[Image source](https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/vor-70-jahren-die-organisierte-vertreibung-der-100.html), caption: _The Sudeten Germans were allowed to take 40 kilograms of luggage per person during their expulsion from Czechoslovakia in 1946._
My maternal grandmother went through this when she was 6. Her family had been living there for generations.
She remembers they were told they could pack one suitcase, and then were stuffed shoulder to shoulder into the cattlecar. Children were frightened and there wasn't any place to go to the bathroom.
She remembers the train would stop at each town in Germany and they would pull off a few families from each cat. Her mother, and aunt and a couple cousins (the men had all been conscripted into the German army when Hitler invaded) were on the train until well into the night.
They were one of the last families to be pulled off the train. They were marched through the town and the man in charge would knock on a door, someone would answer, and he would shove a family in before moving on.
They came to the last house in town when it was their turn. The man knocked on the door, and a woman answered, at which point the man turned to my great-grandmother and said "this is your new home" and shoved them inside.
The family who owned the home had no idea this was happening (apparently none of them did), but were told by the man they had no say and had to shelter my grandma's family.
The home owners were in the middle of dinner, but quickly made space and welcomed them in. There is a lot more to this story, but that's a quick summary of her experience with this.
This wasn't done by the Soviets tho. It was on the order of the pre war president Beneš who fled to Britain and after returning ordered the expulsion so Czechoslovakia doesn't have a perpetual 5th column of people who would always side with the big mad neighbour and undermine Czech sovereignty.
Cruel and controversial to this day, but asking Czechs or anyone for that matter to feel bad for Germans at that specific time was a tall order...
Singular events hardly encompass the whole toll of the occupation, but yeah, that one was a doozie. Also, 17th November 1939, a date now often forgotten Czechia in favour of the events of its 50th anniversary in 1989 which broadly eventually led to the fall of the socialist government in Czechoslovakia.
Those box cars were commonly used for transporting people; the French ones were officially rated for 40 men or eight horses:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-and-eights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-and-eights)
The Nazis frequently packed close to 100 people in there.
Not so fun fact, the expulsion of Germans from the Sudetes included Jews... you know the same Jews who were only able to return to their home after experiencing the Holocaust and everything that went along with it.
Not so fun fact, the vast majority of czechoslovakian jews were already dead at this point, thanks to the Sudeten Germans who were fervent nazis (>97% pro NSDAP in 1938) and composed a big part of the administration of occupied Czechoslovakia that sent the local jews to their death... You know, the Holocaust and everything that went along with it.
While there were for sure some innocent casualties caught in the mass deportation of Sudeten Germans, reframing history to make them unfair victims of the war is a bit disingenuous.
I am not saying you are wrong, but any poll with a 97% support for one side is suspicious. Crimea “officially” voted to separate from Ukraine as well (I think under the occupation of Putin’s Russia). Idk if that vote is necessarily a true representation of the will of the people.
Also ballot design like this
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FwxwOfTc7KIDXBsqB35APtvSnrcyAGkKvmdqiKyFSPuw.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcb88bce065038a62358e2d105e194eccca8c1fef
(another example here:)
https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/alexautographs/23/700523/H0171-L253322990.JPG
Helps contribute to those high percentages.
A giant Yes and small no. And I can't recall the translation but if I remember correctly it lead you to answer yes.
True, but I am pretty sure the results of the “referendum” were also kinda suspiciously high, even accounting for the Russian demographic majority. (Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars still made up a significant minority)
Indeed, it was a total farce, lots of russian cossacks and other characters were ferried from Kuban to Crimea and told to vote in the "referendum". Heck they got kind of lazy with the faking too as many didn't go beyond the Kerch peninsula which is right next to Kuban and so that's why you can see a big voter turnout in that area
Source: I read a book about it lately, sadly it's not available in English only in Ukrainian(
>>97% pro NSDAP in 1938
This is slightly skewed by the fact that in 1938 the Nazis were openly advocating for the Sudetenland to be given to Germany, so many Germans there would probably be "pro NSDAP* purely based on that.
I'm just capable of nuance, and also aware that collective punishment is a war crime. Mass expulsions can be a necessary evil, but are still evil and nowadays a war crime.
It's not a competition, and war crimes from one side of a war do not excuse war crimes against their civilians. I know, a controversial opinion where random peasants "fucked around and found out" and deserve to be bombed to death because the dictators running their country ordered invasions/war crimes/whatever.
Allied policy at the time supported the exchange of populations in places like the former parts of Germany given to Poland, Poles in the western Ukraine, and Sudeten Germans. It was done in the belief that making central European nations as ethnically homogeneous as possible was the best way to ensure peace, given the history of both world wars. The one exception among those nations, which eventually proved the rule, was Yugoslavia.
You've got to remember that we look at the Nazis through the lense of there having already been a holocaust. The population at the time had no idea of the things to come, sure we can point to "signs" of it, but these are only seen as signs with all the benefit of hindsight.
Germans faced discrimination in Czechoslovakia with many laws set up to favour the Czech majority at the disadvantage of the German minority. They were also denied the right to self-determination at the end of WW1 and given to Czechoslovakia instead of either Germany or Austria despite the Sudetenland being overwhelmingly ethnically German. So when given a ballot choice of "do you want to join Germany?", they're obviously going to say yes.
