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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 ...
In the years following World War II, large numbers of German civilians and captured soldiers were forced into labor by the Allied forces. The topic of using Germans as forced labor for reparations was first broached at the Tehran conference in 1943, where Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin demanded 4,000,000 German workers. [1] [better source needed]
On 7 May 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied powers, marking the practical end of World War II in Europe. [107] The German Instrument of Surrender applied to German Wehrmacht forces in Yugoslavia, as well as to other armed forces under German control, such as the Croatian Armed Forces.
After World War II ended, the main four Allied powers – Great Britain, The United States, France, and the Soviet Union – jointly occupied Germany, with the Allied occupation officially ending in the 1950s. During this time, Germany was held accountable for the Allied occupation's expenses, amounting to over several billion dollars. [21]
German POWs were forced into slave labor during and after World War II by the Soviet Union. Based on documents in the Russian archives, Grigori F. Krivosheev in his 1993 study listed 2,389,600 German nationals taken as POWs and the deaths of 450,600 of these German POWs including 356,700 in NKVD camps and 93,900 in transit. In addition he ...
During World War II, expulsions were initiated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. The Germans deported 2.478 million Polish citizens from the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany , [ 30 ] murdered 1.8 to 2.77 million ethnic Poles, [ 31 ] another 2.7 to 3 million Polish Jews and resettled 1.3 million ethnic Germans in their place. [ 32 ]
Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939 which marked the beginning of World War II, the campaign of ethnic "cleansing" became the goal of military operations for the first time since the end of World War I. After the end of the war, between 13.5 and 16.5 million German-speakers lost their homes in formerly German lands and all over ...
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.