Expulsion of Germans - Demography - Casualties

Casualties

Estimates of total deaths of German civilians have ranged from 500,000 to a maximum of 3.0 million persons. The death toll also includes the Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union. Although the German government's official estimate of deaths due to the flight and expulsions has stood at 2.2 million for several decades, recent analysis has led some historians to the conclusion that the actual number was much lower - in the range of 500,000 to 600,000. The higher figure of 3.0 million was a preliminary estimate from 1950. Estimates made in West Germany during the Cold War were calculated by balancing pre- and post-expulsion populations or on researches attempting to account for the number of verified deaths. There is an academic discourse regarding the validity of the methods and their results.

The German government figures for the estimated death toll of the flight and expulsions are not directly comparable. The Schieder commission(1953–1961), which consisted primarily of distinguished historians with a Nazi past, put the death toll at about 2.3 million based on preliminary data. A 1958 demographic study of the population balance by the Statistisches Bundesamt estimated a death toll of 2,225,000. The German Church Search Service of the German Red Cross attempted to trace the individual fates of Germans in the post war expulsions, by 1964 they confirmed 473,013 deaths and listed 1,905,991 "unsolved cases" in the entire area of eastern Europe. A 1974 German Federal Archives report estimated 600,000 deaths only due to what the authors describe as "crimes against humanity" (völkerrechtswidrige Verbrechen), excluding excess post war deaths due to malnutrition and disease. The German Red Cross in 2005 still maintained that death toll in the expulsions is 2,251,500 persons.

Since the end of the cold war material on the expulsions from the German archives has been released to the public. Based on this recently disclosed information the German historians Ingo Haar, Rüdiger Overmans and Hans Henning Hahn and Eva Hahnova believe the figures and methodology of the studies by the West German government from the 1950s are inaccurate. (See section on discourse below)

The German historians Ingo Haar, and Hans Henning Hahn and Eva Hahnova maintain that German speaking Jews are included with the German population used to compute overall losses (See section on the Religion of the Eastern Germans above)