Refugee crises · CHAPTER 2 ·
Expulsion of Germans after WW2
Chapter 2 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “The Expulsions of Germans”
Between 12 and 14 million Germans fled or were driven out of the lands east of the Oder and Neisse and from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other states after 1945. At Potsdam in August 1945 the Allies accepted this ‘transfer’, asking that it be orderly and humane, but the expulsions had begun before any agreement and were neither.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Europe, August 1945 — Potsdam: borders move west.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe was the largest forced migration of the post-war years, and it happened because the victors decided that borders and nations should finally match. Between 12 and 14 million Germans fled or were driven out of the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, which the Allies handed to Poland and the Soviet Union, and out of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other states where German communities had lived for centuries. At the Potsdam Conference near Berlin, where Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union set the rules for defeated Germany much as a peace conference would, the three powers accepted this “transfer” in Section XIII of their agreement, asking only that it be “orderly and humane”. The expulsions cannot be understood apart from what preceded them: six years of German occupation in which about six million Polish citizens were killed and Czech villages such as Lidice were destroyed, and in which many local Germans had welcomed the Nazi state.
The map shows both the decision and its result. Hatching now covers the old German east and the Sudetenland, the German-speaking rim of Bohemia, and the thick red arrows carry their people into the four zones of occupied Germany. The process began before Potsdam with “wild expulsions”, violent removals by soldiers and local militias with no agreement behind them, continued with organised trains in 1946, and left West Germany with 7.9 million expellees, as Germans driven from the east came to be called, a sixth of its population by 1950. Estimates of the dead run from about 500,000 to more than two million, and the gap reflects a debate about method. The new borders lasted because they had been emptied of the people who might have contested them.
The full story
The Allies accepted mass expulsion because they had drawn a single lesson from the 1930s, which was that national minorities gave aggressors their pretext. Hitler had used the Sudeten Germans, the German-speaking minority along Czechoslovakia’s borders, to break the country in 1938 and the German minority in Poland to justify war in 1939, so Czech and Polish exiles in London argued from 1942 onwards that only removal would make their states safe. Winston Churchill agreed in the House of Commons in December 1944, telling members that expulsion was the most “satisfactory and lasting” method and that “a clean sweep will be made”. Planners pointed to the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, under which about 1.2 million Orthodox Christians left Turkey and about 400,000 Muslims left Greece, as proof that a population exchange, the compulsory swap of minorities between states, rather like a land swap applied to people, could bring peace. Transfer therefore looked to its sponsors like prevention, and its humanity was assumed in advance.
In practice the expulsions began before any agreement and were neither orderly nor humane. In the “wild expulsions” of May to August 1945, carried out without any international agreement, Czechoslovak soldiers, militias and local committees drove out some 700,000 to 800,000 Germans, including about 20,000 residents of Brno marched toward Austria, and Polish troops cleared a strip along the new western border. A presidential decree of 2 August 1945 stripped Czechoslovakia’s Germans and Hungarians of citizenship, leaving them stateless in their own homes. On 20 November 1945 the Allied Control Council, the four powers’ governing body in Berlin, fixed a plan for 6.65 million people, 3.5 million of them from Poland and 2.5 million from Czechoslovakia. The organised trains of 1946, the thick arrows on the map, carried families with a few kilograms of luggage to camps such as Friedland, and by 1950 West Germany counted 7.9 million expellees, the term for these uprooted Germans, and East Germany about 4.3 million, so the state that had started the war became home to Europe’s largest displaced population, a reversal that shaped German memory for decades.
The human cost is measured in a contested range, and the reasons for the dispute matter as much as the number. Estimates run from about 500,000 documented deaths to more than two million, because the higher counts treat everyone unaccounted for as dead. Some died of violence in camps and on marches, many more of hunger, cold and disease, and the old, the very young and women without men suffered most, because German men of military age were dead or in captivity. Expellees lost farms, houses and savings, and their churches and dialects vanished from the places they left. The policy also achieved what its authors wanted: Poland and Czechoslovakia became nearly homogeneous nation-states, and the border disputes that had helped cause two wars never returned. That outcome is exactly why the episode is so hard to judge, since a measure taken to secure the peace was paid for by millions of people who had not individually chosen the war.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Half a million or two million dead?
