During the later stages of World War II and the post-war period, Germans and Volksdeutsche fled and were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries, including Czechoslovakia, and from the former German provinces of Lower and Upper Silesia, East Prussia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg (Neumark) and Pomerania (Hinterpommern), which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union.
A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 is a 1994 non-fiction book written by Cuban-born American lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, former research fellow at MPG in Heidelberg, Germany. The work is based on a collection of testimonials from German civilians and Wehrmacht military personnel; and devoted to the expulsion of Germans after World War II from states previously occupied by Nazi Germany. It includes as well selected interviews with British and American politicians who participated at the Potsdam Conference, including Robert Murphy, Geoffrey Harrison, and Denis Allen. The book attempts to describe the crimes committed against the German nation by the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia at the end of World War II – as perceived by the expellees themselves and settlers brought in Heim ins Reich from the east.
The Landsmannschaft Schlesien - Nieder- und Oberschlesien e.V. is an organization of Germans born in the former Prussian provinces of Lower and Upper Silesia, and their descendants, who currently live in Germany. The Landsmannschaft Schlesien was established in March 1950 and is a member of the Federation of Expellees, and has its headquarters in Königswinter, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Erika Steinbach is a German right-wing politician. She previously served as a member of the Bundestag from 1990 until 2017.
Herbert Hupka was a German journalist, politician, and advocate for the Germans expelled from neighbouring countries after the Second World War.
The German Expellees or Heimatvertriebene are 12–16 million German citizens and ethnic Germans who fled or were expelled after World War II from parts of Germany annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union and from other countries, who found refuge in both West and East Germany, and Austria.
Herbert Czaja was a German Christian democratic politician. Czaja was born to a multi-ethnic and multilingual family in Cieszyn in Poland, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time of his birth. During the Second Polish Republic he was politically active in the German Christian People's Party, a centrist party representing German-speaking Catholics in Poland, and obtained a doctorate in philology from the Jagiellonian University. In 1946 he was expelled from his native Poland by the communist regime during the expulsion of Germans after World War II and came as a refugee to Stuttgart in West Germany, where he worked as a teacher and became active in politics for the Christian Democratic Union.
The Landsmannschaft Westpreußen is an organization of Heimatvertriebene — Germans born in West Prussia, or their descendants, who either fled or were expelled to the Federal Republic of Germany during the Expulsion of Germans after World War II.
The Prussian Trust, or Prussian Claims Society, is a corporation registered in Düsseldorf, founded in 2000 as Preußische Treuhand GmbH by some descendants of German expellees, and supported by some officials of the Landsmannschaft Schlesien organization. It seeks to claim compensation from Poland and the Czech Republic, among others, for property confiscated from Germans expelled from territories which after World War II became parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia.
The Centre Against Expulsions was a planned German documentation centre for expulsions and ethnic cleansing, particularly the expulsion of Germans after World War II. Since March 19, 2008 the name of the project is Sichtbares Zeichen gegen Flucht und Vertreibung.
Fritz Wittmann was a German politician (CSU) and lawyer.
The Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft is an organization representing Sudeten German expellees and refugees from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Most of them were forcibly expelled and deported to western Allied occupation zones of Germany, which would later form West Germany, from their homelands inside Czechoslovakia during the expulsion of Germans after World War II. Many settled in Bavaria.
The All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights was a right-wing political party in West Germany, which acted as an advocacy group of the Germans fled and expelled in and after World War II.
The Federal Law on Refugees and Exiles is a federal law passed by the Federal Republic of Germany on 19 May 1953 to regulate the legal situation of ethnic German refugees and expellees who fled or were expelled after World War II from the former eastern territories of the German Reich and other areas of Central and Eastern Europe. The law was amended on 3 September 1971.
Hans Krüger was a former member of the NSDAP party and other Nazi organizations who served as an SS judge in occupied Poland during the Second World War. After the war he became West German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He served as Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims of the Federal Republic of Germany from 17 October 1963 to 7 February 1964, in the First Cabinet of Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, as President of the Federation of Expellees from 1959 to 1964, and as a Member of Parliament from 1957 to 1965. He stepped down from cabinet amid controversy about his war-time background.
Demographic estimates of the flight and expulsion of Germans have been derived by either the compilation of registered dead and missing persons or by a comparison of pre-war and post-war population data. Estimates of the number of displaced Germans vary in the range of 12.0–16.5 million. The death toll attributable to the flight and expulsions was estimated at 2.2 million by the West German government in 1958 using the population balance method. German records which became public in 1987 have caused some historians in Germany to put the actual total at about 500,000 based on the listing of confirmed deaths. The German Historical Museum puts the figure at 600,000 victims and says that the official figure of 2 million did not stand up to later review. However, the German Red Cross still maintains that the total death toll of the expulsions is 2,251,500 persons.
The flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland was the largest of a series of flights and expulsions of Germans in Europe during and after World War II. The German population fled or was expelled from all regions which are currently within the territorial boundaries of Poland: including the former eastern territories of Germany annexed by Poland after the war and parts of pre-war Poland; despite acquiring territories from Germany, the Poles themselves were also expelled from the former eastern territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. West German government figures of those evacuated, migrated, or expelled by 1950 totaled 8,030,000. Research by the West German government put the figure of Germans emigrating from Poland from 1951 to 1982 at 894,000; they are also considered expellees under German Federal Expellee Law.
Hans Krueger was a German captain of the Gestapo in occupied Poland during World War II, involved in organizing the string of massacres after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa behind the Curzon Line. His murderous rampage in the General Government territory against the ethnic Poles and the Polish Jews began with the massacre of Lwów professors in July 1941, which was followed by the Czarny Las massacre near Stanisławów in August 1941, as well as the notorious Bloody Sunday massacre of 10,000–12,000 Jews: men, women and children in October 1941, leading to the liquidation of the Stanisławów Ghetto a year later. Krueger was known as the right man for the job due to his Nazi fanaticism which earned him the seat of a city commandant in 1941 but also his brutality exhibited through hands-on participation in the killings.
Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe is the abridged English translation of a multi-volume publication that was created by a commission of West German historians between 1951 and 1961 to document the population transfer of Germans from East-Central Europe that had occurred after World War II. Created by the Federal Ministry for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims, the commission headed by Theodor Schieder consisted primarily of well-known historians, however with a Nazi past. Therefore, while in the immediate post war period the commission was regarded as composed of very accomplished historians, the later assessment of its members changed. The later historians are debating how reliable are the findings of the commission, and to what degree they were influenced by Nazi and nationalist point of view.
Ingo Haar is a German historian. He received his Master of Arts from the University of Hamburg in 1993 and his PhD in History in 1998 at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. His doctoral dissertation was on "Historians in Nazi Germany: the German history and the`'Ethnic struggle' in the `East'".
