Expulsions of Germans after World War II - John Wear

[Lamprecht]

An excellent 2 part series by John Wear on the forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from various areas in Europe after World War II. Wear estimates that 12 to 18 million Germans were forcibly resettled, and perhaps 2 million of them died in the process. For the most part, the Western mass media did not report on this event.

Introduction

One of the great tragedies of the 20th century was the forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from their ancestral homes in Europe after the end of World War II. The Allies carried out the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of people—in human history. A minimum of 12 million and possibly as many as 18.1 million Germans were driven from their homes because of their ethnic background. Probably 2.1 million or more of these German expellees, mostly women and children, died in what was supposed to be an “orderly and humane” expulsion.

One estimate of the number of Germans expelled runs to 16.5 million: 9.3 million within the 1937 Reich borders and 7.2 million outside. The Germans within the 1937 Reich borders include 2,382,000 East Prussians, 1,822,000 East Pomeranians, 614,000 in Brandenburg east of the Oder, and 4,469,000 Silesians. The Germans outside the 1937 Reich borders include 240,000 in Memel and the Baltic States, 373,000 in Danzig, 1,293,000 in Poland, 3,493,000 in Czechoslovakia, 601,000 in Hungary, 509,000 in Yugoslavia, and 785,000 in Romania. The Russians did not expel many of their 1.8 million Volga Germans from the Soviet Union; instead, the Volga Germans were predominantly deported to other (distant) locations within the Soviet Union.

Expulsions of Germans after World War II (Part I)
https://codoh.com/library/document/6785/

Expulsions of Germans after World War II (Part II)
https://codoh.com/library/document/6820/

[Lamprecht]

"This is the story of the ethnic Germans who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some two million died and fifteen million were displaced - driven from their lands by those opposed to anyone and everything German... De Zayas's moving plea is that one's home should be a human right. As frontiers once more shift in Eastern Europe and families flee in Bosnia, he could hardly have chosen a better moment to deliver it." - The Times, (London) 18 November 1993.



A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944 - 1950
Full book: https://archive.org/details/DeZayasAlfr ... bleRevenge or https://web.archive.org/web/20190909012 ... 838224.pdf
TXT: https://archive.is/I2XsC
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Terrible_Revenge

The closing phase and the aftermath of World War II saw millions of refugees and displaced persons wandering across Eastern Europe in one of the most brutal and chaotic migrations in world history. The genocidal barbarism of the Nazi forces has been well documented. What hitherto has been little known is the fate of fifteen million German civilians who found themselves at the mercy of Soviet armies and on the wrong side of new postwar borders. All over Eastern Europe, the inhabitants of communities that had been established for many centuries were either expelled or killed. Over two million Germans did not survive. Many of these people had supported Hitler, and for the Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, and surviving Jews, their fate must have seemed just. However, the great majority--East Prussian farmers, Silesian industrial workers, their wives and children--were guiltless. Their fate, sentenced purely by race, remains an appalling legacy of the period.Alfred de Zayas's book describes this horrible retribution. On the basis of extensive research in German and American archives, he outlines the long history of these German communities, scattered from the Baltic to the Danude, and, most movingly, reproduces the testimonies of surviors from the catastrophic exodus that marked the final end to Nazi fantasies of Lebensraum.

[Lamprecht]

Although the deaths, suffering and dispossession of the ethnic Germans of the Balkans during and after World War II are well documented by both German authorities and independent scholars, they continue to be largely ignored in the major media of the United States and Europe. Why? In the following article, the author estimates that the total number of German losses in Yugoslav captivity after the end of the war is estimated at 120,000 killed, starved, worked to death, or missing.

The Destruction of Ethnic Germans and German Prisoners of War in Yugoslavia, 1945-1953
http://www.ihr.org/other/sunic062002.html or https://web.archive.org/web/20190717045 ... 62002.html