Expulsion of Germans - Expulsions Following Germany's Defeat

Expulsions Following Germany's Defeat

The Second World War ended in Europe with Germany's defeat in May 1945. By this time, all of Eastern and much of Central Europe was under Soviet occupation. This included most of the historical German settlement areas, as well as the Soviet occupation zone in eastern Germany. The Allies settled on the terms of occupation, the territorial truncation of Germany, and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from post-war Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the Allied Occupation Zones in the Potsdam Agreement, drafted during the Potsdam Conference between 17 July and 2 August 1945. Article XII of the agreement is concerned with the expulsions and reads:

The Three Governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.

The agreement further called for equal distribution of the transferred Germans between American, British, French and Soviet occupation zones comprising post–World War II Germany.

Expulsions that took place before the Allies agreed on the actual terms at Potsdam are referred to as "wild" expulsions (German: Wilde Vertreibungen). They were conducted by military and civilian authorities in Soviet-occupied post-war Poland and Czechoslovakia during the spring and summer of 1945. In Yugoslavia, the fate of the remaining Germans was anything but "humane", ethnic German villages were turned into internment camps where 50,000 perished. The Potsdam Declaration requested that those countries temporarily stop expulsions due to the refugee problems created by the expulsion of Germans before the Potsdam meeting. While expulsions from Czechoslovakia were temporarily slowed down, this was not true for Poland and the former eastern territories of Germany. Sir Geoffrey Harrison, one of the drafters of the cited Potsdam article, stated that the "purpose of this article was not to encourage or legalize the expulsions, but rather to provide a basis for approaching the expelling states and requesting them to co-ordinate transfers with the Occupying Powers in Germany."

After Potsdam, a series of expulsions of ethnic Germans occurred throughout the Soviet-controlled Eastern European countries. Property and materiel in the affected territory that had belonged to Germany or to Germans was confiscated and either transferred to the Soviet Union, nationalised, or redistributed among the citizens. Of the many post-war forced migrations, the largest was the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe, primarily from the territory of 1937 Czechoslovakia (which included the historically German-speaking area in the Sudeten mountains along the German-Czech-Polish border (Sudetenland)), and the territory that became post-war Poland. Poland's post-war borders were shifted west to the Oder-Neisse line, deep into former German territory to within 50 miles of Berlin.

Expulsions and resettlements of other ethnicities took place contemporaneously with the expulsion of the Germans. During and after the war 2,208,000 Poles fled or were expelled from the eastern Polish regions that were annexed by the USSR, 1,652,000 of these refugees were resettled in the former German territories that were awarded to Poland after the war. An additional 249,000 Poles were allowed to leave the USSR from 1955 to 1959, leaving 1,132,000 persons declaring Polish nationality remaining in the USSR in 1959. Poland also expelled to the USSR 518,000 of the 700,000 ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians living in Poland, resettling the remaining 150,000 to the former German territories during Operation Vistula. Most of the Italians were expelled from post war Yugoslavia In Czechoslovakia, not only were Sudeten Germans expelled, but also the Hungarian minority in Slovakia.