Expulsion and Exodus From Central and Eastern Europe At The End of The War
Most Volksdeutsche left or were expelled from eastern European countries from 1945-1948 towards the end and after the war. Both those who became Volksdeutsche by registering and Reichsdeutsche retained German citizenship during the years of Allied military occupation, after the establishment of East Germany and West Germany in 1949, and later in the reunified Germany.
An estimated 12 million Germans fled or were expelled from the Soviet Union and non-Geman-speaking Central Europe, many of them being Volksdeutsche. Most left the Soviet-occupied territories of Central and Eastern Europe; they comprised the largest migration of any European people in modern history. The Allies had agreed to the expulsions during negotiations in the midst of war. The western powers hoped to avoid ethnic Germans being an issue again in Central and Eastern Europe. Thus the expulsion of Volksdeutsche was demanded by article 12 of the Potsdam Agreement.
Local authorities forced most of the remaining ethnic Germans to leave between 1945 and 1950. Remnants of the ethnic German community survive in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. A significant ethnic German community has continued in Siebenbürgen (Transylvania) in Romania but most of it migrated to West Germany throughout the 1980s. There are also remnant German populations near Mukachevo in western Ukraine.
Read more about this topic: Volksdeutsche
Famous quotes containing the words expulsion and, expulsion, exodus, central, eastern, europe, the and/or war:
“An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“...the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 32:6.
“The central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us back out in the world.... But motherhood that can narrow our lives can also broaden them. It can make us focus intensely on the moment and invest heavily in the future.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)
“From this elevation, just on the skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and south, for a hundred miles. There it was, the State of Maine, which we had seen on the map, but not much like that,—immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, the eastern stuff we hear of in Massachusetts. No clearing, no house. It did not look as if a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking-stick there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All the terrors of the French Republic, which held Austria in awe, were unable to command her diplomacy. But Napoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse, with the morals, manners, and name of that interest, saying, that it was indispensable to send to the old aristocracy of Europe men of the same connection, which, in fact, constitutes a sort of free- masonry. M. de Narbonne, in less than a fortnight, penetrated all the secrets of the imperial cabinet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the old, the new is usually bad news.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“The great war that broke so suddenly upon the world two years ago, and which has swept up within its flame so great a part of the civilized world, has affected us very profoundly.... With its causes and its objects we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst we are not interested to search for or explore.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)