Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Post WWII German Expulsions

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

World War II was unquestionably the greatest bloodletting in world history. Never before had so many people lost their lives in such a short period of time. Of all of the many tragedies during the war, one of the largest actually took place after the war. It was the largest single migrations of people in human history, it resulted in millions of deaths, and almost no one knows about it. Learn more about the Post-WWII German Expulsions on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

World War II was unquestionably the greatest bloodletting in world history. Never before had so many people lost their lives in such a short period of time. Of all the many tragedies which took place during the war, one of the largest actually took place after the war. It was the largest single forced migration of people in humid history. It resulted in millions of deaths and almost no one knows about it. Learn more about the post-World War II German expulsions on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is Potsdam, the NPR. End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe by Michael Nyberg. After Germany's defeat in World War II, Europe lay in tatters.

Millions of refugees were dispersed across the continent. Food and fuel were scarce. Britain was bankrupt while Germany had been reduced to rubble. In July 1945, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin gathered in a quiet suburb of Berlin to negotiate a lasting peace, a peace that would finally put to an end the conflagration that had started in 1914. a peace under which Europe could be rebuilt. But riven by tensions and dramatic debates over how to end the most recent war,

they only dimly understood that their discussion of peace were giving birth to a new global conflict. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking on the link in the show notes. The topic of this episode is one that many people, and dare I say the vast majority of people, have never heard about. It's almost never mentioned in school history courses. There are no movies about it. There are a few books, and it is seldom the topic of conversation. There are two reasons for this. The first is when it happened. All of the events I'll be talking about occurred after VE Day,

which ended one of the most significant, terrible, and tumultuous periods in world history. Almost anything which was going to happen after that would be in the shadow of all the events which preceded it. The second is because of who it happened to. It happened to ethnic Germans. Given the horrors of the war, the millions who died, and the fact that it all happened because it was instigated by Nazi Germany, there was very little sympathy for the victims. To understand what happened, we first have to go back well before the start of World War II or even the 20th century. In the early 18th century, Peter the Great invited many German craftsmen to come to Russia and settle in Russia so he could have use of their skills. Likewise, Catherine the Great, who herself was actually German and not Russian,

invited Germans to come and settle in an area near the Volga River. Many Germans had come to settle either as craftsmen or as farmers in countries east of Germany. When Prussia controlled much of what is today Poland, they encouraged German immigration. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Soviets actually created an autonomous republic within the Soviet Union for the Volga Germans, called the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Germans also settled in parts of what is today Hungary, Romania, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia, and other countries. In each of these countries listed, Germans were an ethnic minority.

They often lived in German communities or in German neighborhoods in larger cities. Most of these people had migrated before there was actually a country called Germany, which was only founded in 1871. At the start of the Second World War, there were millions of ethnic Germans living outside of Germany. Those people were born outside of Germany, most had never been to Germany, and they were citizens of the country where they lived. The Nazis, however, called these German people who lived outside of Germany and did not have German citizenship Volksstoitsch. Those who lived inside Germany and were German citizens were called Reichstoche. A big part of Hitler's plan was unifying all the German peoples in Europe.

That was why he annexed Austria as well as the Sudaten land, which was an ethnically German part of Czechoslovakia. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin ordered all the ethnic Germans to head west to Siberia and Central Asia, and the Volga German ASSR was dissolved. Many were placed in prison camps and forced to work for the Soviet war effort. As the Nazis expanded eastward, they recruited soldiers in these German communities. In countries such as Hungary, Romania, and Serbia, many of the Volksstoitsch join the SS units to fight local partisans. Most of the Volksstoitsch from these countries were conscripted and did not volunteer. This was because there weren't enough volunteers to meet the quota of the SS,

and most of the people locally didn't want to fight against their neighbors. When the war was over, the tables were turned on the ethnic Germans. All of the violence which the Nazis subjugated the rest of Europe to was now being done to the ethnic Germans. In the Czech village of Hone Moshenitsa, 265 Germans were dragged from a train and shot in the neck. This number included 120 women and 74 children. The Czech city of Berno conducted what was called the Berno Death March.

