- Richard J. Evans
- June 25, 2012 | 12:00 am
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War
by R.M. Douglas
AT THE END of World War II, between twelve and fourteen million people, ethnic Germans, were forcibly expelled from Eastern Europe, or, if they had already fled, were prevented from going back to their homes. Many of them were simply bundled on to cattle trucks of the sort previously used to take Europe’s Jews to their fate in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and sent westward to Germany without food, water, or adequate winter clothing. Others were detained in appalling conditions in concentration camps for weeks, suffering from disease, starvation, and maltreatment, before they were brutally pushed out to the west. Long lines trudged towards Germany, with the weak succumbing to hypothermia and malnutrition. Altogether probably half a million and perhaps as many as a million perished in what was the largest action of what later came to be known as “ethnic cleansing” in history.
This massive act of expulsion and forced migration is still largely unknown outside the countries most closely affected by it. The story appears in standard histories of Germany and Europe in the twentieth century as little more than a footnote. Calling it to public attention questions the widespread popular understanding of World War II as a wholly good fight by the Allies against the evil of Nazism and German aggression. Unfortunately, history is seldom as simple as that. Until recently, few historians troubled to investigate the expulsions in any depth, and what writing there was on the topic was bedeviled by one-sided narratives of German suffering or Polish or Czech self-justification. But since the fall of Communism and the opening of the archives in these countries, serious and reasonably objective historical research by a new generation of younger historians less affected than their predecessors by national or ethnic prejudice has begun to appear. R. M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War draws on this recent work and incorporates archival research in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic as well as the files of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and the records of the British and American governments. It is a major achievement: for the first time it puts the whole subject onto a scholarly footing.
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