German exodus from Eastern Europe The German exodus from Eastern Europe refers to the exodus of ethnic German populations from 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 part of negotiated agreements between the victorious Allies to redraw national borders and arrange for "orderly population transfers" to remove ethnic minorities that were viewed as "troublesome".
Background 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, Alto Adige/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. Travelers 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. Territorial claims of German nationalists By World War I, 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.
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.
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 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 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 meter of territory. About 50% of the Germans residing in areas annexed by Germany during WWII and almost 100% residing in unannexed occupied areas were evacuated. While around 7.5 million Germans (both "Imperial Germans" and "Ethnic Germans") 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 Poland, 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, generally according to their Landsmannschaft. 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 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." In The Volksdeutsche of Eastern Europe and the Collapse of the Nazi Empire, 1944-1945, Doris Bergen analyzes the immediate and long-term effects of population policy on the ethnic Germans of eastern Europe which, in her view, was disastrous. Bergen notes that the ethnic Germans of this area found their fate intimately linked to, and affected by, the German war effort and the regime's genocidal policy in more than material ways. Not only did Nazi resettlement policy cause a permanent shift of population transfers and ethnic boundaries, it also caused the erasure of ethnic coexistence. During the earlier years of the war, the Nazis emphasized racial hostility and competition, but at war's end, when it was fairly clear that the Germans would lose, ethnic Germans who had benefited from the earlier policy simply refused to abandon these ideas and found themselves, as a result, struggling to find a satisfactory place within their new communities.
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 Romania allowed the migration of ethnic Germans (Danube Swabians, Carpathian Germans, and Transylvanian Saxons) to West Germany and Romanian Jews to Israel in exchange for hard currency. Since the Romanian Revolution, this migration has continued. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, large numbers of Russian Germans (Wolgadeutsche) 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).
The results During the period of 1944/1945 - 1950, millions Germans fled or were expelled as a result of actions of the Red Army, 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. 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, 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 nonBavarian Germans from the East. The areas from which ethnic Germans escaped or were expelled were subsequently repopulated 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 any public debate was not 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, there was little public knowledge of the expulsions outside of Germany[citation needed], 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.
Cold War assessment of the expulsions In 1946, Winston Churchill delivered a memorable speech in Fulton, Missouri in the presence of US President Truman. Cribbing a phrase from Joseph Goebbels, 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).
Expelled Germans in post-war Germany After World War II, many expellees (German: Heimatvertriebene) 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 as of 2004 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. Federation of Expellees The Federation of Expellees (German: Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV)) 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 descendants (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 Germans who were transferred from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and other countries. The current president is CDU politician Erika Steinbach. Centre Against Expulsions The foundation Centre Against Expulsions 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 (German: Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen) 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.
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. 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 has denied Polish requests for his extradition.