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Between June 1945 and 1947, roughly half a million Germans were expelled. [194] Between 24 August and 26 October 1948, 21 transports with a total of 42,094 Germans left the Kaliningrad Oblast for the Soviet Occupation Zone. The last remaining Germans were expelled between November 1949 [103] (1,401 people) and January 1950 (7). [195]
During the pre-Potsdam expulsions, many Germans were forced to march over 100 and sometimes even 200 kilometres. [167] Different estimates of the number of Germans expelled by People's Army of Poland alone during pre-Potsdam deportations (all numbers after Jankowiak): [168] 365,000 to 1,200,000 Germans were deported by Polish administration. [169]
Distinguished are refugees and expellees who had neither German citizenship nor German ethnicity but as a matter of fact had fled or been expelled from their former domiciles and stranded in West Germany or West Berlin before 1951. They were taken care of – as part of the displaced persons – by international refugee organisations until 1951 ...
These Germans were treated as second class citizens, especially regarding salary and food supply. So-called "abandoned wives", whose husbands found themselves in post-war Germany and were not able to return, were compelled to "seek divorce" and were not allowed to leave for Germany before 1950–52. [20]
In the chaos of the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed it, many ethnic Germans were displaced within Russia or emigrated from Russia altogether. The chaos surrounding the Russian Civil War was devastating to many German communities, particularly to religious dissenters like the Mennonites.
Between 13.5 and 16.5 million German-speakers fled, were evacuated or later expelled from Central and Eastern Europe, [48] [49] making this event the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in recorded history. estimates of the number of those who died during the process are being debated by historians and they range from 500,000 to 3,000,000.
For several years following the surrender, German nutritional levels were low. The Germans were not high on the priority list for international aid, which went to the victims of the Nazis. [34]: 281 It was directed that all relief went to non-German displaced persons, liberated Allied POWs, and concentration camp inmates.
(The term displaced persons does not typically refer to the several million ethnic Germans in Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands etc.) who were expelled and repatriated in Germany.) British authorities made June 30, 1946 the cutoff for accepting further displaced persons in their sector of occupation, and the American sector set it ...