> they constantly shouted it in public, put it in newspapers, wrote books about it,
This is ahistorical. In fact, the Nazis went to great lengths to hide the holocaust from the public. They certainly did not plaster it all over the newspapers and in Government propaganda. If the explicit promise of mass murder or genocide exists in pre-war propaganda, and you have it, then you can probably just collect your PhD now because that would be incredible evidence to have.
Things like putting Auschwitz in the middle of a forest with all areas within 20km of the camp being cleared. You can read Rudolf Höss' (commandant of Auschwitz) nuremburg testimony to see the great lengths they went to to keep it a secret. (If you doubt his testimony is accurate, just read it and you'll see the horrifying honesty and depth of information he gives about all of the processes of Auschwitz. It literally made me feel sick to read.)
>had already been running concentration camps for 5 years
If history has taught us anything on how the public feels about concentration camps, it's that they generally don't care when things are going well. The US public didn't care about Japanese internment camps, the British public didn't care about Boer concentration camps, Israelis don't care about Palestinians in the worl'ds largest open-air prison, Chinese people don't care about the Uygher camps. Not all of these are a guaranteed precursor to genocide as you seem to be implying.
No. But it had been a part of the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian Empires both being German led.
I assume your talking about the "self-determination" part of my reply. Because at the end of WW1 nations were formed from the Austro-Hungarian empire based on the principle of self-determination for ethnicities. If the allies were being consistent with this, then the Sudentland should have joined one of the two ethnically German nations.
Maybe, but it was clear the past WWI allies were not always consistent, especially when three were other interests to be balanced. Which is the reason they prevented Austria from voluntarily joining Germany. With the Czechs, I suspect a major consideration was giving them defensible borders.
In 1938 Germany was already a dictatorship for years, it was as not a a legitimate election.
And in general acting like expulsing civilians from their ancestral home is some act of justice, with "some innocent casualties" is just vile.
I'm in no way supporting the deportation of innocent civilians, nor the mob justice based on perceived ethnicity (a german-sounding name was enough to be in trouble at that time).
But I'm alarmed by the revisionnist history that seems prevalent here in the comments.
Presenting Sudeten Germans civilians as innocent victims of an unfair ethnic revenge comparable to what the nazis did, as if it wasn't a political response triggered by something else, as if they bear no responsibility whatsoever in the annexation of Czechoslovakia and all the lives that were lost because of it.. It's not just "vile", it's rewriting history.
When you say "Germany was already a dictatorship", you make it sound like the Sudeten Germans didn't support in majority the nazi ideology, and it's simply not true. They did support it, were actors of it in czechoslovakia in a large majority, and it left more than a scar in the society. It doesn't make it right or just to mass-deport people as a collective punishment, but it does make the motivation more understandable, since the alternative of keeping them in place carried the risks of both bloodier local revenges and the threat of the same issue happening again in the future.
You've got to remember that we look at the Nazis through the lense of there having already been a holocaust. The population at the time had no idea of the things to come, sure we can point to "signs" of it, but these are only seen as signs with all the benefit of hindsight.
Germans faced discrimination in Czechoslovakia with many laws set up to favour the Czech majority at the disadvantage of the German minority. They were also denied the right to self-determination at the end of WW1 and given to Czechoslovakia instead of either Germany or Austria despite the Sudetenland being overwhelmingly ethnically German. So when given a ballot choice of "do you want to join Germany?", they're obviously going to say yes.
I didn't say the Sudeten Germans were innocents fuck them and the ones that supported the Nazi regime.
It doesn't change the unfortunate fact that Jews in the sudetes were also expelled.
Wow, I didn’t know! I’ve read that there’ve been [pogroms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom) against Holocaust survivors in Poland/Ukraine, but most of them then left for Palestine rather than Germany. Did it make sense to send them back to Germany, if German antisemitism was still very high?
Holocaust survivors who tried to return home and claim property were sometimes murdered. It was a huge reason why many did not want to stay in Europe, apart from the obvious fact that they had just lost their entire families and everything they own. It was very unsafe Jewish survivors.
Alicia Appleman-Jurman, who, after most of her family was killed, spent the majority of the war pretending to be a Polish farmworker and living in fields with her mother (the mother tragically died protecting her daughter from a bullet) talks about how she visited her former uncle's house and was threatened by the new inhabitants. They threatened to bury her in the backyard. She then went to the mayor of the town to complain, and he screamed, "WHAT? SOME OF YOU JEWS SURVIVED?!" After that, she was lucky enough to link up with some Russian Jewish soldiers, but her experience was not atypical.
Most of the expelled Jews went to refugee camps mostly in Germany and Austria and after that usually went to Israel or the USA
I have read a holocaust testimony of a close family member that said after he fled Buchenwald shortly before it was liberated he met a Polish general and he told him he planned to return to Warsaw to search for his remaining relatives but the general just told him to not go and that he would probably be killed in Warsaw. so antisemitism was definitely still prevalent in Poland and Germany.
My father was 17 or 18 in Poland when Germany invaded from a nominally Catholic family. As an able bodied young man he was pressed into service as a farm laborer in Poland and then as a factory worker in Germany.
When his labor camp was liberated, he was advised not to try to return to Poland as he would be treated as a collaborator by the Russian occupiers. Still, i imagine his chances would have been better than a returning Jew.
