I was just talking to my Czech BIL, and we were talking about the history of “the old continent”. One thing that always interested me-prior to the war, there were groups of ethnic Germans scattered all around Europe:
-Czechoslovakia had the “Sudeten Germans”
-Rumania had the Transylvania region, which was settled by Germans in the 15th century
-Hungary had groups of ethnic Germans
-Poland had Silesia and Gdansk, which had been German for hundreds of years
Even Russia had the “Volga Germans”-who had lived there since the time of Empress Catherine the Great.
My question: when the borders wereredrawn after WWII, what did these germans do? Most of them were probably not welcome in the countries they were in (given the atrocities committed by the Nazi armies).
So what became of these people? Were they liquidated or did most of them settel in Germany?
Most of them were forcibly repatriated to Germany, often after being interred in forced labor camps.
For example, despite being east of the German/Polish border the city of Danzig had long been Germanic, with a majority of ethnic Germans and even being part of the Haseatic League in the Middle Ages (a confederation of German city-states that was an early expression of a pan-Germanic union). The Nazis made Danzig a focal point of their brutal occupation of Poland, and in reprisal, hundreds of years of history were expunged following the war - the city is now known exclusively by its Polish name of Gdansk, Germany has formally renounced any claims to the city, and there is no significant ethnic German population there.
Same thing with the “Sudetenland” Germans who were used as a reason for Nazi Germany to invade and incorporate Czechoslovakia. They’re not there any more, even the ones who may not have done anything in particular to welcome or help the Nazis effectuate the occupation.
Which really shouldn’t surprise anyone in the end. It’s just a sad story all around.
In my hometown of just 2500 in upstate PA, there were at least 3 ethnic German refugee families who moved there in the late 40’s and early 50’s.
A little google-fu shows that this was not unique and many other families came to the US. Over 600,000 European DPs were admitted to the US in the postwar period. In the 40’s alone, there were 117,000 Germans who immigrated to the US. Even more in the 50’s.
I read once that about 2 million ethnic German civilians trudged west to Germany along one general area or route (there must have been other streams of migrants; no way that 2 mil. figure covers them all, as there were an estimated 2 million Volga Germans alone), of which as many as 200,000 died en route, and not all of those from disease or starvation, either.
Most European countries kicked out their ethnic German communities after the war. It was justified as a defensive measure because Germany had used the existence of these communities as an excuse to invade the countries they were residing in. A lot of them died and most of the survivors ended up in Germany. I believe there was an article in the German postwar constitution which gave ethnic German refugees the right to reside in Germany.
I had the impression a lot who couldn’t make it to Western forces were either overrun, liquidated, or enslaved by the Russians. Can’t quantify “a lot” and the first few sites that come up dampened my interest in searching as it’s not unpredictable that those who are interested in dwelling on suffering by/atrocities upon Germans often have a suspect agenda . . . .
Keep in mind that plenty of German soldiers managed to die in the first year or two after the war through some comparatively benign form of neglect/ineptitude by the Brits and Americans, who AFAICT weren’t going out of their way to try to kill them, just didn’t have the greatest plan for exactly how and how quickly denazification and demobilization of POWs would go. Now imagine how much less solicitous a Russian captor would have been motivated to be, to soldiers or civilians of the late invading fascist enemy.
I think a fair number of them fled without waiting to be kicked out. In particular, large numbers travelled west in 1944 to escape the Soviet advance, and then either could not go back or didn’t want to (or both).
Wikipedia article. If you read the Discussion page, you’ll see it is a pretty touchy/controversial subject. Not the least because the East German government having a pretty substantial interest not to make any noise about former German lands now in Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia, etc. kept a lid on things for a good long while.
So they closed the barn door after the horse had bolted.
No. Do recall that Germany was involved in two major wars in the first half of the 20th century; their neighbours weren’t keen on another.
The Soviets had a nasty habit of killing them or sending them to the Gulag (from which they didn’t return). That probably accounted for a fair number in the Soviet conquered territories. Those who could probably decided to do things like ‘lose’ their paperwork, change their name and go from Herman Schwartz, Transylvanian German, to Horatiu Silivasi, displaced Romanian.
Cite?
On the receiving end, most survivors (~12 million) ended up in the two German states. In some areas that were previously less densely settled they significantly changed the cultural and denominational makeup and were a distinct group for a long time (e.g. in Bavaria the Sudeten Germans were often referred to as the state’s fourth tribe, with Bavarians, Franconians and Swabians).
Many of the Volga Germans were deported to Kazakhstan were their decendants live today
[Ducks head as he quotes Stephen Ambrose]
Cowdrey, Albert E. (1992), “A Question of Numbers”, in Bischoff, Gunter; Ambrose, Stephen, Eisenhower and the German POWs, New York: Lousiana State University Press, ISBN 0807117587
Mind you, Ambrose was acknowledging that there were a non-trivial number of POW deaths and bad treatment in the course of debunking a very controversial book which had put those numbers above a million and basically accused Eisenhower of concerted murder, which was indeed silly. Still I’da rather been a POW in U.S. or even better Brit hands than anything else.