The Allied victory in 1945 brought relief and joy to Europe, but for millions of people, it marked the beginning of a new nightmare. As the Allies celebrated their defeat of the Nazi regime, Europe was experiencing the start of another ethnic cleansing that would target millions of people purely because of the way they were born or the language they spoke.
Millions of innocent people were removed from their ancestral homes, stripped of their rights and dignity, and told that they deserved it. Torture, rape, and murder awaited hundreds of thousands of them. This is the story of the forgotten atrocity that reshaped Europe: the ethnic cleansing of over 12 million Germans.
The German people existed long before the German nation state. Germany only unified as a country in 1871, but the German people and language have been a feature of Europe for 2,000 years. While most Germans lived in the lands now recognized as Germany and Austria, German minorities could be found in almost every corner of Europe.
After the First World War, millions of Germans ended up as minorities in newly created nation states following the Treaty of Versailles. These newly created or recreated nations like Czechoslovakia and Poland were not happy to have Germans in their country, and the Germans were not happy to be there either.
The Sudetenland on the Czech-German border was a perfect example. Despite being majority German, the region was denied independence or unification with Germany and was instead rolled into Czechoslovakia, where the German population was a neglected and sometimes outright persecuted minority.
Hitler used these German minorities to justify his expansion in the late 1930s. His union with Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 were met with a weak reaction because many in Europe quietly agreed that all Germans deserved to be unified. Of course, Hitler's invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 proved that these minorities were only a pretext for further conquest.
Given that Europe's German minorities were intrinsically linked to the start of Hitler's expansion, it is no surprise that blame stuck after his defeat. The very existence of the German minorities was seen as one of the causes of the war. With a Nazi regime persecuting entire ethnic groups on the basis of their race and birth, it felt like justice to many to turn it back on the Germans after Hitler's downfall.
This revenge took many forms. The desolation of German cities like Dresden and the mass rape of German women by the Red Army are well known, but less attention was paid to what happened outside of Germany itself.
The Allies were making plans to remove the Germans long before they had actually won. As early as 1942, some of the Allied powers were discussing the mass resettlement of ethnic Germans out of Poland and other strategic areas, anticipating the removal of some 6 million people.
However, with Soviet successes in 1943 shifting the tide of the war, expectations changed for a full Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed with Stalin that the borders of post-war Germany and Poland would be the Oder-Neisse line. All of the 4 million Germans east of that line would have to be removed as well.
The British and the Soviets led the way for these so-called population transfers. Churchill was its strongest advocate, believing that the ethnic peoples of Europe should be disentangled to avoid future wars. In a speech before Parliament in December 1944, Churchill declared his support for the total ethnic cleansing of Germans from Polish territories.
It was believed that the death tolls of Germans in Germany itself would leave enough room for the deported Germans from elsewhere to move in. The Germans of Eastern Europe were aware of the fate awaiting them.
Starting in the winter of 1944, some 4 million ethnic Germans fled Eastern Europe ahead of the Red Army's advance. Traveling through the winter months, these refugees were exposed to serious danger as they traveled through war zones and freezing temperatures to reach Germany. Tens of thousands died from hypothermia as they tried to flee.
The Nazis considered these refugees to be cowards and offered no protection or support. Some regional governors declared it illegal for ethnic Germans to flee even as the Red Army was knocking down their door.
By the summer of 1945, an estimated 100,000 German refugees were flooding into war-ravaged Germany every week, adding to the strain of the country's millions of internal refugees. There was not enough food or shelter for them, and many would perish from starvation and exposure.
At the Potsdam Conference in July, the Allies had to agree to pause the deportations into Germany because the numbers were just unmanageable. However, they also reiterated their commitment to getting the deportations done eventually.
The ethnic cleansing of Germans played out slightly differently in different countries. In 1942, the Czech government in exile confirmed it would be seeking the expulsion of 1 million Germans after the war.
