German Expulsion after World War II

Before and during World War II, many ethnic Germans lived among their neighbors in Eastern Europe. However, as the war drew to a close, many Germans began fleeing the East before the rapidly advancing Red Armies, displacing millions of people. Refugees streamed back into central Europe during the last months of the war and the years following it, urged on by an agreed-upon Allied policy of German expulsion. Those who did not pack their things and run toward the end of the war were often forced to leave their homes later on at the behest of local governments. A census taken five years after the end of the war puts the number of ethnic Germans living in Eastern Europe at about twelve percent of what it was before the war.

Many victims of German expulsion during and after World War II came from areas that had been German territories, such as the Sudetenland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Others came from Hungary, Yugoslavia, and other parts of Eastern Europe. Their numbers are estimated to have been somewhere between 13.5 and 16.5 million people, a figure that included those refugees evacuated by the Germans, those who fled combat, as well as those who were killed due to the fighting. Many refugees were deported to the Soviet Union for use in forced labor camps, and much of the land and property that they left behind was nationalized by the Soviet government.

When the Allied leaders met at Potsdam toward the end of the war to decide what the terms of Germany’s surrender would be, they also had to decide what would be done with all of the ethnic Germans who had moved into Eastern Europe. The Poles, in order to regain control of their country, insisted on a policy of German expulsion, stating that their country was not built on multinational lines. Many Eastern Europeans sought revenge on Germans for the brutal way that the Nazis had treated them, and some of the early German expulsions resulted in a number of deaths, as well as yet more war atrocities. Many children, sometimes known as “wolf” children, were left orphaned, and many also died of starvation and cold.

Those who survived the great German expulsion after World War II arrived in their homeland beaten, starving, and”in many cases, raped. They found their homeland had been destroyed by the war, and had to deal with shortages in food, space, and housing that would last for decades. The housing shortages, as well as the new borders of Germany, forced many expellees to live in camps. Many of the refugees from the East were crowded into the British and American occupational zones, being that the French refused to admit them and the Soviets were the ones who deported them, straining American and British supply lines.

It was only in the 1990s, with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany, that many of these events were re-examined by historians and survivors alike. All agree that the German expulsion following World War II was a dark time for ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe.