German Exodus From Central and Eastern Europe - Legacy

Legacy

The psychological and social impact of the events were so immense, that even today the expulsions have entered the German language simply as "the Flight" or "the Expulsion" with no further specification needed, similar to the German reference to World War II as simply "the War" without further qualification. Added the fact that mostly only far "right-wing" organizations publicly rallied to the cause of the expellees following 1950 in Western Germany made the topic a political taboo. Anyone highlighting the grave injustice set upon the victims of the expulsion was labeled a revisionist and ultra-nationalist in the political spectrum. In East Germany no public debate was tolerated and it was officially counterbalanced with communist propaganda purporting the new frontier as a "Peace Border" or Friedensgrenze. The official German Federal government policy on the matter was that the Oder-Neisse border was only a de facto frontier and that a final peace treaty was needed to settle the issue with the inclusion of all the Allied Powers. This kept the legacy of the expulsion alive in the minds of both the expellee population and the Polish government until it was resolved in 1990 with the Reunification Treaty.

During the Cold War era, there was little public knowledge of the expulsions outside of Germany, and thus scant discussion over the morality of the policy. Perhaps the primary reason for this is that Cold War geopolitics discouraged criticism of post-war Allied policies by the West Germans and of post-war Soviet policies by the East Germans. There was some discussion of the expulsions in the first decade and a half after World War II, but serious review and analysis of the events was not undertaken until the 1980s. It can be surmised that the fall of the Soviet Union, the spirit of glasnost and the unification of Germany and now the expansion of the European Union into the areas that experienced the expulsions opened the door to a renewed examination of these events.