Few figures in post-war history have been argued over as fiercely as the death toll of the expulsions, because each estimate came from a different method and served a different politics. In 1958 the West German Federal Statistical Office calculated about 2.2 million “losses” by population balance, subtracting the expellees who arrived from the Germans who had lived in the east and counting everyone unaccounted for as dead. In 1964 the churches’ tracing service confirmed 473,013 deaths and listed about 1.9 million cases as unresolved, many of whom had probably died in the war, stayed behind under Polish names or simply never registered. A report of the Federal Archives in 1974 estimated about 600,000 deaths from crimes; Helmut Schmidt’s government held it back to protect relations with the East, and it appeared only in 1989. Later researchers such as Rüdiger Overmans and Ingo Haar concluded that around 500,000 to 600,000 deaths can be documented, while the German Red Cross still cites 2.25 million. For Czechoslovakia the joint Czech–German historians’ commission put the dead at 15,000 to 30,000 in 1996, far below the 220,000 to 270,000 of older German estimates. The range shows how a statistic can carry a Cold War argument inside it.
Who decided: the Allies and Potsdam
German post-war memory long blamed Poles and Czechs alone, while Polish and Czech memory stressed Allied approval, and historians have since shown that both views capture part of the record. Detlef Brandes traced how Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak president in exile, and the Polish government lobbied London and Moscow from 1942, and how the British cabinet accepted transfer in principle that year. R. M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane (2012) argues that Britain and the United States knew by the summer of 1945 that the expulsions were brutal and deadly and endorsed them anyway, then used Section XIII mainly to slow the flow into zones they could not feed. Section XIII did ask governments to suspend expulsions until the Control Council could plan them, and the request was largely ignored. Douglas concludes that the expulsions were an international policy carried out by national governments, which shares responsibility without excusing either. The comparison with Indochina is instructive, because there too outside powers accepted a mass departure that they thought would settle a regional conflict, and then bargained over who would bear its cost.
Transfer, removal, expulsion: words as arguments
The vocabulary for these events still divides the countries involved, and each word carries a judgement. The Potsdam text spoke of “transfer”, an administrative term. Czech usage long preferred odsun, “removal” or “transfer”, which presents the event as a legal measure, while Polish official language used wysiedlenie, “resettlement”, and German speaks of Vertreibung, “expulsion”, which stresses force and victims. Since the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, historians such as Norman Naimark in Fires of Hatred (2001) and Philipp Ther in The Dark Side of Nation-States (2014) have used the term “ethnic cleansing”, meaning the forced removal of an ethnic group from a territory, and they place 1945 in a European series running from the Balkan wars to Bosnia. Governments have also chosen words to make peace: in the Czech–German Declaration of 1997, Germany acknowledged its responsibility for the Nazi occupation and the Czech side expressed regret that the post-war expulsion had inflicted “much suffering and injustice” on innocent people. Choosing a word is therefore choosing an interpretation, and students should notice which one a source uses.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The lesson drawn from Munich. Mixed borderlands looked like the cause of the last war. In 1938 Hitler used the grievances of the three million Sudeten Germans to dismember Czechoslovakia, and in 1939 he invoked the German minority in Poland to justify invasion. To Czech and Polish leaders, and soon to the British, the conclusion was that mixed borderlands invited the next war. Removing the minority looked like a permanent cure, and that reasoning turned an act of retribution into a security policy that the great powers could endorse.
Six years of occupation. The memory of occupation made collective guilt seem plausible to Poles and Czechs in 1945, even though individual Germans had acted in very different ways. German rule in Poland and Bohemia killed about six million Polish citizens, half of them Jews, destroyed villages such as Lidice in reprisal and planned to deport or eliminate Slavic populations. Many local Germans had served the occupation, and in 1935 about two-thirds of Sudeten German voters had backed Konrad Henlein’s pro-Nazi party, so many Poles and Czechs came to see the whole minority as the occupiers’ partners.
Poland moved west. Once the Allies at Yalta gave Poland’s eastern provinces to the Soviet Union, Poland needed land for its people and compensation for its losses. At Potsdam the Oder–Neisse lands were placed under Polish administration “pending the final determination” of the border, and Warsaw set out to make that provisional line permanent by filling it with Poles and emptying it of Germans. The expulsion was thus also a consequence of Poland’s own uprooting in the east.