True to its word, the first act of the restored Czech government was to strip every ethnic German of citizenship until they could prove that they had taken part in anti-fascist activity, which only a minority could claim.
The German occupation of Czechoslovakia had been horrific. The Nazis had sent Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust and a man considered psychopathic even by Nazi leadership, to run the occupation government. His nickname of the Butcher of Prague was well deserved.
Although he had been assassinated in 1942, the scars of the occupation were still fresh. For the Czechs, victory was a chance to avenge themselves upon the Germans.
The Czechs passed sweeping laws to punish the Germans. Taking a hint from Nazi anti-Semitic policies, all ethnic Germans were required to wear white armbands marked with the letter N for Nemits, the Czech word for German. It was illegal for Germans to gather in large numbers.
All German businesses were dissolved or seized by the state, while Germans were also banned from public parks, trains, restaurants, and even walking on the sidewalk.
Czech troops were already rounding up Germans in the Sudetenland by mid-May 1945. Deportations were quick. Soldiers would arrive in a town or village and go door by door, telling the deportees they had 30 minutes to grab their things and report for deportation.
Some were driven across the border to Germany, where they would be left to fend for themselves. Others were placed into concentration or labor camps for the time being, with all men and women over the age of 14 required to work for the state.
Conditions in these camps were wretched, with high rates of disease and death. Many of these camps were run by Soviet soldiers who abused German civilians en masse.
Between May and August alone, some half a million Germans had been officially rounded up in Czech territory, and hundreds of thousands more would follow. However, deportations were not enough to satisfy the anger of the Czech people.
Massacres of German civilians by soldiers, partisans, and lynch mobs were common. The exact numbers are unknown, but there were certainly hundreds of individual examples ranging from just one family to hundreds of people at once.
On the night of June 18, 1945, 260 Germans were massacred by Czech and Slovak soldiers in the city of Prerov. Of the victims, 120 were women and 74 were children.
Also in June, 30,000 Germans were rounded up in the city of Brno. Many were imprisoned in the Kaunic College camps, which the Gestapo had used as a prison during the occupation. Some 300 Germans were hanged there in the following weeks, and the rest were deported to concentration camps on the Austrian border, a trek which killed several hundred more.
There was also a well-recorded massacre of Germans in Lobin, where 43 Germans were shot, bayoneted, or drowned in the river by lynch mobs who blamed them for an explosion at a nearby ammunition depot.
The single worst atrocity befell the Germans of Jatec, who were deported on a forced march to nearby Postoloprty in early June. What followed was the single largest post-war massacre of Germans.
According to one survivor, the inciting incident was the execution of five German boys between the ages of 10 and 15 who had been caught stealing food. The boys were lined up against the wall of the nearby barracks and shot. This was taken as a signal to begin killing more.
Over the following five days, between 800 and 2,000 more German civilians were murdered, their bodies thrown into mass graves.
Czechoslovakia counted the removal of almost 3 million Germans by the time official persecution ended in 1948. Most of the Germans who remained would self-deport in the following years.
Things were bad in Czechoslovakia, but they were worse in Poland. Poland had even more ethnic Germans in its land and even more anger at them than the Czechs.
Poland had another complication, as it had lost land in the east to the Soviet Union, resulting in millions of displaced Poles. The Polish government needed the Germans out of the way so they could resettle these Poles in their place.
But between Nazi and Soviet invasions, Poland was in ruins at war's end. The new authorities were struggling to establish themselves, and so Poland was in no position to oversee the safe or orderly deportation of millions of people.
While the Polish government did play a role in organizing deportations, for example deporting some 300,000 Germans from the 50-kilometer stretch east of the Oder to clear the way to settle ex-soldiers, they had to rely on the Germans deporting themselves, too.
The official policy of Polish communists was to create conditions in Poland that were so hostile to ethnic Germans that most would choose to leave by themselves. In the words of one Polish army commander to his troops: "You must perform your tasks in such a stern and decisive manner that the German vermin do not hide in the houses, but flee of their own accord."
