 1945 the eastern part of the divided city of Görlitz.The agreement...
in 1950. The border was even referred to as the "Border of Peace" in official Communist Party propaganda. It was initially rejected as unacceptable by all West German political parties, with the exception of the Communists.
By the 1960s, this opposition had mellowed, especially within the Social Democrats
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a social-democratic political party in Germany...
and the Liberals. A key component of Chancellor Willy Brandt's
Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt, born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm , was a German politician, Mayor of West Berlin 1957–1966, Chancellor of West Germany 1969–1974, and leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 1964–1987....
policy of Ostpolitik
Ostpolitik
Neue Ostpolitik , or Ostpolitik for short, refers to the normalization of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Eastern Europe, particularly the German Democratic Republic beginning in 1969...
was the Treaty of Warsaw (1970)
Treaty of Warsaw (1970)
The Treaty of Warsaw was a treaty between West Germany and the People's Republic of Poland. It was signed by Chancellor Willy Brandt and Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz at the Presidential Palace on 7 December 1970, and it was ratified by the German Bundestag on 17 May 1972.In the treaty, both...
, where the West German and Polish states committed themselves to nonviolence and accepted the existing de facto border - the Oder-Neisse line
Oder-Neisse line
The Oder–Neisse line is the border between Germany and Poland which was drawn in the aftermath of World War II. The line is formed primarily by the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers, and meets the Baltic Sea west of the seaport cities of Szczecin and Świnoujście...
. This was a quite sensitive topic at the time, since Poland was concerned that someday a German government would lay claim to some of the territory Germany lost to Poland after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Brandt was heavily criticized by his conservative CDU
Christian Democratic Union (Germany)
The Christian Democratic Union of Germany is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany. It is regarded as on the centre-right of the German political spectrum...
/CSU
Christian Social Union of Bavaria
The Christian Social Union in Bavaria is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany. It operates only in the state of Bavaria, while its sister party, the Christian Democratic Union , operates in the other 15 states of Germany...
opposition in the Bundestag
Bundestag
The Bundestag is a federal legislative body in Germany. In practice Germany is governed by a bicameral legislature, of which the Bundestag serves as the lower house and the Bundesrat the upper house. The Bundestag is established by the German Basic Law of 1949, as the successor to the earlier...
. They were indeed in favour of such a claim for Polish territory, and accused Brandt and his party of abandoning German interests.
The Oder-Neisse line was formally accepted by the Two plus Four treaty
Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany
The Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany, was negotiated in 1990 between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic , and the Four Powers which occupied Germany at the end of World War II in Europe: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the...
, effecting Germany's reunification
German reunification
German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...
in 1990, and the German-Polish Border Treaty
German-Polish Border Treaty (1990)
The German-Polish Border Treaty of 1990 finally settled the issue of the Polish-German border, which in terms of international law had been pending since 1945...
that was signed in 1990 and came into force in 1992.
Restrictions on the sale of property to foreigners
In November 2005 Der SpiegelDer Spiegel
Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It is one of Europe's largest publications of its kind, with a weekly circulation of more than one million.-Overview:...
published a poll from the Allensbach Institute
Allensbach Institute
The Allensbach Institute, formally the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research or Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Polling , is a private conservativeopinion polling institute based in Allensbach, Baden-Württemberg, Germany....
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 lands that were allocated to the Polish state 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, requiring that special permission be obtained. This policy is comparable to similar restrictions in the Baltic Åland Islands
Åland Islands
The Åland Islands form an archipelago in the Baltic Sea. They are situated at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia and form an autonomous, demilitarised, monolingually Swedish-speaking region of Finland...
. These restrictions will be lifted 12 years after the 2004 accession of Poland to the European Union
European Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
, i.e., on May 1, 2016. The restrictions are weak, and they are not valid for companies and certain types of properties.