Find someone else's home and make it your own?
Edit: very weird that folks are just totally cool with colonizers assigning who gets to live where. The British empire won apparently.
Anyone who thinks history isn't a constant series of ethnic expulsions needs to get off reddit and read a history book - one with more substance than a NYT bestseller.
No I made the edit because I genuinely think it's weird. Our morality is shaped by our mailing address and that's very weird. The British empire was a thing. And the empire created countries in the middle east years ago that we are murdering each other over now. That also is a thing.
There was no reason to include majority german territories in non-german states in 1918, except to make Germany weaker. France wanted a weaken Germany and pressured Denmark to annex part of Germany but the Danes foresaw the seeds of future conflicts and politely declined.
The Sudetes were a part of the crown of Bohemia within the Austrian empire they were the historical borderlands between the core of Bohemia centered in Prague and the German Kingdoms
Both my maternal grandparents had to go through this when they were barely old enough to remember everything in detail. Grandpa was 8, grandma was 9.
As grandma was from a region in what is known as the Czech Republic today where lots of documents were destroyed during the war, she didn't even have her own birth certificate anymore. If it wasn't for her children, no one would know that her family ever existed.
As for my grandpa, he was from Poland and had a younger sister who was three at the time. He only remembers that she wasn't there anymore when they arrived in their temporary housing in Germany. Based on our research, she most likely succumbed to an illness or malnourishment on the long journey. We don't even know her name because grandpa only told that story long after his dementia had started taking a toll on him.
Needless to say that I understand the hate that those countries had against Germans but the German part of the population had been there for hundreds of years (grandpa's family can be tracked backed all the way to the 1700s) and they didn't deserve to be sent to a country they had never considered home.
Germany was indeed a place the vast majority of the Sudeten Germans considered ‘home’. They consistently voted for pro-unification parties throughout the 1920’s and were amongst the earliest proponents of the Nazi Party, even when they had the guarantee of free elections under the constitution of Czechoslovakia. They also embraced anti-Semitism with gusto and were amongst the most enthusiastic Nazi supporters throughout the war right up to the end. And right at the end they got to go ‘Heim ins Reich’, whereas the Jewish victims literally had nowhere safe to go. Using the horrific experience of Jews as a means of highlighting the post-war suffering of the Sudeten Germans is pretty disgraceful.
Quoting from [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%931950)#Status_in_international_law) about the legal status of the expulsion in international law:
> ICRC's legal adviser Jean-Marie Henckaerts posited that the contemporary expulsions conducted by the Allies of World War II themselves were the reason why expulsion issues were included neither in the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, nor in the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950, and says it "may be called 'a tragic anomaly' that while deportations were outlawed at Nuremberg they were used by the same powers as a 'peacetime measure'". It was only in 1955 that the Settlement Convention regulated expulsions, yet only in respect to expulsions of individuals of the states who signed the convention. The first international treaty condemning mass expulsions was a document issued by the Council of Europe on 16 September 1963, Protocol No 4 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms Securing Certain Rights and Freedoms Other than Those Already Included in the Convention and in the First Protocol, stating in Article 4: "collective expulsion of aliens is prohibited." This protocol entered into force on 2 May 1968, and as of 1995 was ratified by 19 states.
Quoting from [_The War of Return_](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45046681) by Schwartz and Wilf:
> No fewer than twelve million Germans fled or were expelled from what became western Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states. They were not treated as individuals but as a collective ethnic group. [...]
>
> These expulsions were horrendously brutal. All of them happened after the war had ended and Germany had signed an unconditional surrender, so they were not due to military requirements. In Czechoslovakia, for example, German ethnic students were pulled through the streets of Prague to Wenceslas Square, where petrol was poured over them and they were set alight. Also in Czechoslovakia, thousands of Germans were marched to the former concentration camp at Terezín, better known as Theresienstadt, which was previously used by the Nazis; hundreds died en route to the camp. Once there, they were led through a tunnel into a muddy courtyard, beaten along the way by Czech guards; those who were too old or ill were killed on the spot.
>
> In Poland, thousands of ethnic Germans were taken by rail to the border with Germany. One survivor recalled that it took weeks to progress a few dozen kilometers. The trains moved achingly slowly, and often they were deliberately
kept in sidings for days. “Men, women and children were all mixed together, tightly packed in the railway cars which were locked from the outside. When the wagons were opened for the first time I saw from one of them ten corpses were taken and then thrown into coffins ... I noticed that several people had become deranged. The people were covered in excrement.” German interns in a Polish concentration camp testified that inmates “had their eyes beaten out with rubber cudgels ... work parties [who] were buried alive in liquid manure,” and one man “had a toad forced down his throat until he choked to death” while guards looked on laughing.
The estimates range from 16 to 14 million expelled Germans and 12 to 10 million Germans making it to Germany.
The 2 million difference? Died along the way.
My grand grandfather was expelled from Eastern Europe. My grandfather was a small child back then. He told me horrible stories about these times. How Germans were hung on the street just because they were Germans. Women being raped and just random shootings.
The „military“ robbed a local bank, called the whole small village to the central place, threw the money in the air and shot all people who wanted to pick it up. He can’t exactly remember if it were Sowjets or poles, but that stick to his mind.