Allied consent and the Lausanne precedent. Great-power consent made expulsion look respectable. Churchill told the House of Commons in December 1944 that expulsion was the most “satisfactory and lasting” method, and Allied planners cited the Greek–Turkish exchange of 1923, which moved about 1.6 million people, as a model that had brought peace. Great-power consent gave Polish and Czechoslovak governments international cover, and the expectation that transfer could be managed humanely made it easier for London and Washington to approve.
THE TURNING POINT
Potsdam, Section XIII, 2 August 1945. Section XIII of the Potsdam agreement is the hinge because it converted local, often violent expulsions into an internationally recognised policy. Three powers stated that the transfer of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary “will have to be undertaken”, and with that sentence the question changed from whether Germans would leave to how and when. The request for orderly and humane conduct had almost no means of enforcement, while the acceptance of transfer had every means, since the occupying armies controlled the receiving zones. The rest of the expulsion was administration, and administration on that scale was always going to be counted in millions.
What it changed
A sixth of West Germany. The expellees became a sixth of West Germany’s people. The census of September 1950 counted 7.9 million of them, 16.5 percent of its population, crowded at first into rural Bavaria, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. Their integration through housing programmes, the Equalisation of Burdens law of 1952 and the post-war boom became one of the Federal Republic’s founding achievements, the subject of chapter 6. The expellees also became voters with their own party and lobby, which kept the lost east alive in West German politics for a generation.
Room for Poles from the east. The emptied towns of Silesia and Pomerania were refilled by Poles from central Poland and by Poles leaving the eastern provinces that the Soviet Union had annexed. Breslau became Wrocław within three years. The settlers arrived in houses with German furniture still inside, and many lived for years expecting to be moved again. Chapter 3 follows this second chain of movement, which shows that one expulsion made room for another.
Outside the refugee regime. Because expellees arriving in Germany held German citizenship, the international agencies treated them as Germany’s own responsibility, and the 1951 Refugee Convention excluded people who enjoyed the rights of nationals in their country of residence. The largest displaced population of post-war Europe was thus never a “refugee” in international law, a fact chapter 5 explains. Their absence from the law shows that the refugee regime was built around people who had lost the protection of a state, and Germany had to protect its own.
A memory still contested. Expellee associations became a lobby in West German politics, and the question of whether to remember German suffering without diminishing German guilt shaped relations with Poland and the Czech Republic for decades. The border treaty of 1990 and the Berlin documentation centre that opened in 2021 are the epilogue’s markers of that argument. Each step toward reconciliation required Germans to hold their own losses and their own responsibility in view at the same time.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — How far should the Allied powers share responsibility for the expulsion of Germans with the governments that carried it out?
The case for shared responsibility rests on Potsdam: Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union stated that the transfer “will have to be undertaken”, the Allied Control Council fixed quotas for 6.65 million people, and Churchill had endorsed a “clean sweep” months before. Without that consent Poland and Czechoslovakia could hardly have expelled millions into zones the Allies controlled. On the other side, the wild expulsions of 1945 began before Potsdam on the initiative of national authorities, decrees such as Czechoslovakia’s citizenship law of August 1945 were national choices, and the Allies did ask for a pause that was ignored. A judgement in the spirit of R. M. Douglas would say that responsibility was shared but unequal in kind: the Allies legitimised and organised, while national governments initiated and executed. The deeper insight is that international consent can turn ethnic cleansing into policy, a pattern worth testing against the Geneva bargains of chapter 10.
An interesting fact
Bavaria received more Sudeten Germans than any other part of Germany, and in 1954 the Bavarian state government formally declared itself the patron of the Sudeten German community. Bavarian politicians still describe the Sudeten Germans as the state’s “fourth tribe”, alongside the Old Bavarians, Franconians and Swabians, and the Sudeten German Day held every Whitsun remains a fixture of Bavarian political life. Towns such as Neugablonz, built on the site of a wartime explosives works near Kaufbeuren, were founded by expellees from Gablonz (Jablonec nad Nisou), who rebuilt their glass and costume-jewellery trade there.
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