18,000 Germans living in Berno were expelled from the city and forced to march to the Austrian border 55 kilometers away. 4,140 ethnic Germans died on the march. The leaders of the three major allied powers met in Potsdam Germany to outline how a post-war Germany was to be managed. One of the issues they addressed was the question of ethnic Germans living in other countries. The Potsdam Agreement explicitly called for the removal of Germans from non-German countries. The agreement said, quote,

The three governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognized that the transfer to Germany of German populations or elements thereof remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be affected in an orderly and humane manner, unquote. Basically, they wanted to create ethnically homogeneous nation states in central and eastern Europe. The largest minority group, by far, were Germans.

After the passage of the Potsdam Declaration, each of the countries had the green light to begin expelling Germans from their country. What happened over the next four years was the largest forced expulsion of humans in history. In fact, many call it the largest migration of humans in history, even larger than the migration which occurred after the partition of India and Pakistan. Despite the calls on the Potsdam Declaration for expelling the Germans in a humane manner, there was little heed paid to it.

Most of the people affected were women, children, and the elderly, as most of the men had gone off to fight or had been killed in combat. In Poland, hundreds of thousands of people were held in camps to provide reparations in the form of forced labor, and many of those were sent to the Soviet Union. Over a quarter million ethnic Germans were sent to the USSR to work camps, and over 57,000 died there. In Yugoslavia, many Germans were forced into camps where they were starved to death. Others were sent into forced labor. Gang rapes and mass murder were a common occurrence everywhere in 1945. Much of this was pure vengeance for what local populations were put through during the war. They wanted a target to lash out against, and the ethnic Germans were the closest thing available.

However, this was a top-down policy as well. The Potsdam Agreement gave the governments all the cover they needed. Germans were often given just a few minutes notice before they were forcefully removed from their homes. They were sometimes kept in the very same prison camps where the Nazis held Jews and were given similar treatment. Many communities forced the Germans to wear armbands to degrade them in a way similar to how the Nazis had treated them. They were often transported in cattle cars with no food or water, similar to how the Nazis had transported their prisoners. In total, approximately 14 million ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from European countries and sent to Germany or Austria. The vast majority of them settled in West Germany, and almost none of them were allowed to settle in East Germany.

In the 1950s and 60s, the West German government tried to calculate the number of Germans who died during the expulsion. They estimated that between 2.4 and 3 million people were killed or disappeared. They were able to confirm 473,013 civilian deaths, and there were at least another 2 million people who could not be accounted for. Many of the findings of this study were not released until 1989 for fear of spoiling West German-Polish relations. There was some outcry when this was happening, but it mostly fell on deaf ears. George Orwell noted that the expulsions were, quote, largely the defense of the indefensible. Bertrand Russell said, quote, Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war,

and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies during a time of peace? Unquote. Few people, however, were willing to stand up and try to stop what was happening. The legacy of the German expulsions has landed. lingered with us. In 1948, the United Nations passed the Genocide Convention. A passage in the first draft of the document was removed, which banned, quote, the force and systematic exile of individuals representing a culture or a group. The reason it was taken out of the document was because the Allies, which formed the core of the new United Nations, were in the middle of doing exactly

that at the time. While the scale of this event was enormous, it has mostly been forgotten from history. It's totally omitted from most history books. Despite the thousands of documentaries on World War II, there is almost nothing on the forced expulsions. There was an attempt to create a museum about the subject in 2010, but objections raised by Poland ensured that it was never created. There are a few small monuments erected to recognize the victims. There's a small one in the city of Elic and Hungary, and there was another one recently unveiled in Serbia. On the whole, most people don't really want to talk about it. In central and Eastern Europe, many still hold the view that the expulsions were justified.

Many Germans don't want to talk about it because it will make them appear to be Nazi sympathizers. Many people from allied countries don't want to talk about it because it makes the good war, with clear good guys and bad guys, much more morally ambiguous. Nonetheless, this period of history is one which people should at least be aware of. The horrors of the Second World War didn't end when the articles of surrender were signed. They lingered for years later. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com.

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