ON THIS DAY ·
Friedland transit camp
20 Sep 1945 — The British open a reception camp in farm buildings where their zone met the American and Soviet zones. Expellees, prisoners of war coming home and, for decades afterwards, ethnic German resettlers passed through it in their millions; it still receives newcomers today.
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The moment in context
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.
From Expulsion of Germans after WW2, chapter 2 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990 (1945).
The place: Friedland transit camp — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- 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…
- The turn — 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.…
- 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,…
Then ask the room: How far should the Allied powers share responsibility for the expulsion of Germans with the governments that carried it out? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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