Ostsiedlung - 20th Century

20th Century

Economic reasons led to a westward migration of Germans from eastern Prussia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Ostflucht).

The 20th century wars and nationalist policies severely altered the ethnic and cultural composition of Central and Eastern Europe. After World War I, Germans in reconstituted Poland were set under pressure to leave the Polish Corridor and other areas. Before World War II, the Nazis initiated the Nazi-Soviet population transfers, wiping out the old settlement areas of the Baltic Germans, the Germans in Bessarabia and others. During World War II, in line with Nazi Germany's expansion, Generalplan Ost was drawn to expel and enslave the Slavs according to the Nazi's Lebensraum concept. While that was prevented by the war's turn, some measures such as the expulsion of 2 million Poles and settlement of Volksdeutsche in the annexed territories were implied.

With the Red Army's advance and Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, the ethnic make-up of Central and Eastern and East Central Europe was radically changed, as nearly all Germans were expelled not only from all Soviet conquered German settlement areas across Central and Eastern Europe, but also from former territories of the Reich east of the Oder-Neisse line, mainly, the provinces of Silesia, East Prussia, East Brandenburg, and Pomerania. The Soviet-established People's Republic of Poland annexed the majority of the lands while the northern half of East Prussia was taken by the Soviets and made a new exclave of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. The former German settlement areas were resettled by ethnic citizens of the respective succeeding state, (Czechs, Slovaks and Roma in the former Sudetenland and Poles, Lemkos, ethnic Ukrainians in Silesia and Pomerania). However, some areas settled and Germanised in the course of the Ostsiedlung still form the northeastern part of modern eastern Germany, like the Bundesländer Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony and east of the limes Saxoniae in the Holstein part of Schleswig-Holstein.