Utilisateur:Felipeh/Expulsion of Germans after World War II

Un article de Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre.

The expulsion of Germans after World War II refers to the escape and mass deportation of people considered Germans (both Reichsdeutsche and Volksdeutsche) from Soviet-occupied areas of Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe during the first three years after World War II 1945-48. The term "expulsion" is used in a wider sense for various kinds of migration that happen under the threat of force exercised by local governments or militias, with the understanding that the migrants will not be allowed to come back. Though no international judicial body has considered the issue, any deportation of populations could be considered a crime against humanity under international law as the International Criminal Court applies it today. In modern terms the deportations could be also characterised as ethnic cleansing.

The deportations, which in most areas coincided with Soviet occupation, were purportedly intended to create ethnically homogeneous nation states. The mass expulsion of ethnic minorities was legitimized by the 1945 Potsdam Conference, which called for resettlement to be conducted in an "orderly and humane manner." In the postwar atmosphere characterized by chaos, famine, disease, cold winter, crime, violent militias, and senseless killings, German civilian casualties numbered in the millions during the whole process of evacuation and expulsion. Estimates vary by source, but it is generally accepted that between one to two million German civilians lost their lives. According to Allied sources revealed after 1990, the deportation and migration of ethnic Germans affected up to 16.5 million people and was the largest of several similar post-World War II migrations orchestrated by the victorious Western Allies and the Stalinist Soviet Union. The period was also marked by the contemporaneous forced resettlement and expulsion of millions of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews throughout Eastern Europe and Russia.

The majority of expulsions occurred in areas belonging to Germany before the war, and to Poland and Russia thereafter. Others occurred on the soil of today's Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia (predominately in the Vojvodina region), Lithuania, and other regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Those who either migrated or were expelled included both true German citizens, some of whom had gained their German citizenship during Nazi occupation, the people simply considered ethnic Germans and those willing to escape from the "Communist paradise". Some were persecuted because of their activities during the war; the others were persecuted solely because of their German ethnicity.

More than half a century later, relations between unified Germany and its East European neighbors remain somewhat difficult due to a heated and emotional controversy concerning the morality of the expulsions and the rights of expellees (the "Heimatvertriebene"). Much of the controversy is spurred by contentious demands of some groups of the expellees or their descendants for revocation of expulsion decrees, official apologies, prosecution of perpetrators, compensation for lost properties. Underlying this controversy are disagreements about who was responsible for the expulsions, what the motivations were and whether the expulsions were morally justified.

Sommaire

[modifier] Background

Part of the motivation behind the expulsions are based on events in the history of Germany and Europe, especially Eastern Europe. Migrations that took place over more than a millennium led to pockets of Germans living throughout Eastern Europe as far east as Russia. The existence of these pockets were used by German nationalists, most notably the Nazis, to justify wars of aggression which led up to World War II. The expulsions at the end of World War II were part of negotiated agreements between the victorious Allies to redraw national borders and arrange for "orderly population transfers" to remove the ethnic minorities that were viewed as troublesome.

[modifier] Controversy over responsibility for the expulsions

There is a continuing controversy regarding assigning responsibility for the expulsions. One perspective argues that there were only two forces orchestrating the new order after the Second World War: the United States and the Soviet Union. Thus, this perspective argues that the responsibility for all the expulsions (Germans, Poles, Ukrainians etc) rests on those two allies and that the countries that the policies were implemented in had no say in this. Modèle:Fact Other perspectives suggest that, while these two countries may have planned, sanctioned and even facilitated the expulsions, some responsibility must be charged to the national and local authorities in the countries where the expulsions took place. Modèle:Fact

[modifier] Controversy over reasons and justifications for the expulsions

Given the complex history of the region and the divergent interests of the victorious Allied powers, it is difficult to ascribe a definitive set of motivations behind the expulsions. Various groups, including the public in affected countries and historians, perceive the reasons for the Potsdam decision and subsequent transfers differently. The key issues that motivated the expulsions include:

  1. A desire to consolidate the new borders by creating ethnically homogeneous nation states
  2. Distrust of and enmity towards German communities
  3. Preventing ethnic violence between majority populations and German minorities
  4. A desire to punish ethnic German minorities for activities in support of the Nazi invasion
  5. A desire to expel ethnic Germans in the hopes of invalidating German territorial claims
  6. Compensating Poland for territories occupied by the Soviet Union
  7. Making room for Polish returnees
  8. Making future Polish state dependent on Soviet Union
  9. Material gains from the German property left behind by the expellees

[modifier] A desire to create ethnically homogeneous nation states

This was given as the key reason for the official decisions of the Potsdam conference and previous allied conferences involving the Polish and Czech exile governments, as cited in this article.