They did not have to work hard to make this happen. Ethnic hatred was intense after the horrendous experiences of the war. The vast majority of Poland's 25 million ethnic Poles fully supported the expulsion of the country's Germans.
Like in Czechoslovakia, the Germans first had to be rounded up. Millions of Germans were forced into urban ghettos, converted barracks, and former prisons, and in some cases repurposed Nazi concentration camps.
A nation already struggling to house and feed its citizens had little to spare for its enemies. Disease and starvation tore through the German prisoners, while abuse from soldiers and civilians alike claimed yet more lives.
No one relished in the persecution of these Germans quite like Solomon Morel. Morel was just 26 years old, but he had already worked as a prison warden for the Soviets. He was also Jewish and had lost his parents at Auschwitz, so he had plenty of reasons to hate Nazis.
So when the Polish government decided to reopen the Zgoda camp, a sub-camp of Auschwitz, to imprison German civilians, it was a perfect assignment for him. Morel ran Zgoda as his own personal revenge upon the Germans.
He treated women and children as if they had been responsible for Auschwitz, inflicting torture and abuse on them that would have fit any description of the Holocaust. Morel and his guards would toy with prisoners for their own amusement.
For example, they would force prisoners to make human pyramids that the guards would walk over, crushing the people beneath. Prisoners were given little food and no medical care, even as a vicious typhus epidemic cut through the camp.
The day's dead would be buried in the mass grave by the surviving prisoners every night. But survivors admitted that they sometimes got so hungry that they ate the bodies instead.
Conditions were so bad at Zgoda that inmates would throw themselves on the electrical fences just to make the suffering end. Of the 6,000 people held in Zgoda during the eight months of Polish control, 2,000 died.
Not until Polish independence in the 1990s did anyone try to bring Morel to account for his actions, but he fled to Israel to avoid punishment and was protected there until his death in 2007.
Poland counted for the majority of the German expulsions in Europe. By the time they stopped in 1950, over 8 million had been expelled.
While most of the Germans in Poland were removed, not all of them were. The Polish government identified certain minority German groups as being secretly Polish. That is, their true identity was Polish, but many at the time identified more as Germans.
The Silesians of Silesia, the Kashubians of Pomerania, and the Masurians of East Prussia had been more German than Polish, but most were given Polish citizenship and incorporated into the Polish nation.
Poland and Czechoslovakia saw most of the German expulsions, but several other countries deserve attention. Most of Yugoslavia's German population had already left by the time the war ended.
The arrival of the Red Army in October 1944 had sent most of them running anyway. In early 1945, the remaining Germans were rounded up and placed in temporary camps, although thousands were shot by communist partisans as well.
Around 30,000 Germans, 90% of whom were women, were deported from Yugoslavia to forced labor camps in the USSR before Germany was even defeated. In March 1945, the remaining Germans were relocated to rural village camps.
Those who were well enough to work were made to do so, while those who could not were kept in separate camps. These camps for the non-workers were dismal places of disease and unrestrained abuse.
As many as 50% of those who entered these camps never came out again, and they were accurately described as extermination camps. Children who survived this ordeal were sent away to state-run orphanages or given to Yugoslav families and were forbidden to speak German.
By the early 1950s, most of Yugoslavia's German prisoners were released, and most of these would go on to leave Yugoslavia entirely. By the 1960s, the country's German minority had all but disappeared.
Based on Yugoslav records, historians believe that over 7,000 Yugoslav Germans were killed by partisans, over 48,000 died in the camps, and another 2,000 vanished into the Soviet gulag system during and after 1945.
Also notable was the fate of German children who fled into Lithuania. Most were orphans from East Prussia and Königsberg, which was taken by the Soviets with heavy casualties in January 1945.
Around 45,000 of these orphans fled into the wilderness of Lithuania, where they became known as the wolf children. These wolf children roamed the countryside, surviving by scavenging or stealing from the local population, often being mistreated or chased away by the local Lithuanians.