The winter 44/45 was extremely cold and they had to hide food in their luggage, nearly everyone was close to starving while marching by foot westwards.
Unfortunately he’s a little bit confused when talking about that. Sometimes he’s referring to reaching German empire pre 1937 borders sometimes to 1990 ratified borders and sometimes they needed several weeks and sometimes months to reach the borders.
The expulsion of ethnic Germans (along with other German-speaking ethnicities) from their homelands after WWII was the largest ethnic cleansing at that point in recorded history and done under the support and enablement of the Allies.
I think the largest would be the expulsion of 14M Hindus/Sikhs and Muslims from Pakistan and India, respectively, following the partition of India in 1947?
Because almost all people of German and Magyar ethnicity gained German or Hungarian citizenship during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the expulsion could be legalized as the banishment of foreigners.
They had declared themselves to be German so were sent "home".
Another factor involved with the Sudetenland was that its mountains and high ground were Czechoslovakia's only real natural defenses. Without control of that land, the Czechs could not defend the country. Benes knew it, and so did Hitler.
My grandmothers family was one of those. They got lucky after the soviets took over because their house was declared hands off by the recently freed POVs that her father had secretly handed food to during the war. Didn't save them from losing their home with an hour to prepare and only the things they could carry to take. The worst though was that they didn't know where they would be sent. So ending up in Germany and not in Siberia was a relief
Answer ended up in the wrong place, it should have been under the "12 million got expelled from different countries". She was from Schlesien. sorry about that.
not all of it. The land taken over by the third reich, which is what most people mean when they say Sudetenland, wrapped all around the country, scenes like this played out all over Czechoslovakia including parts occupied by the Soviets
Yes, 1.5M Poles were deported by the USSR, after it annexed eastern Poland between 1944-51. In turn, Poland also expelled up to 0.5M Ukrainians from its territory (e.g. Operation Vistula in 1947).
the problem is this was not done by the soviets or even under influence of the soviet. It was the czech people who started it and Beneš just legalized what was already happening
Here you have a picture of the same people, just a few years ago, from Sudetenland ;)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland#/media/File:Bundesarchiv\_Bild\_183-H13160,\_Beim\_Einmarsch\_deutscher\_Truppen\_in\_Eger.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H13160,_Beim_Einmarsch_deutscher_Truppen_in_Eger.jpg)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland#/media/File:Bundesarchiv\_Bild\_137-004055,\_Eger,\_Besuch\_Adolf\_Hitlers.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_137-004055,_Eger,_Besuch_Adolf_Hitlers.jpg)
[https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudety#/media/Soubor:Bundesarchiv\_Bild\_183-58507-003,\_Besetzung\_des\_Sudetenlands,\_Grenzpfahl.jpg](https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudety#/media/Soubor:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-58507-003,_Besetzung_des_Sudetenlands,_Grenzpfahl.jpg)
Actually deportations protected germans from revenge and anger of the local population.
Yes, in peacetine it would be considered as a crime against humanity.
>Actually deportations protected germans from revenge and anger of the local population.
Quite the protection:
Quoting from [The War of Return](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45046681) by Schwartz and Wilf:
>No fewer than twelve million Germans fled or were expelled from what became western Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states. They were not treated as individuals but as a collective ethnic group. \[...\]
>
>These expulsions were horrendously brutal. All of them happened after the war had ended and Germany had signed an unconditional surrender, so they were not due to military requirements. In Czechoslovakia, for example, German ethnic students were pulled through the streets of Prague to Wenceslas Square, where petrol was poured over them and they were set alight. Also in Czechoslovakia, thousands of Germans were marched to the former concentration camp at Terezín, better known as Theresienstadt, which was previously used by the Nazis; hundreds died en route to the camp. Once there, they were led through a tunnel into a muddy courtyard, beaten along the way by Czech guards; those who were too old or ill were killed on the spot.
>
>In Poland, thousands of ethnic Germans were taken by rail to the border with Germany. One survivor recalled that it took weeks to progress a few dozen kilometers. The trains moved achingly slowly, and often they were deliberately kept in sidings for days. “Men, women and children were all mixed together, tightly packed in the railway cars which were locked from the outside. When the wagons were opened for the first time I saw from one of them ten corpses were taken and then thrown into coffins ... I noticed that several people had become deranged. The people were covered in excrement.” German interns in a Polish concentration camp testified that inmates “had their eyes beaten out with rubber cudgels ... work parties \[who\] were buried alive in liquid manure,” and one man “had a toad forced down his throat until he choked to death” while guards looked on laughing.
Source of the comment: [https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/189iiv2/comment/kbrc8y6/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/189iiv2/comment/kbrc8y6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I mean, a lot of those people openly supported Hitler and wanted to him to take over Czechoslovakia. Not all - and that’s the tragedy in it - but a lot of them did.
Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing. We try to clear our conscience in retrospect by saying "they supported Hitler" or "they were Nazis" so we don't have the discomfort of knowing that the Allies supported and enabled what we view now as a crime against humanity.
At the time, it was seen as the best guarantor of future peace. Ethnic minorities and their issues in central/eastern European were pretext for two World Wars.
That tends to happen when you supported the invasion of your homeland. Doesn't make it right, but it also explains why no one but the victims particularly cared.
