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Some allege that the purpose of this policy was to punish Germany for its actions during World War II, motivated by political concept of Lebensraum.
Others perceived it as "act of historical justice", because e.g. Sudeten Germans strongly contributed to destruction of pre-war Czechoslovakia and ethnic Czechs were expeled from Sudeten after unfication with Nazi Germany.
Many believed ethincaly homogenous nation-states is the only way to prevent ethnic violence. As Churchill expounded in the House of Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble...A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions...". As German nationalists allways used the existence of large German minorities in other countries as base for terriotrial claimes and Adolf Hitler used it as 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 after World War II experience.
Some of those removed had been settled in the East by the Nazi government. Over 15 million Germans and ethnic Germans were forced to relocate and an estimated 1.8 to 3 million died during the trek. However, those numbers may include the evacuation during the WWII. These numbers are not well established as little research has been done on this subject. Other persons fled voluntarily, rather than being expelled by any government, and were prevented for decades from returning home (usually because of communist).
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. Many ethnic Germans collaborated with Nazi occupants. 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.
Some expelled Sudeten Germans or their descendants are demanding return of their former property, confiscated after war. Several such cases run at Czech courts. As confiscated estatates usualy have new inhabitants (for more than 50 years), attempts to return to pre-war state may cause fear, and topic is occasionaly live in Czech politics.
Further reading
See also