The attempts by German organizations to build a Centre Against Expulsions
Centre Against Expulsions
The Centre Against Expulsions was a planned German documentation centre for expulsions and ethnic cleansing, particularly the expulsion of Germans after World War II. Since March 19, 2008 the name of the project is Sichtbares Zeichen gegen Flucht und Vertreibung...
dedicated to documentation of, among other subject matter, the Expulsion of Germans after World War II has provoked strong reactions in Poland. A proposal by Polish politicians that Germany should instead build a Center for the Memory of the Suffering of the Polish Nation was rejected by German politicians, who argue that this suffering has already been documented in many memorial centers and expositions, while that of the expelled Germans has not.
Indemnity claims
The official policy of the expelleesHeimatvertriebene
Heimatvertriebene are those around 12 million ethnic Germans who fled or were expelled after World War II from parts of Germany annexed by Poland and Russia, and from other countries, who found refuge in both West and East Germany, and Austria...
is not to repeat the post-war expulsions with new expulsions, annexations, and population transfers. Most expellees accept the territorial changes of 1945 as far as territorial claims are concerned, and consider the Poles now living in the former East Germany as friends and neighbors in the European Union. However, a few of them demand compensation from the Poles and support the Prussian Trust.
At the end of August 2004, a heated debate took place in the Polish legislature Sejm
Sejm
The Sejm is the lower house of the Polish parliament. The Sejm is made up of 460 deputies, or Poseł in Polish . It is elected by universal ballot and is presided over by a speaker called the Marshal of the Sejm ....
over a proposed bill calling upon the Polish government to enforce Germany's payment of reparations for damage inflicted on Poland during World War II. The issue of German reparations was raised in response to signals coming from Germany, or rather from certain German circles, which in civil legal proceedings to lay indemnity claims for property left behind in the post-war territory of Poland might be initiated. The Polish nation reacted strongly to statements made by Erika Steinbach
Erika Steinbach
' is a German conservative politician and president of the Federation of Expellees. She has been representing the Christian Democratic Union and the state of Hesse as a member of the Parliament of Germany, the Bundestag, since 1990...
, chair of the Union of the Expelled (BdV), and to claims made by Prussian Trust. Polish politicians asserted that only a response in the form of Poland's own reparations claims could suppress endeavors of some German citizens and their political advocates who are attempting to claim indemnity from Polish citizens in civil proceedings. The majority of Poles have not received any compensation from either the Soviet Union or Germany for losses suffered during World War II. However, Steinbach has sharply rejected any compensation claims and distanced herself from the Prussian Trust. On 9 October 2008 the European Court of Human Rights declared the case of Preussische Treuhand v. Poland inadmissible.
Czech-German relations
On 28 December 1989, Václav HavelVáclav Havel
Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...
, at that time a candidate for president of Czechoslovakia (he was elected one day later), suggested that Czechoslovakia should apologize for the expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II. Most of the other prominent politicians disagreed with this proposal. There was also no reply from leaders of Sudeten German organizations. Later, the German President Richard von Weizsäcker
Richard von Weizsäcker
Richard Karl Freiherr von Weizsäcker , known as Richard von Weizsäcker, is a German politician . He served as Governing Mayor of West Berlin from 1981 to 1984, and as President of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1984 to 1994...
answered this by apologizing to Czechoslovakia during his visit to Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
on March 1990, after Václav Havel repeated his apology by saying that the expulsions were "the mistakes and sins of our fathers". The Beneš decrees
Beneš decrees
Decrees of the President of the Republic , more commonly known as the Beneš decrees, were a series of laws that were drafted by the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in the absence of the Czechoslovak parliament during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War II and issued by President...
, however, remain in force in Czechoslovakia.
In Czech-German relations, the topic has been effectively closed by the
Czech-German declaration of 1997. One principle of the declaration was 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 the 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 these a pre-war state may be the cause for a general increase in fears. The issue is revived periodically in Czech politics. As in Poland, there are restrictions in the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
on land purchases by foreigners. According to a survey by the Allensbach Institute
Allensbach Institute
The Allensbach Institute, formally the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research or Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Polling , is a private conservativeopinion polling institute based in Allensbach, Baden-Württemberg, Germany....
in November 2005, 38% of Czechs believe Germans want to regain territory that they lost or will demand compensation.
