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Refugees moving westwards in 1945. During the later stages of World War II and the post-war period, Germans and Volksdeutsche fled and were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries, including Czechoslovakia, and from the former German provinces of Lower and Upper Silesia, East Prussia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania (Hinterpommern), which were annexed by ...
The German Expellees or Heimatvertriebene (German: [ˈhaɪmaːt.fɐˌtʁiːbənə] ⓘ, "homeland expellees") are 12–16 million German citizens (regardless of ethnicity) and ethnic Germans (regardless of citizenship) who fled or were expelled after World War II from parts of Germany annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union and from other ...
Ethnic German citizens from pre-war Poland, who collaborated with the German occupiers, were considered "traitors of the nation" and sentenced to forced labor. [72] In territories that belonged to Poland before the war, Germans were treated even more harshly than in the former German territories. [ 73 ]
In addition to former German citizens, their descendants and family members (usually from the marriage of an autochthon and non-autochthon) and other Polish citizens also emigrated to Germany after World War II in numbers difficult to estimate. During the 1980s, about 300,000 Poles left Poland (usually illegally) and settled in Western Germany.
German citizens (expatriates) from pre-war western Europe and abroad who resettled in postwar Germany as a consequence of the Second World War (BVFG § 1 (1)). Western European democracies did not denaturalise their citizens of German ethnicity, so they were not systematically expelled, but German expatriates often had to quit as enemy aliens.
Czech districts with an ethnic German population in 1934 of 20% or more (pink), 50% or more (red), and 80% or more (dark red) [19] in 1935 Following the Munich Agreement of 1938, and the subsequent Occupation of Bohemia and Moravia by Hitler in March 1939, Edvard Beneš set out to convince the Allies during World War II that the expulsion of ethnic Germans was the best solution.
A Deutsche Reichsbahn official inspects the escape tunnel beneath Berlin Wollankstraße station in January 1962.. Republikflucht (German pronunciation: [ʁepuˈbliːkˌflʊxt] ⓘ; German for "desertion from the republic") was the colloquial term in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) for illegal emigration to West Germany, West Berlin, and non-Warsaw Pact countries; the official ...
More than 3.8 million people left the GDR, many of them illegally and at high risk, between 7 October 1949 and June 1990, from its foundation until reunification. This figure includes 480,000 citizens of the GDR who left the country legally from 1962. About 400,000 eventually returned to the GDR over time. [7]