There is a longer history of the Polish and Czech nation state trying to assert itself against real or perceived German eastward expansionism (see also Drang nach Osten article), as well as the late compensatory nationalism of newly independent Eastern-European nation states. Poland waged a war of conquest against the Soviet Union and took oppressive measures against German minorities in the early 1920s, see http://www.jf-archiv.de/archiv06/200603011366.htm. The Oder-Neiße Line had historically been a border of the Polish dynasty of Piasten, had been object of nationalist dreams and was actively pursued by the Polish exile government in LondonModèle:Dubious, which, under pressure from the Soviet Union and its western allies, was looking for possible recompensation for the Soviet-occupied eastern regions which Stalin was not willing to give back http://www.wsgn.euv-frankfurt-o.de/vc/pageO9.html

The German-speaking territories that had been handed over to Poland and Czechoslovakia by the Versailles treaty caused particular trouble to these nation states. Especially the Czech exile government in London insisted on a bitter lesson it had learned in 1938: no stability without ethnic homogeneity. The utter military and moral defeat of Germany provided a chance for achieving ethnic homogeneity by means normally not available. In the case of Czechoslovakia, not only the Sudete Germans but also the Hungarians of Southern Slovakia became victims of the postwar ethnic cleansing campaign.

[modifier] Distrust of and enmity towards German communities in Poland

There was an expressed fear of disloyalty of German minority based in part on the pro-Nazi activities of members of the German minority during the war and even after the end of the war. As a result of these activities, there was not a political party that would agree with German minority staying in Poland. To Poles, deportation of Germans was seen as an effort to avoid such events in the future and as a result Polish authorities proposed population transfer of Germans already in the late 1941 [1]. Among the reasons that Polish representatives advocated such measures was the fact that there was no Polish family that did not suffer material or family loss as a result of German aggression. Thus transferring the German-speaking population to the west was advocated as a necessary means of achieving inter-ethnic peace. Some of the terror activities of para-military groups in Summer 1945 were presented as arguments for a needed "orderly transfer" of the much-hated Germans.

[modifier] Preventing ethnic violence

The Allied participants at the Potsdam Conference asserted the expulsions were the only way to prevent ethnic violence. As Winston Churchill expounded in the House of Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble... A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions…" From this point of view, it may be possible to conclude that the policy achieved its goals: the 1945 borders are stable and ethnic conflicts are relatively marginal, although this stability can also be explained by the rigidity of Soviet control of Eastern Europe during the Cold War era.

[modifier] Retribution

One justification offered was that the actual purpose of the policy was to punish the Germans for Germany's actions during World War II, including its expulsion of Poles and Czechs from territories annexed to Nazi Germany; and at the same time to create ethnically homogeneous nation states that would not give rise to the kind of ethnic tensions that had preceded the war. Modèle:Fact

From this perspective, the expulsions were an "act of historical justice", because, for example, some Sudeten Germans strongly contributed to the destruction of pre-war Czechoslovakia. The Czech public opinion saw this act as betrayal. The Nazi occupation forces had planned to kill, deport, or enslave the Russian and other Slavic populations, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate the land with Germanic peoples. The entire urban population was to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and allowing their replacement by a German upper class.Modèle:Fact

Also, there was little empathy for German victims after the World War II experience, especially since the German government had itself ethnically cleansed a large number of areas (e.g. Reichsgau Wartheland) during the war.

[modifier] Invalidating German territorial claims

According to one argument, the purpose of expelling Germans from areas now belonging to other countries was to invalidate German territorial claims to the land. Modèle:Fact The purported objective was to prevent a repetition of what happened in the Sudetenland where the Nazis based territorial claims based upon the large number of ethnic Germans living there. Modèle:Fact

[modifier] Compensation for territories lost to the Soviet Union

Poland lost 43 percent of its pre-war territory due to the fact that the Soviet Union insisted on keeping what it had annexed as a result of the partition of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. While some cities, like Gdańsk (Danzig), were transferred to Poland as part of the "clean sweep" (see below) that eliminated minorities and strategically risky borders, other cities, like Wrocław (Breslau) or Szczecin (Stettin), would hardly have been transferred to Poland had it not lost Vilnius (Wilno) and Lviv (Lwów).

One can thus say that one of the reasons, seen from the Polish, Communist and Western-Allied view point, for the expulsion of the Germans was the territorial compensation of Poland for what was taken by the Soviet Union. Of course, this was ultimately a decision not only of Stalin, but with the tacit consent of Great Britain and the United States.

[modifier] Making room for Polish returnees

Even before former German territories were captured by the Red Army, around 2 million Poles from eastern Poland (behind the Curzon line) were expelled by the Soviets to western Poland or deported to gulag camps in Siberia. Additionally, an estimated 800,000 people from Warsaw were deported by the Germans to special work camps. After the end of the war, these people returned and needed housing in a country devastated by war. According to this line of reasoning, Germans were expelled to make housing available for the returnees.

[modifier] Making future Polish state dependent on Soviet Union

Obviously never stated as the official reason, some believe that one of the Soviet motivations for the expulsions was to make the Polish state more dependent on the Soviet Union protection against potential future German demands. Modèle:Citation needed

[modifier] Material gains from the German property left behind by the expellees

Polish communist administration often purposefully did not inform the Germans intended for deportation about their scheduled transport time until 24 hours before the departure. It has been alleged that the reason for this was to make it more difficult for the Germans to organize the transport of their property. [2]

[modifier] Chronicle of the expulsion

If the participants of the Potsdam conference envisioned "orderly population transfers", the reality on the ground turned out to be anything but that. Any transfer of millions of people is likely to be difficult even in the best of circumstances. Attempting a forced transfer amidst the chaos, destruction and privation of postwar Europe could only result in a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Potsdam Agreement called for equal distribution of the transferred Germans between American, britannique, French and Soviet occupation zones in Germany. In actuality, nearly twice as many expelled Germans found refuge in the occupation zones that later formed "West Germany" than in the so-called "East Germany" (Soviet Zone), and large numbers of these Eastern German refugees went eventually to other countries of the world, including the United States, Canada and Australie.

As part of the nationalisation that all citizens in communist countries faced, property in the affected territory that belonged to Germany and Germans was confiscated and transferred to the Soviet Union or redistributed among the local population.

It is worth noting that the expulsion was not always indiscriminate. In Czechoslovakia, large numbers of skilled Sudeten German workmen were forced to remain to labour for the country [1]. Likewise in the Opole (Oppeln) region in Upper Silesia, natives which were considered "autochthonous" (members of the German minority in Poland) were allowed to stay. Their status as a national minority was accepted in 1955, alongside with the state's help in regard to economic assistance, and education [3].

[modifier] Czech Republic and Slovakia

See also: History of Czechoslovakia, Beneš decrees, Sudetenland, Ústí massacre.

At the end of World War II, Czechoslovakian president Edvard Beneš advocated a policy of "no mercy" toward the Germans and indicated the "German problem" would have to be solved by transfers/expulsion. Modèle:Citation needed His rhetoric would certainly have inflamed the sentiment of the Czechoslovakian populace against the ethnic Germans.

Already before the German annexation of the Sudetenland, roughly one-third of the population in Czechoslovakia had been ethnic Germans[4]. After the war, the Germans living in the border regions of Czechoslovakia were expelled from the country in late 1945. Many thousands died violent deaths during the expulsion and many more died from hunger and untreated illnesses contracted during or after the mass exodus. In 1946, an estimated 1.3 million ethnic Germans were deported to the American zone of what would become West Germany. An estimated 800,000 were deported to the Soviet zone (in what would become East Germany). [2]

Some of the acts of violence perpetrated against ethnic Germans inside Czechoslovakia, which at first sight appeared to be cases of personal enmity of locals were, in fact, planned operations. Modèle:Citation needed There were cases of massacres committed by paramilitary groups (technically illegal but with strong ties to the ruling Communist party), where the operations were done with the prior agreement of the Red Army, and probably planned under supervision of the Communist party and/or even operatives of the Czech government. It has been suggested that the motivation for these staged acts of purportedly spontaneous violence against ethnic Germans was to provide arguments to the participants of the Potsdam conference that would support the need for expulsions. The putative line of reasoning was as follows: you can see the ethnic violence - population transfers are the humane way to put an end to it. However, in other instances, the authorities stopped on-going "genuine local" mob violence. Modèle:Citation needed

In the summer of 1945 there were a number of incidents and localised massacres of the German population. The following examples are described in a study done by the European University Institute in Florence.[5]

  • In the Prerov incident, 71 men, 120 women and 74 children, who were Slovak Germans just passing through Prerov railway station, were taken out of the train, taken outside of the city to a hill named "Svedske sance", there they were forced to dig their own graves and all were shot.
  • 30,000 Germans were forced to leave their homes in Brno for labour camps near Austria. They were beaten and it is estimated that several hundred died in the death march.
  • Estimates of killed in the Ústí massacre range from 30 - 50 to 600 - 700 civilians. Some women and children were thrown off the bridge into the Elbe River and shot.

Another source [6] also tells of a massacre in Postoloprty and a neighbouring area, where 763 people were shot, and estimates the victims from Brno to 800.

Approximately 10,000 died in "internment camps" in the years 1945-1948 [7]

[modifier] Hungary

In Hungary the persecution of the German minority began on 22 December 1944 when the Soviet Commander-in-Chief ordered the deportations. Five percent of the German population (appr. 20,000 people) had been evacuated by the Volksbund before that. They went to Austria, but many of them returned to their homes next spring. In January 1945 the Soviet Army collected 32 000 ethnic Germans and deported them to the Soviet Union to do slave labour. Many of them died there as a result of the hardships and cruelties. On 29 December 1945, the new Hungarian Government ordered the deportation of every person who had declared him/herself German in the 1941 census, or was a member of the Volksbund, the SS or any other armed German organisation. In accordance with this decree, mass deportations began. The first wagon departed from Budaörs (Wudersch) on 19 January 1946 with 5788 people. Some 185,000 to 200,000 German-speaking Hungarian citizens were deprived of their rights and all possessions, and deported to West Germany. Until July 1948, further 50,000 people were deported to the Eastern zone of Germany. Most of the deported Germans found a new home in the Western provinces of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse. In 1947 and 1948, a forced population exchange took place between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Some 74,000 ethnic Hungarians were deported from Slovakia in exchange for about the same number of Slovaks from Hungary. They and the Székelys of Bukovina were settled in the former German villages of southeastern Transdanubia. In some parts of Tolna, Baranya and Somogy counties, the original population was totally replaced by the new settlers. In 1949, only 22,455 people dared to declare themselves German, although the real numbers were certainly higher. Probably half of the German community was able to survive the dark years between 1944 and 1950 in Hungary.

[modifier] Poland

Modèle:Sectstub

[modifier] Yugoslavia

Modèle:Sectstub

[modifier] Russia

Having been the capital of Kingdom of Prussia, Königsberg (now renamed Kaliningrad) was an important city in the history of Germany. Under the Nazis it belonged to the German province (Gau) of East Prussia, which itself had been an exclave of Weimar Germany between 1918 and 1939.

Many of the Germans from East Prussia were evacuated by Nazi authorities of fled in panic before the Soviet Army entered. Those who remained suffered the terror of the Soviet occupation.Modèle:Fact After the war, all the surviving Germans were expelled and the region was settled by ethnic Russians and the families of military staff. The expelled Germans mostly headed to the territory of the future Western Germany.

Today, the area, named Kaliningrad Oblast, is an exclave of Russia, separated from the rest of the country by Lithuania and Belarus.

Modèle:Seealso

[modifier] Lithuania

A small portion of what is today western Lithuania along the seacoast was re-annexed by Nazi Germany in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the war. The area, including an important Prussian sea port Memel (Klaipėda) had been part of the German province of East Prussia from 1871 until the Treaty of Versailles, then again from 1939 to 1945.

After WW II, the area was part of the Soviet Union, (which included occupied Lithuania). Most of its German inhabitants fled to Germany, joining the exodus of the others from Königsberg and other Eastern Prussian cities. German civilian remnants were put on deportation trains in 1946. Russians and ethnic Lithuanians from overcrowded villages replaced the former German population of Memel and the surrounding formerly mixed German-Lithuanian areas.

[modifier] The results

During the period of 1944/1945 - 1950, more than 14 million Germans were forced to flee or were expelled as a result of actions of the Red Army, civilian militia and/or organised efforts of governments of the reconstituted states of Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were detained in internment camps or sentenced to forced labor, some of them for years. The number of expellees and refugees, whose fate could not be ascertained, was estimated to be around 2.1 million, according to two major studies conducted in 1958 and 1965, which were commissioned by the German Bundestag. Millions of German women were raped (the process of escape and expulsion includes the actions taken by the Red Army against German civilians). Private property of the expelled Germans was confiscated. More than 4 million Germans were resettled in Germany from the end of the 1950s, joining the 14 million expellees and refugees.

A German source from the mid-1980's [8] gives the following estimates of the population transfers.

German Expellees
Expelled from Number expelled
Eastern Germany 7,122,000
Danzig 279,000
Poland 661,000
Czechoslovakia 2,911,000
Baltic States 165,000
USSR 90,000
Hungary 199,000
Romania 228,000
Yugoslavia 271,000

The integration of expellees and refugees into German society required great efforts from the 1940s to the 1960s. In some areas, for instance in Mecklenburg, the number of inhabitants doubled as a result of the influx. Other areas, like Bavaria, which had been predominantly Roman Catholic before the war now had to deal with an influx of non-Catholic and non-Bavarian Germans from the East.

The areas, from which the Germans escaped, or which were ethnically cleansed, were subsequently re-populated by nationals of the states to which they now belonged, many of whom were expellees themselves from lands further east.

[modifier] Assessing blame for the expulsions

There is considerable, contentious debate over how much blame for the deaths and suffering of the expelled Germans should be placed on the shoulders of the nations who expelled the Germans.

Whether the actual death toll be 1 million or 2 million, it is clear that the blame must be shared among the Allied Powers who made the decision to authorize the population transfers, the Soviet Union which had effective control over the countries involved, the national governments that put the expulsions into motion, and also the paramilitary organizations and local civilians who took advantage of the opportunity to rob, rape, torture and murder the expellees as they transited out of their homelands.

Much blame is placed on the Soviet regime at the time (in particular Josef Stalin) for its program of ethnic cleansing of the German people from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many of the deaths were caused by death marches ordered by Soviet officials, banditry, famine, widespread disease and overall poor living conditions that prevailed in that part of postwar Europe.

[modifier] Legacy of the expulsion

During the Cold War era, there was little public knowledge of the expulsions 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 1990s. It can be surmised that the fall of the Soviet Union, the spirit of glasnost and the unification of Germany opened the door to a renewed examination of these events.

[modifier] Cold War assessments of the expulsions

In 1946, Winston Churchill delivered a memorable speech in Fulton, Missouri in the presence of US President Truman. Churchill made the USA aware of the Iron Curtain coming down "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic". In this speech, Churchill also emphasised the wrongful Soviet-directed Polish incursions into Germany (that is, the land east of the Oder-Neisse line) and the plight of millions of Germans refugees/expellees. However, taking into account his personal responsibility for and - though reluctant - acceptance of the decisions made in Potsdam, the sentence would seem to have been motivated by the contemporary political agenda. Modèle:Fact

In a speech before the U.S. House of Representatives on May 16, 1957, the Hon. B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee called the deportation and violent expulsion of German civilians "genocide". He charged that over 16 million Germans had been expelled from their homes east of the Oder-Neisse Line,resulting in over 3 million deaths. [3]

Both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelev, during their Soviet military service, had objected to the brutal treatment of German civilians of East Prussia. Lev Kopelev wrote about the cruel events in post-1945 East Prussia in the autobiographical trilogy To Be Preserved Forever (Хранить вечно, Khranit' Venchno).

[modifier] Expelled Germans in postwar Germany

After World War II many expellees (German: Heimatvertriebene) found refuge in both West Germany and East Germany. Refugees who had fled voluntarily but were later refused to return are often not distinguished from those who were forcibly deported, just as people born to German parents that moved into areas under German occupation either on their own or as Nazi colonists.

In a document signed 50 years ago the Heimatvertriebene organisations have also recognized the plight of the different groups of people living in today's Poland who were by force resettled there. The Heimatvertriebene are just one of the groups of millions of other people, from many different countries, who all found refuge in today's Germany.

Some of the expellees were active in politics and belonged to the political right-wing. Many others do not belong to any organizations, but they continue to maintain what they call a lawful right to their homeland. The vast majority pledged to work peacefully towards that goal while rebuilding post-war Germany and Europe.

The expellees are still highly active in German politics, and are one of the major political factions of the nation, with still around 2 million members. The president of their organization is as of 2004 still a member of the national parliament.

Although expellees (in German Heimatvertriebene) and their descendants were active in West German politics, the prevailing political climate within West Germany was that of atonement for Nazi actions. However the CDU governments have shown considerable support for the expellees and German civilian victims.

[modifier] Re-examination of the expulsions in the 1990s

In the early 1990s, the Cold War ended and the occupying powers withdrew from Germany. The issue of the treatment of Germans after World War II began to be reexamined, having previously been overshadowed by Nazi Germany's war crimes. The primary motivation for this change was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed for issues previously marginalised, such as the crimes committed by the Soviet Army during the World War II, to be raised.

In November and December 1993, an exhibit on the Ethnic Cleansing 1944-1948 was held at Stuart Center of De Paul University, in Chicago, where it was called an unknown holocaust, which had been forgotten about.

Reports have surfaced of both Czech nationalist as well as Soviet massacres of German civilians (see the book A Terrible Revenge). Also, some of the former German concentration camps were used as temporary camps for German civilians.

[modifier] Polish-German relations

Although relations between Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany have generally been cordial since 1991, there remain disputes about the War, the post-War expulsion, the treatment of the current German minority in Poland and the treatment of German heritage in modern day Western Poland.

Since 1990, historical events have been examined by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. Its role is to investigate the crimes of the past without regard to the nationality of victims and perpetrators. In Poland, crimes motivated by the nationality of victims are not covered by a statute of limitations, therefore the criminals can be charged in perpetuity. In a few cases, the crimes against Germans were examined. One suspected perpetrator of retaliatory crimes against expelled innocent German civilians, Salomon Morel, fled the country to Israel, which has denied Polish requests for his extradition.

[modifier] Finalization of the Polish-German border

The Oder-Neisse line as the Polish-German border was quickly accepted by the East German government but rejected as unacceptable by the all Western political parties (with the exception of the Communists). Since the 1960s this opposition mellowed, especially within the Social Democrats and the Liberals. The government declared the border an issue to be solved in a future peace treaty. The Oder-Neisse line was formally accepted by the Two plus Four treaty, effecting Germany's reunification in 1990, and a Polish-German border in 1991. The agreement also gave to minority groups in both countries several rights, such as the right to use national surnames, speak their native languages, and attend schools and churches of their choice.

[modifier] Polish criticism of German "revisionism"

Some Poles criticise the recently revived German interest in Germans victims and suffering as trying to deflect from German responsibilty for crimes.Modèle:Fact Such positions are viewed negatively in Poland, as it is alleged that they ignore the widespread collaboration and support for the Nazi occupation by the German minority in Second Polish Republic and the classification of Poles were classified as subhumans by German authorities.

[modifier] German criticism of Polish "collectivist view"

Some German expellees criticise what they see as the official Polish perspective on the War and the post-War events being mostly based on a collectivist view (of mixed communist and nationalist ideas) that emphasizes the ethnic background of the individuals and ignores the individual suffering on both sides.Modèle:Fact

[modifier] Restrictions on the sale of property to foreigners

In November 2005 Der Spiegel published a poll from Allensbach Institut which estimated that 61% of Poles believed Germans would try to get back territories that were formerly under German control or demand compensation[4],[5].

There are also some worries among Poles that rich descendants of the expelled Germans would buy the land the Polish state confiscated in 1945. It is believed that this may result in large price increases, since the current Polish land price is low compared to Western Europe. This led to Polish restrictions on the sale of property to foreigners, including Germans: special permission is needed. This policy is comparable to similar restrictions on the Baltic Åland Islands. These restrictions will be lifted 12 years after the 2004 accession of Poland to the European Union, i.e on May 1 2016. The restrictions are weak, they are not valid for companies and certain types of properties.

The attempts by German organisations to build a Centre Against Expulsions dedicated to documentation of, among other subject matter, the Expulsion of Germans after World War II has provoked strong reactions in Poland. A proposal by Polish politicians that Germany should instead build a Center for the Memory of the Suffering of the Polish Nation (called also Center for the Memory of Suffering of the Polish Nation) was rejected by German politicians [6], who argue that this suffering has already been documented in memorial centers and expositions while that of the expelled Germans has not.

[modifier] Indemnity Claims

The officially proposed policy of the expellees is not to repeat the post-war expulsions with new expulsions, annexations and population transfers. Most expellees accept the territorial changes of 1945 as far as territorial claims are concerned and consider the Poles now living in former East Germany as friends and neighbours in the European Union. However, a few of them demand compensation from the Poles and support the Prussian Claims Inc.

At the end of August 2004, a heated debate took place in the Polish Sejm over a proposed bill calling upon the Polish government to enforce Germany's payment of reparations for damage inflicted on Poland during World War II. The issue of German reparations was raised in response to signals coming from Germany, or rather from certain German circles which in civil legal proceedings wanted to lay indemnity claims for property left behind in the postwar territory of Poland. The Polish nation had reacted strongly to statements made by Erika Steinbach, chair of the Union of the Expelled (BdV), and claims made by Prussian Claims Inc. Polish politicians asserted that only a response in the form of Poland's reparations claim could suppress endeavors of German citizens and their political advocates who are attempting to claim indemnity from Polish citizens in civil proceedings. The majority of Poles have not received any compensation from the Soviet Union or Germany for losses suffered during World War II.

[modifier] Czech-German relations

On 28 December 1989, Václav Havel, at that time a candidate for president of Czechoslovakia (he was elected one day later), suggested that Czechoslovakia should apologise for the expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II. Most of the other prominent politicians disagreed with this proposal. There was also no reply from leaders of Sudeten German organizations. Later, the German President Richard von Weizsäcker answered this by apologizing to Czechoslovakia during his visit to Prague on March 1990 after Václav Havel repeated his apology saying that the expulsion was "the mistakes and sins of our fathers". The Beneš decrees, however, remain in force in Czechoslovakia.