Recognition of Sudeten German anti-Nazis
In 2005, Czech Prime Minister Jiří ParoubekJirí Paroubek
Jiří Paroubek is a Czech politician, who served as the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic from 25 April 2005 to 16 August 2006. He was also Chairman of the Czech Social Democratic Party , but resigned from his position immediately after the result of the 2010 Legislative Election was announced...
announced an initiative to publicize and formally recognize the deeds of Sudeten German anti-Nazis. Although the move was received positively by most Sudeten Germans and the ethnic German minority, there has been criticism that the initiative is limited to anti-Nazis who actively fought for the Czechoslovak state, but not to anti-Nazis in general or non-Nazis. Some also expected some financial compensation for their mistreatment after the war.
Status of the German minority in the Czech Republic and Slovakia
There are about 40,000 ethnic Germans remaining in the Czech RepublicCzech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
. Their number has been consistently decreasing since World War II. According to the 2001 census there remain 13 municipalities and settlements in the Czech Republic with more than 10% ethnic Germans.
The situation in Slovakia
Slovakia
The Slovak Republic is a landlocked state in Central Europe. It has a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia is bordered by the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south...
is different from that in the Czech Republic, in that the number of ethnic Germans was considerably lower initially, and that the Germans from Slovakia
Carpathian Germans
Carpathian Germans , sometimes simply called Slovak Germans , are a group of German language speakers on the territory of present-day Slovakia...
were almost completely evacuated to Germany as the Soviet army was moving west through Slovakia. Only those few who returned to Slovakia after the end of the war were expelled together with the Germans from the current Czech Republic.
The German minority in Hungary
Today, the ethnic German minority in HungaryHungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
has minority rights, organisations, schools, local councils, and spontaneous assimilation is well under way. Many of the expellees have visited their old homes since the fall of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in 1991.
Russia
Many descendants of ethnic Germans who were expelled from Kaliningrad (Königsberg) can be found today in Germany. The expulsion of Germans from the northern part of what was formerly East PrussiaEast Prussia
East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...
was often conducted in a violent and aggressive way by Soviet officials who sought to exact revenge for the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the Soviet Union during the war. However, the present Russian inhabitants of the Kaliningrad sector (northern East Prussia) have much less animus against Germans. German names have even been revived in commercial Russian trade. Thus, it is possible that, in the future, the name of Kaliningrad might revert to its earlier name of Königsberg
Königsberg
Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945 as well as the northernmost and easternmost German city with 286,666 inhabitants . Due to the multicultural society in and around the city, there are several local names for it...
. Because the exclave was a military zone during the Soviet era and nobody was allowed to enter without special permission, many old German Prussian villages are still intact, though they have become dilapidated over the course of time.
See also
- Flight and expulsion of Germans during and after WWII
- Evacuation of German civilians during the end of World War II
- Demographic estimates of the German exodus from Eastern Europe
- Danube-Swabians
- Population transferPopulation transferPopulation transfer is the movement of a large group of people from one region to another by state policy or international authority, most frequently on the basis of ethnicity or religion...
- Regained Territories
- Volga Germans
- History of Germans in Russia and the Soviet UnionHistory of Germans in Russia and the Soviet UnionThe German minority in Russia and the Soviet Union was created from several sources and in several waves. The 1914 census puts the number of Germans living in Russian Empire at 2,416,290. In 1989, the German population of the Soviet Union was roughly 2 million. In the 2002 Russian census, 597,212...
- Gottschee CountyGottschee CountyGottschee County refers to the former German speaking region in the Duchy of Carniola , a crownland of the Habsburg Empire, located in modern day Slovenia...