Many of these children died, while others were adopted into Lithuanian families where their German identity was stripped away.
Hungary and Romania posed unique problems. Since they had been German allies for most of the war, the German minorities there were relatively small and had not been a source of conflict like they had in Poland or the Sudetenland.
The primary reason for the expulsion of Germans in these countries appears to have been communist control. The ethnic Germans were seen as a potential source of anti-communist sentiment, which authorities could address by linking it to the broader expulsions of Germans.
The Germans in these areas were also generally well off and owned a lot of land, especially in Hungary, where the Germans had once formed part of the social elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Removing them would make communist land reforms much simpler.
Hungary's Germans were counted alongside Polish and Czech as one of the top priorities for deportation at Potsdam. After some debate, German citizens were stripped of their political rights in October 1945.
But Hungary was one of the few countries to argue against collective German punishment. Nevertheless, the Allies demanded the expulsion of 500,000 Hungarian Germans, mostly to the American-occupied zone in Germany.
This was a problem partially because there were not even that many Hungarian Germans to begin with. Hungary also protested that most of its Germans were women, children, and elderly and had done nothing to deserve punishment for Nazi crimes.
Despite this, Allied pressure forced the government to accept the total deportation of all German speakers. The deportations were rushed and chaotic, but the Hungarians ensured that trains were not too overcrowded, and evacuees were provided with food, clothes, and medical staff for the journey.
About 100,000 Germans were deported in the first six months of 1946. Expulsions continued later that year, but the scope was gradually reduced. Essential workers like miners and craftsmen were exempted, as were most of the remaining poor and working-class Germans.
Still, by the time deportations ended in June 1948, around 200,000 Germans had been expelled from Hungary.
Similarly, Romania experienced a confused mix of deportations for their former allies, but on a smaller scale. Most ethnic Germans left ahead of the collapse of the pro-Nazi Romanian government in 1944.
In January 1945, the Soviets pressured Bucharest to deport 100,000 Germans to the USSR to work in labor camps as punishment, which it had no choice but to agree to. Ten thousand of these Romanian Germans died in the camps.
The rest were released in 1949 but were sent to Soviet-occupied East Germany instead of returning home. For the 40,000 or so Romanian Germans who did eventually return to Romania later, they found their former land and property seized by the state and redistributed to ethnic Romanians.
The treatment of the Germans improved significantly after the winter of 1945. In November 1945, the Allies signed new agreements to regulate the deportations to decrease deaths.
While the anger from the war and desire for revenge on the Germans began to fade, the major Allied powers agreed to help the smaller nations manage humane and orderly deportations, which were done with much less violence and robbery.
For example, from February 1946, two trainloads of Germans carrying around 2,400 people ran from Czechoslovakia to the American-occupied zone of Germany every day. Evacuees were also given food, clothes, and medical care from charity organizations like the Red Cross.
This was still an ethnic cleansing, still the removal of millions of people for the crime of being the wrong ethnicity and speaking the wrong language. But the conditions were undeniably better than they had been before.
Persecution ended by the 1950s, but there would be no accountability. The world did not want to recognize that the Germans had suffered any wrongdoing. To admit as such would be to undermine the simple good-versus-evil narrative of the war.
It took until the 1990s for any significant attention to be paid to the issue outside of Germany, but by then it was too late to do anything.
Take Solomon Morel, who continued to work for the NKVD and Polish communist authorities after the closure of the Zgoda camp. After the fall of communism, the Polish government did investigate him for crimes against German civilians, but Morel fled to Israel to escape prosecution.
The Polish government demanded his extradition to stand trial, but Israel blocked it, protecting him until his death in 2007.
In all, around 12 million Germans had been expelled from across Eastern Europe. At least 500,000 Germans died from disease, violence, exhaustion, exposure, or other causes of death, with some estimates surpassing 2 million.
These actions were conscious attempts to eradicate the presence of German culture, language, and people in the affected areas.