Refugees moving westwards in 1945. German Federal Archives/Wikimedia Commons.
12. Between 1945-50 more than 10 million ethnic German civilians were forcibly deported to Germany after the war from liberated countries, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians
It is a common assumption for those who have not experienced war that when the fighting ends, life return to normality. However, simply because armed hostilities have ended does not mean the animosity and hate which provoked and underpinned the war has diminished, or that the damage caused by the war has been repaired; if anything, the losses suffered during the fighting creates even more intense emotions on either side. Due in no small part to the horrors inflicted by Nazi Germany on the peoples of central and eastern Europe during their wartime occupations, these nations subsequently sought to expel all those they considered to be “German” from their territorial borders. Finalized in the Potsdam Agreement in August 1945, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary was approved.
As a result of this agreed punitive action, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Allied powers collaborated to forcibly deport between 12 and 14 million ethnic Germans to the remains of their supposed homeland from neighboring European countries. Many of these individuals were not born in Germany, merely descending from ancestors who did, and did not support the activities of the Third Reich. Additionally, most of those deported were of a vulnerable condition, being those unable to be conscripted into military service for either the Axis or Allies, including women, young children, and the elderly; such peoples had little to no authority or say over the actions inflicted upon their neighbors by occupying German forces, but were punished nonetheless indiscriminately for it.
The consequences of the largest forced migration in history were devastating, with estimates placing the number of civilians who died as a direct result of this policy in excess of 500,000 and possibly as high as 2.5 million. Furthermore, many of those who survived transportation were housed in former concentration and internment camps and committed to compulsory labor on behalf of the Allies for the purposes of reparations – a serious atrocity which itself will be explored in greater depth later.