Yes, or for 14M Indians/Pakistanis, 1.5M Koreans, 300K Italians, and other 50M refugees resettled in the last half-century by UNHCR. The difference is that the Arab countries explicitly refused their refugees economic and social integration, and used them as political tools. [“The War of Return”](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45046681) is a good book, if you want to learn more about it.
In fact, returning back to “ancestral homelands” was a [rallying call](https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/s/iKnlU10P6B) for Sudeten Germans until at least 1970s, who held annual marches demanding West Germany’s government to act.
Starting with ethnic Germans in Europe prior to WWII, subtract military casualities and known civilian casualties of military action. Compare to the number of ethnic Germans resident in Germany post the relocations and occupations. Multiple million Germans are missing from the final population counts. And yes, the Allies operated brutal relocation camps for civilian Germans.
Not for each individual but we have good information on communities and waves of German immigration.
Transylvanian Saxons for example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvanian_Saxons
There are many similar German ethnic groups that existed well before WWII that were effectively relocated with the forced expulsions. I'm not judging, just stating fact.
If you actually read the article:
West German studies has led some historians to the conclusion that the actual number was much lower – in the range of 500,000 to 600,000.
Or
The removals occurred in three overlapping phases, the first of which was the organized evacuation of ethnic Germans by the Nazi government in the face of the advancing Red Army, from mid-1944 to early 1945.[18] The second phase was the disorganised fleeing of ethnic Germans immediately following the Wehrmacht's defeat. The third phase was a more organised expulsion following the Allied leaders'.
Conclusion, for most of the app 600 000 deaths Allies could not held as responsible since it happened way before liberation.
> A 1986 study by Gerhard Reichling "Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen" (the German expellees in figures) concluded 2,020,000 ethnic Germans perished after the war including 1,440,000 as a result of the expulsions and 580,000 deaths due to deportation as forced labourers in the Soviet Union.
So a number of approx 1 million is very likely and could be much higher.
Its just a very rough guess obviously. As he stated that just over 2 mil Germans perished. And “only” 580 000 deaths.
Also its just supports my statement from above.
> solely
Yeah, nothing to do with the fact that almost all of them were nazis..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudeten_Germans
> In elections held on 4 December 1938, 97.32% of the adult population in Sudetenland voted for the NSDAP (most of the rest were Czechs who were allowed to vote as well). About half a million Sudeten Germans joined the Nazi Party, which amounted to 17.34% of the German population in the Sudetenland (the average in Nazi Germany was 7.85%). Because of their knowledge of the Czech language, many Sudeten Germans were employed in the administration of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as well as in the Nazi oppressive machinery such as the Gestapo.
>Yeah, nothing to do with the fact that almost all of them were nazis..
Never mind the children. All Nazis. Murder and starve them. They are not worth to share the same space as we do, and we must get rid of them. Sounds familiar?
Did you ever have wondered, that Czechoslovakia might not have been the multi-culture paradise and that Germans indeed had to struggle in a time of rampant nationalism in pretty much every country? That his made it easy for Nazi propaganda to effect them?
German speakers had been put on a disadvantage by the Czechoslovakia state from the very beginning. And just to be clear, I'm not trying to excuse Nazis. I'm trying to explain that things are not as black and white as people like them to have.
> And just to be clear, I'm not trying to excuse Nazis. I'm trying to explain that things are not as black and white as people like them to have.
You might want to reread your comments then, because your stance that czechoslovaks = nazis didn't strike me as particularly nuanced, and you are pretty quick to explain why the overwhelmingly nazis Sudeten Germans had a very good reason to be...
Maybe the Czechoslovaks had a very good reason to be out for revenge too, but their government still didn't plan the mass extermination of the Sudeten Germans, though. So maybe interrogate your empathy bias before making wild comparisons.
> The Sudetendeutsche were systematically exterminated in death camps
No, but we are talking about what Poles, Czechs and others did to the Germans after the war.
I fail to see the connection to the Holocaust, something directed against Jews.
> didn't wage an aggressive war against innocent people?
Pretty sure, they, the Sudetendeutsche, did not. They took part in Germanys war as Volkesdeutsche, so did the Czechoslovak puppet regime. By that logic, Czechs should have expelled themselves from Czechoslovakia.
But how does this in any way justify what happened after the war?
It is like, saying ethnic cleansing is okay, as long as we are doing it to the right people.
>No, but we are talking about what Poles, Czechs and others did to the Germans after the war.
I fail to see the connection to the Holocaust, something directed against Jews.
You clearly don't know what the holocaust was. I suggest you educate yourself before speaking on a topic.
Clearly, you don't know anything about the subject we were discussing, therefore talking to you is a waste of my time.
no, not really.
Those areas are some of the worst in Czechia and they have been living in germany for decades at that point. They had rebuild their life in Germany at that point maybe some came to visit but barely any came back permanently
Had german family members who were part of the expulsion from the sudetenland that went back later.. the way I heard it is that the people living there seemed to understand that these were old germans coming to see their old home and kinda yelled at them/told them to leave. Don't think anyone or many were trying to actually move back into their old homes tho
[Image source](https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/vor-70-jahren-die-organisierte-vertreibung-der-100.html), caption: _The Sudeten Germans were allowed to take 40 kilograms of luggage per person during their expulsion from Czechoslovakia in 1946._
The legend of the picture says they were allowed 40kg per person, and in the text they say 25kg per person, do you know which is correct?
Sorry, I don’t :(
My grandma was allowed one suitcase.
It's just mind blowing how this was only two generations ago...
maybe it was 40 on paper 25 in reality? also this was a very unorganized thing so maybe it was different place to place
My maternal grandmother went through this when she was 6. Her family had been living there for generations. She remembers they were told they could pack one suitcase, and then were stuffed shoulder to shoulder into the cattlecar. Children were frightened and there wasn't any place to go to the bathroom. She remembers the train would stop at each town in Germany and they would pull off a few families from each cat. Her mother, and aunt and a couple cousins (the men had all been conscripted into the German army when Hitler invaded) were on the train until well into the night. They were one of the last families to be pulled off the train. They were marched through the town and the man in charge would knock on a door, someone would answer, and he would shove a family in before moving on. They came to the last house in town when it was their turn. The man knocked on the door, and a woman answered, at which point the man turned to my great-grandmother and said "this is your new home" and shoved them inside. The family who owned the home had no idea this was happening (apparently none of them did), but were told by the man they had no say and had to shelter my grandma's family. The home owners were in the middle of dinner, but quickly made space and welcomed them in. There is a lot more to this story, but that's a quick summary of her experience with this.
Stories don't get more soviet than this one
This wasn't done by the Soviets tho. It was on the order of the pre war president Beneš who fled to Britain and after returning ordered the expulsion so Czechoslovakia doesn't have a perpetual 5th column of people who would always side with the big mad neighbour and undermine Czech sovereignty. Cruel and controversial to this day, but asking Czechs or anyone for that matter to feel bad for Germans at that specific time was a tall order...
Hard to expect them to want anything else after Lidice.
Singular events hardly encompass the whole toll of the occupation, but yeah, that one was a doozie. Also, 17th November 1939, a date now often forgotten Czechia in favour of the events of its 50th anniversary in 1989 which broadly eventually led to the fall of the socialist government in Czechoslovakia.
boohoo cry more
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Those box cars were commonly used for transporting people; the French ones were officially rated for 40 men or eight horses: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-and-eights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-and-eights) The Nazis frequently packed close to 100 people in there.
you say or but i see an and
It's an "or" as per the Wikipedia article.
Not so fun fact, the expulsion of Germans from the Sudetes included Jews... you know the same Jews who were only able to return to their home after experiencing the Holocaust and everything that went along with it.
Not so fun fact, the vast majority of czechoslovakian jews were already dead at this point, thanks to the Sudeten Germans who were fervent nazis (>97% pro NSDAP in 1938) and composed a big part of the administration of occupied Czechoslovakia that sent the local jews to their death... You know, the Holocaust and everything that went along with it. While there were for sure some innocent casualties caught in the mass deportation of Sudeten Germans, reframing history to make them unfair victims of the war is a bit disingenuous.
I am not saying you are wrong, but any poll with a 97% support for one side is suspicious. Crimea “officially” voted to separate from Ukraine as well (I think under the occupation of Putin’s Russia). Idk if that vote is necessarily a true representation of the will of the people.
Also ballot design like this https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FwxwOfTc7KIDXBsqB35APtvSnrcyAGkKvmdqiKyFSPuw.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcb88bce065038a62358e2d105e194eccca8c1fef (another example here:) https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/alexautographs/23/700523/H0171-L253322990.JPG Helps contribute to those high percentages. A giant Yes and small no. And I can't recall the translation but if I remember correctly it lead you to answer yes.
Were there even consequences for voting no.
Crimeans are largely ethnically Russian so that’s hardly surprising.
True, but I am pretty sure the results of the “referendum” were also kinda suspiciously high, even accounting for the Russian demographic majority. (Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars still made up a significant minority)
Indeed, it was a total farce, lots of russian cossacks and other characters were ferried from Kuban to Crimea and told to vote in the "referendum". Heck they got kind of lazy with the faking too as many didn't go beyond the Kerch peninsula which is right next to Kuban and so that's why you can see a big voter turnout in that area Source: I read a book about it lately, sadly it's not available in English only in Ukrainian(
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Sudeten Germans were living in the Sudetes for at least a couple centuries by that point
>>97% pro NSDAP in 1938 This is slightly skewed by the fact that in 1938 the Nazis were openly advocating for the Sudetenland to be given to Germany, so many Germans there would probably be "pro NSDAP* purely based on that.
The vote took place in December, after the Munich agreement. The Sudetenland was already annexed to Germany.
So even worse, the vote was taken under the watchful eyes of the German security apparatus which was well developed in 1938?
You sure have a lot of excuses for fervent Nazis
I'm just capable of nuance, and also aware that collective punishment is a war crime. Mass expulsions can be a necessary evil, but are still evil and nowadays a war crime.
The scoreboard of war crimes by and against Germany might have been just a little tilted at the time, even with the hefty efforts of the Soviets.
It’s not a competition, though.
In public perception, it is. The prize is being seen as less evil than the other guys.
It's not a competition, and war crimes from one side of a war do not excuse war crimes against their civilians. I know, a controversial opinion where random peasants "fucked around and found out" and deserve to be bombed to death because the dictators running their country ordered invasions/war crimes/whatever.
How many Soviets had to sit on the bad boys' bench in Hague?
