Heimatvertriebene

It was believed, that since Adolf Hitler used the existence of large German minorities in other countries as a pretext for waging aggressive wars, removing Germans from territories of other countries would remove potential causes of future problems. Also, there was little empathy for German victims, since the German government started a policy of ethnic cleansing in occupied territories, for example in Greater Poland.

The subjects of this policy included inhabitants of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, German citizens living in Poland and Sudetenland Germans in Czechoslovakia. The Communists also expelled ethnic Germans from other eastern European countries. Twice as many expelled Germans found refuge in West Germany as in East Germany, and large numbers went to other countries of the world.

At the time the policy was undertaken and until the 1990s, there was little argument over the morality of the policy. Many of the propaganda themes of the Nazi regime against Czechoslovakia and Poland claimed the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) were persecuted. Although expellees (in German Heimatvertriebene) and their descendants were active in West German politics, the prevailing political climate within West Germany was that of atonement for Nazi actions, and even within West Germany there was little sympathy for the claims of the expellees.

In 1946 Winston Churchill held a memorable speech in Fenton, Missouri in the presence of US President Truman. The paragraph, which has become very famous, Churchill made the USA aware of the Iron Curtain coming down ...from Stettin to ... In this speech Churchill also emphazised the wrongful Russian Soviet controlled Polish incursions into Germany (that is the land east of the Oder-Neisse line and the plight of millions of refugeees/expellees. This statement is in stark contrast to what wikipedians an other older Cold War propaganda publications are reporting about Germany east of the two rivers and all histories concerning that land and people.

US Congressman B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee, in the House of Representatives on May 16, 1957, called it genocide.

In November and December, 1993, an exhibit on Ethnic Cleansing 1944-1948 was held at Stuart Center of De Paul University, in Chicago, where it was called an unknown holocaust.

In the 1990s the Iron Curtain came down. The issue of the treatment of Germans after World War II for the first time began to be reexamined. The primary motivations for this was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed previously untouchable issues such as crimes committed by Russians during World War II to be raised.

Reports have surfaced of Soviet massacres of German civilians (see the book A Terrible Revenge). Also some of former German concentration camps were used as temporal camps for Germans.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during his Soviet military service had objected to the brutal murder of German civilians of East Prussia. For that he was put in Siberian Gulag for 10 years. There he memorized and later documented his experiences in the military as well as in the Gulag.

Further reading

• Casualty of War: A Childhood Remembered (Eastern European Studies, 18) Luisa Lang Owen and Charles M. Barber, Texas A&M University Press, January, 2003, hardcover, 288 pages, ISBN 1585442127
• New York Times article, "Honor the Uprooted Germans? Poles Are Uneasy", by Richard Bernstein, October 15, 2003

• Silesian Inferno, War Crimes of the Red Army on its March into Silesia in 1945 , Karl F. Grau, The Landpost Press,Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1992

Referenced By