1974 Study By German Federal Archives
In 1969, the Federal West German government ordered a further study to be conducted by the German Federal Archives, which was finished in 1974 and published in 1989. Thereby false positives from the Suchdienst report were excluded and additional sources evaluated, resulting in a number of about 600,000 estimated deaths caused by "crimes against humanity" (völkerrechtswidrige Verbrechen). The definition of crimes against humanity used by the 1974 archives report includes deaths caused by military activity in the 1944–45 campaign as well as deliberate killings and deaths due to forced labor and in internment camps. The 1958 demographic study estimated total losses of 2.225 million persons including post-war losses due to famine and disease. The authors of the German Federal Archives study maintain that their figures do not include post-war losses due to famine and disease. The study did not include Hungarian, Romanian and Soviet ethnic Germans. A summary of the figures given in the 1974 German Federal Archives report is as follows: Total losses: about 600,000 (violent deaths during war 1945 – 150,000; deported to USSR for forced labor - 200,000; in post-war internment camps - 250,000). By country (Poland/Soviet Kaliningrad region 400,000; Czechoslovakia 130,000 and Yugoslavia 80,000. The sources for these figures cited by the authors of the report were the Schieder commission and the 1965 study by the German Red Cross.
Both Ingo Haar and Rüdiger Overmans have cited statistics from this report. The findings of this study were kept secret during the cold war in order not to disturb West German-Polish rapprochement, and were only made public in 1989. The German Archives figure of 200,000 deaths of Germans during forced labor in the Soviet Union was based on West German estimates made in the 1960s. More recently since the fall of communism, the Soviet archives have been accessible to researchers. The Russian scholar Pavel Polian in 2001 published an account of the deportations during the Soviet era, Against Their Will. Polian detailed the Soviet employment of German civilian labor in the Stalin era. The Soviet archives listed a total of 66,456 deaths of 271,672 German civilians sent to the USSR as forced laborers. In 1995, the organization of Germans expelled from Yugoslavia revised the figures for Yugoslavia, giving a total of 57,730 verified deaths and 889 reported missing. In 1995, a joint German and Czech commission of historians revised the number of civilian deaths in Czechoslovakia, from previous demographic estimates of 220,000 to 270,000 down to between 15,000 and 30,000 confirmed deaths.
Read more about this topic: Expulsion Of Germans, Demography, Casualties
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