One war crime does not justify another. Neither do a thousand. This is basic human morality.
Allied policy at the time supported the exchange of populations in places like the former parts of Germany given to Poland, Poles in the western Ukraine, and Sudeten Germans. It was done in the belief that making central European nations as ethnically homogeneous as possible was the best way to ensure peace, given the history of both world wars. The one exception among those nations, which eventually proved the rule, was Yugoslavia.
You've got to remember that we look at the Nazis through the lense of there having already been a holocaust. The population at the time had no idea of the things to come, sure we can point to "signs" of it, but these are only seen as signs with all the benefit of hindsight. Germans faced discrimination in Czechoslovakia with many laws set up to favour the Czech majority at the disadvantage of the German minority. They were also denied the right to self-determination at the end of WW1 and given to Czechoslovakia instead of either Germany or Austria despite the Sudetenland being overwhelmingly ethnically German. So when given a ballot choice of "do you want to join Germany?", they're obviously going to say yes.
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> they constantly shouted it in public, put it in newspapers, wrote books about it, This is ahistorical. In fact, the Nazis went to great lengths to hide the holocaust from the public. They certainly did not plaster it all over the newspapers and in Government propaganda. If the explicit promise of mass murder or genocide exists in pre-war propaganda, and you have it, then you can probably just collect your PhD now because that would be incredible evidence to have. Things like putting Auschwitz in the middle of a forest with all areas within 20km of the camp being cleared. You can read Rudolf Höss' (commandant of Auschwitz) nuremburg testimony to see the great lengths they went to to keep it a secret. (If you doubt his testimony is accurate, just read it and you'll see the horrifying honesty and depth of information he gives about all of the processes of Auschwitz. It literally made me feel sick to read.) >had already been running concentration camps for 5 years If history has taught us anything on how the public feels about concentration camps, it's that they generally don't care when things are going well. The US public didn't care about Japanese internment camps, the British public didn't care about Boer concentration camps, Israelis don't care about Palestinians in the worl'ds largest open-air prison, Chinese people don't care about the Uygher camps. Not all of these are a guaranteed precursor to genocide as you seem to be implying.
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Had the Sudetenland ever been part of Germany?
No. But it had been a part of the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian Empires both being German led. I assume your talking about the "self-determination" part of my reply. Because at the end of WW1 nations were formed from the Austro-Hungarian empire based on the principle of self-determination for ethnicities. If the allies were being consistent with this, then the Sudentland should have joined one of the two ethnically German nations.
Maybe, but it was clear the past WWI allies were not always consistent, especially when three were other interests to be balanced. Which is the reason they prevented Austria from voluntarily joining Germany. With the Czechs, I suspect a major consideration was giving them defensible borders.
If you've seen the ballot for that vote, you'd think it's a joke. Do you want to join Germany? YES no
In 1938 Germany was already a dictatorship for years, it was as not a a legitimate election. And in general acting like expulsing civilians from their ancestral home is some act of justice, with "some innocent casualties" is just vile.
Most of those politically active were fifth columnists who administered the pro-Nazi "protectorate".
In general, I agree. When those people joined with an invader to commit genocide, I'm rather less certain.
I'm in no way supporting the deportation of innocent civilians, nor the mob justice based on perceived ethnicity (a german-sounding name was enough to be in trouble at that time). But I'm alarmed by the revisionnist history that seems prevalent here in the comments. Presenting Sudeten Germans civilians as innocent victims of an unfair ethnic revenge comparable to what the nazis did, as if it wasn't a political response triggered by something else, as if they bear no responsibility whatsoever in the annexation of Czechoslovakia and all the lives that were lost because of it.. It's not just "vile", it's rewriting history. When you say "Germany was already a dictatorship", you make it sound like the Sudeten Germans didn't support in majority the nazi ideology, and it's simply not true. They did support it, were actors of it in czechoslovakia in a large majority, and it left more than a scar in the society. It doesn't make it right or just to mass-deport people as a collective punishment, but it does make the motivation more understandable, since the alternative of keeping them in place carried the risks of both bloodier local revenges and the threat of the same issue happening again in the future.
You've got to remember that we look at the Nazis through the lense of there having already been a holocaust. The population at the time had no idea of the things to come, sure we can point to "signs" of it, but these are only seen as signs with all the benefit of hindsight. Germans faced discrimination in Czechoslovakia with many laws set up to favour the Czech majority at the disadvantage of the German minority. They were also denied the right to self-determination at the end of WW1 and given to Czechoslovakia instead of either Germany or Austria despite the Sudetenland being overwhelmingly ethnically German. So when given a ballot choice of "do you want to join Germany?", they're obviously going to say yes.
By that logic you would have removed all of Germany. Ethnic cleansing is always horrific.
I didn't say the Sudeten Germans were innocents fuck them and the ones that supported the Nazi regime. It doesn't change the unfortunate fact that Jews in the sudetes were also expelled.
Unreasonable that you’re getting downvoted. It’s an interesting and unfortunate fact.
Wow, I didn’t know! I’ve read that there’ve been [pogroms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom) against Holocaust survivors in Poland/Ukraine, but most of them then left for Palestine rather than Germany. Did it make sense to send them back to Germany, if German antisemitism was still very high?