In Czech-German relations, the topic has been effectively closed by the Czech-German declaration of 1997. One principle of the declaration was that parties will not burden their relations with political and legal issues which stem from the past.

However, some expelled Sudeten Germans or their descendants are demanding return of their former property, which was confiscated after the war. Several such cases have been taken to Czech courts. As confiscated estates usually have new inhabitants, some of whom have lived there for more than 50 years, attempts to return to a pre-war state may cause fear. The issue is revived periodically in Czech politics. As in Poland, there are restrictions in the Czech Republic on land purchases by foreigners. According to a survey by the Allensbach Institut in November 2005, 38% of Czechs believe Germans want to regain territory they lost or will demand compensation.

[modifier] Recognition of Sudeten German anti-Nazis

In 2005 Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek announced an initiative to publicise and formerly recognise the deeds of Sudeten German Anti-Nazis. Although the move was received positively by most Sudeten Germans and the German minority, there has been criticism that the initiative is limited to anti-Nazis who actively fought for the Czechoslovak state, but not to anti-Nazis in general or non-Nazis. Some also expected some financial compensation for their mistreatment after the War. [7]

[modifier] Status of the German minority in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

There are about 40,000 Germans remaining in the Czech Republic. Their number has been consistently decreasing since World War II. According to the 2001 census there remain 13 municipalities and settlements in the Czech Republic with more than 10% Germans.

The situation in Slovakia was different from that in the Czech lands, in that the number of Germans was considerably lower and that the Germans from Slovakia were almost completely evacuated to German states as the Soviet army was moving west through Slovakia, and only the fraction of them that returned to Slovakia after the end of the war was deported together with the Germans from the Czech lands.

[modifier] German minority in Hungary

Today the German minority in Hungary have minority rights, organisations, schools and local councils but spontaneous assimilation is well under way. Many of the deportees have visited their old homes since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990.

[modifier] Russia

Many descendants of Germans who were expelled from the former city of Königsberg can be found today in Germany. Although the deportation of Germans from this northern part of former East Prussia often was conducted in a violent and aggressive way by Soviet officials who sought to exact revenge for the Nazi terror in Soviet areas during the war, the present Russian inhabitants of the Kaliningrad sector (northern East Prussia) have much less animus against Germans. German names have even been revived in commercial Russian trade. Thus, it is possible that, in the future, the name of Kaliningrad might be reverted to the original name, Königsberg. Because the exclave was a military zone during Soviet times and nobody was allowed to enter without special permission, many old German Prussian villages are still intact, though they have become dilapidated over the course of time.

[modifier] German Expellee Organizations

[modifier] Federation of Expellees

Image:Merkel-steinbach.jpg
Chancellor Angela Merkel is greeted by Erika Steinbach at the annual reception of the Federation of Expellees in Berlin in February 2006

The Federation of Expellees (Modèle:Lang-de) is a non-profit organization formed to represent the interests of Germans displaced from their homes in Historical Eastern Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe by the expulsion of Germans after World War II. ("Heimatvertriebene": "Homeland expellees").

It represents the diaspora of German citizens (today numbering approximately 15 million) who after World War II were transferred from Poland and the Soviet Union and former German territories, together with ethnic Germans who were transferred from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and other countries. The current president is CDU politician Erika Steinbach.

[modifier] Centre Against Expulsions

The foundation Centre Against Expulsions has its registered office in Wiesbaden and is headed by CDU politician Erika Steinbach. One of Steinbach's main aims is to build the Centre Against Expulsions (Modèle:Lang-de) in Berlin, a memorial dedicated to the victims of forced migrations or ethnic cleansing in Europe, particularly those of the Germans displaced after World War II.

It was initiated by the Federation of Expellees, with the support of the CDU/CSU faction in the German parliament and of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who intends to support the building of the centre.Modèle:Fact

The initiative has caused much controversy, both in Germany and abroad. Some critics of the Federation of Expellees criticize the movement to build a centre and monument against forced migration for focusing primarily on the expulsion of Germans rather than giving more weight to expulsions throughout all Europe. Modèle:Fact

Critics argue that this focus on German expulsions "risks de-contexualizing the past, thus breaking the causal relationship between the Nazi policies of radical nationalism and racial extermination on one hand and the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans on the other hand" [8]. This line of criticism argues that the expulsion of ethnic Germans was indirectly a result of Nazi policies during World War II. It charges that the Centre Against Expulsions portrays expelled Germans as victims of the war and thereby downplays the German responsibility for the Holocaust, atrocities and the aggression leading to the outbreak of the war.

