Were the Allies responsible for the expulsion of Germans?

The short answer

• 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.

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.