Expulsion of Germans - Background

Background

Before World War II, East-Central Europe generally lacked clearly shaped ethnic settlement areas. Rather, outside of some ethnic majority areas, there were vast mixed areas and abundant smaller pockets settled by various ethnicities. Within these areas of diversity, including the major cities of Central and Eastern Europe, regular interaction between various ethnic groups had taken place on a daily basis for as long as centuries, while not always harmoniously, on every civic and economic level.

With the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, the ethnicity of citizens became an issue in territorial claims, the self-perception/identity of states, and claims of ethnic superiority. The German Empire introduced the idea of ethnicity-based settlement in an attempt to ensure its territorial integrity, and was also the first modern European state to propose population transfers as a means of solving "nationality conflicts", intending the removal of Poles and Jews from the projected post–World War I "Polish Border Strip" and its resettlement with ethnic Gentile Germans.

The Treaty of Versailles resulted in the creation or recreation of multiple nation-states across Central and Eastern Europe. Before World War I, these had been incorporated in the Austrian, Russian and German empires. Although the latter two arose and were named on the basis of their respective ethnic majorities, none of them were ethnically homogeneous. Ethnic Germans became minorities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania after 1919. The German minorities no longer enjoyed the privileged status that they had in Austria-Hungary and German Empire and many ethnic Germans choose to emigrate to Germany or Austria. With the rise of the Hitler dictatorship in Germany the German minorities were encouraged to demand local autonomy. In Germany during the 1930s Nazi propaganda claimed that Germans were subject to persecution and local Nazi supporters in Czechoslovakia and Poland formed local Nazi political parties sponsored by Germany.

Germans expelled non-Germans from Sudetenland. Germans murdered Jews and educated Poles in September 1939, Poles murdered a number of German minority activists and people accused of terrorism. During the World War II German occupation of Central and Eastern Europe under Nazism, many citizens of German descent in Poland registered with the Deutsche Volksliste. Some held important positions in the hierarchy of the Nazi administration, some participated in Nazi atrocities, causing resentment towards German-speakers in general, which would later be used by the Allied politicians as one of the justifications for their expulsion.

The expulsions policy was part of the geopolitical and ethnic reconfiguration of postwar Europe, and in part retribution for Nazi Germany's initiation of the war and subsequent atrocities and ethnic cleansings in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Allied leaders, Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom and Joseph Stalin of the USSR, had agreed in general before the end of the war that Poland's territory would be shifted west (though how far was not specified) and the remaining German population expelled, and assured the leaders of the emigre governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia, both occupied by Nazi Germany, accordingly.