[modifier] See also

  • Berihah
  • Human migration#World War II
  • Federation of Expellees
  • Pursuit of Nazi collaborators
  • Evacuation of East Prussia
  • War children
  • Minorities in Poland after the War
  • Victor Gollancz
  • Red Army atrocities

[modifier] Notes

  1. ↑ "Polacy - wysiedleni, wypędzeni i wyrugowani przez III Rzeszę", Maria Wardzyńska, Warsaw 2004" Created on order of Reichsfuhrer SS H.Himler from German minority, terrorist organisation called Selbstschutz co-worked in mass executions during „Intelligenzaktion”, made alongside operational groups of security policy, by pointing out local Poles and interning them
  2. ↑ Jankowiak, p. 135
  3. ↑ Rocznik Polsko-Niemiecki Tom I " Mniejszość niemiecka w Polsce w polityce wewnętrznej w Polsce i w RFN oraz w stosunkach między obydwu państwami" Piotr Madajczyk Warszawa 1992
  4. ↑ The Czech Republic: From Liberal Policy to EU Membership, Dušan Drbohlav, Charles University
  5. ↑ The Expulsion of 'German' Communities from Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, European University Institute, Florense. HEC No. 2004/1. pg. 18.
  6. ↑ Z. Beneš, et. al, p. 221
  7. ↑ Z. Beneš, et. al, p. 223
  8. ↑ (de) Gerhard Reichling (1986). Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen. Bonn: Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen (Cultural Society of the German Expellees), 72. ISBN 3-88557-046-7. 

[modifier] References

[modifier] External links

[modifier] Further reading

The following publications might shed a different light on what is presented in the article above:

  • "Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern & Central Europe" compiled by an editorial board headed by Professor Theodor Schieder, of the University of Cologne. Published by the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, & War Victims, Bonn (Dates may indicate the year of the English translations rather than the original publication):
    • vol.1: "The Expulsion of the German Population from the Territories East of the Oder-Neisse Line" (1959).
    • vol.2/3:"The Expulsion of the German Population from Hungary and Rumania" (1961).
    • vol. 4: "The Expulsion of the German Population from Czechoslovakia" (1960)
  • "Speaking Frankly" by James F.Byrnes, New York & London, 1947.
  • "Nemesis at Potsdam - The Anglo-Americans & the Expulsion of the Germans", by Dr. Alfred M. de Zayas, Routledge, London, 1st published 1977, revised edition 1979. 3 editions University of Nebraska Press, 2 editions Picton Press, Rockport Maine, newest edition 2003.
  • Germany and Eastern Europe since 1945" - Keesing's Research Report, New York, 1973.
  • Four-Power Control in Germany and Austria 1945-1946" by Michael Balfour and John Mair for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Oxford University Press, 1956.
  • "In Darkest Germany" by Victor Gollancz, London, 1947.
  • "Thine Enemy" by Sir Philip Gibbs, London, 1946.
  • "The Home Front:Germany" by Charles Whiting, Time-Life Books, Virginia, 1982.ISBN 0-8094-3419-9.
  • "The Aftermath:Europe" by Douglas Botting, Time-Life Books, Virginia, 1983.ISBN 0-8094-3411-3
  • "Hour of the Women" by Count Christian von Krockow, Stuttgart,1988, New York, 1991, London, 1992. ISBN 0-571-14320-2,
  • "Crimes and Mercies - The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation 1944 - 1950" by James Bacque, London, 1997. ISBN 0-316-64070-0.
  • "Memoirs - 1945:Year of Decisions" by Harry S.Truman, 1st pub.,by Time Inc.,1955, reprint New York 1995. ISBN 0-8317-1578-2.
  • "Memoirs - 1946-52:Years of Trial & Hope" by Harry S.Truman, 1st pub.,by Time Inc.,1955, reprint New York 1996. ISBN 0-8317-7319-7.
  • A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 - Alfred-Maurice de Zayas - 1994 - ISBN 0-312-12159-8. New Revised edition with Palgrave/Macmillan, New York 2006, ISBN 13: 978-1-4039-7308-5, ISBN-10: 1-4039-7308-3
  • "Armia Czerwona na Pomorzu Gdańskim 1945-1947" by Grzegorz Baziur, IPN, Warszawa 2003, ISBN 8389078198

Category:Deportation Category:Forced migration Category:Great migrations Category:History of Germany Category:Aftermath of World War II Category:German diaspora

Autres langues