German Exodus From Central and Eastern Europe - Expulsion

Expulsion

Many of the remaining German inhabitants were either expelled or fled from present-day Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, today's Kaliningrad Oblast, and other East European countries. Some reports indicate that up to 16.5 million Germans were forcibly deported. More concrete statistics regarding those who emigrated or were expelled indicate a figure closer to 12 million. Those who fled in fear of the Red Army were subsequently banned from returning. Some ethnic Germans were expelled because of their Nazi activities during the war, yet the single most common reason for their expulsion was their German ethnicity. They were sent to makeshift camps or cities in eastern and western Germany and Austria.

According to some German sources, more than 2.5 million lost their lives during this process. Other German, Czech, and Polish sources give a much lower estimate (Czech historians arguing that most of the estimated losses stemmed from the deaths of soldiers killed at the front). Over the course of the sixty years since the end of the war, estimates of total deaths of German civilians have ranged from 500,000 to as high as 3 million. Although the German government's official estimate of deaths due to the evacuations and expulsions stood at 2.2 million for several decades, recent analyses have led some historians to conclude that the actual number of deaths attributable to the expulsions was actually much lower—in the range of 500,000 to 1.1 million. The higher figures, up to 3.2 million, typically include -all- war-related deaths of ethnic Germans between 1939–45, including those who served in the German armed forces. The debate about the number of deaths and their cause continues to be the subject of heated controversy.

The population transfer itself included about: 688,000 from Poland (1938 borders); 2,275,200 from East Prussia; 5,123,200 from the pre-war areas of Germany proper (mostly Silesia and Pomerania) incorporated into Poland (see Oder-Neisse Line); 3,000,400 from Czechoslovakia; around 169,500 from the Soviet Union; 253,000 from Hungary; 213,000 from Romania; and another 297,500 from Yugoslavia. However, in no East European nation were all ethnic Germans forced to leave. Census figures in 1950 place the total number of ethnic Germans still living in Central and Eastern Europe at approximately 2.6 million, about 12 percent of the pre-war total.

The expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe was tolerated by the Potsdam Agreement, which stated that the process should be undertaken in a "humane" and "orderly" manner, though it failed to specify detailed rules for the population transfers, or supervision of the process to prevent crimes against the transferred populations.

Valdis Lumans indicates that no ethnic German expulsions would have occurred at all, except for the barbaric occupation policies imposed on most of Europe by Nazi Germany, which included the expulsion or slave-labor pressganging of non-Germans from most of these areas. Along similar lines, Prauser and Rees assert that the "charge laid against the German population in the East European states was that of disloyalty and of supporting the destruction of the states of which they were members and of collaboration with the German occupying forces."