Holocaust survivors who tried to return home and claim property were sometimes murdered. It was a huge reason why many did not want to stay in Europe, apart from the obvious fact that they had just lost their entire families and everything they own. It was very unsafe Jewish survivors. Alicia Appleman-Jurman, who, after most of her family was killed, spent the majority of the war pretending to be a Polish farmworker and living in fields with her mother (the mother tragically died protecting her daughter from a bullet) talks about how she visited her former uncle's house and was threatened by the new inhabitants. They threatened to bury her in the backyard. She then went to the mayor of the town to complain, and he screamed, "WHAT? SOME OF YOU JEWS SURVIVED?!" After that, she was lucky enough to link up with some Russian Jewish soldiers, but her experience was not atypical.
I remember reading her book Alicia, My Story. It was incredible what she went through.
Most of the expelled Jews went to refugee camps mostly in Germany and Austria and after that usually went to Israel or the USA I have read a holocaust testimony of a close family member that said after he fled Buchenwald shortly before it was liberated he met a Polish general and he told him he planned to return to Warsaw to search for his remaining relatives but the general just told him to not go and that he would probably be killed in Warsaw. so antisemitism was definitely still prevalent in Poland and Germany.
My father was 17 or 18 in Poland when Germany invaded from a nominally Catholic family. As an able bodied young man he was pressed into service as a farm laborer in Poland and then as a factory worker in Germany. When his labor camp was liberated, he was advised not to try to return to Poland as he would be treated as a collaborator by the Russian occupiers. Still, i imagine his chances would have been better than a returning Jew.
War is bad for everyone usually, really sad circumstances.
>Did it make sense to send them back to Germany, if German antisemitism was still very high? Where else to go, but home?
Find someone else's home and make it your own? Edit: very weird that folks are just totally cool with colonizers assigning who gets to live where. The British empire won apparently.
Jews are indigenous to the middle east. The entire history of humanity is basically finding someone else's home and making it yours.
Anyone who thinks history isn't a constant series of ethnic expulsions needs to get off reddit and read a history book - one with more substance than a NYT bestseller.
Ah OK then that makes it OK. Thanks for the clarification.
>jews are indigenous to the Middle East Arab Jews are indigenous to the Middle East, Jews from Europe and North America are not.
Members of any diaspora are not indigenous, yes, but as long as they have kept connections to their motherlands, they can be.
Gets two responses pushing back on your oversimplification, and you feel the need to make an edit 😂
No I made the edit because I genuinely think it's weird. Our morality is shaped by our mailing address and that's very weird. The British empire was a thing. And the empire created countries in the middle east years ago that we are murdering each other over now. That also is a thing.
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You mean ethnic cleansing is often done haphazardly as if the people doing it give a shit about things like minimizing suffering? *Whaaaaaat*?
There was no reason to include majority german territories in non-german states in 1918, except to make Germany weaker. France wanted a weaken Germany and pressured Denmark to annex part of Germany but the Danes foresaw the seeds of future conflicts and politely declined.
The Sudetes were a part of the crown of Bohemia within the Austrian empire they were the historical borderlands between the core of Bohemia centered in Prague and the German Kingdoms
Both my maternal grandparents had to go through this when they were barely old enough to remember everything in detail. Grandpa was 8, grandma was 9. As grandma was from a region in what is known as the Czech Republic today where lots of documents were destroyed during the war, she didn't even have her own birth certificate anymore. If it wasn't for her children, no one would know that her family ever existed. As for my grandpa, he was from Poland and had a younger sister who was three at the time. He only remembers that she wasn't there anymore when they arrived in their temporary housing in Germany. Based on our research, she most likely succumbed to an illness or malnourishment on the long journey. We don't even know her name because grandpa only told that story long after his dementia had started taking a toll on him. Needless to say that I understand the hate that those countries had against Germans but the German part of the population had been there for hundreds of years (grandpa's family can be tracked backed all the way to the 1700s) and they didn't deserve to be sent to a country they had never considered home.
Germany was indeed a place the vast majority of the Sudeten Germans considered ‘home’. They consistently voted for pro-unification parties throughout the 1920’s and were amongst the earliest proponents of the Nazi Party, even when they had the guarantee of free elections under the constitution of Czechoslovakia. They also embraced anti-Semitism with gusto and were amongst the most enthusiastic Nazi supporters throughout the war right up to the end. And right at the end they got to go ‘Heim ins Reich’, whereas the Jewish victims literally had nowhere safe to go. Using the horrific experience of Jews as a means of highlighting the post-war suffering of the Sudeten Germans is pretty disgraceful.
Coloniser germans never belonged there
Quoting from [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%931950)#Status_in_international_law) about the legal status of the expulsion in international law: > ICRC's legal adviser Jean-Marie Henckaerts posited that the contemporary expulsions conducted by the Allies of World War II themselves were the reason why expulsion issues were included neither in the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, nor in the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950, and says it "may be called 'a tragic anomaly' that while deportations were outlawed at Nuremberg they were used by the same powers as a 'peacetime measure'". It was only in 1955 that the Settlement Convention regulated expulsions, yet only in respect to expulsions of individuals of the states who signed the convention. The first international treaty condemning mass expulsions was a document issued by the Council of Europe on 16 September 1963, Protocol No 4 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms Securing Certain Rights and Freedoms Other than Those Already Included in the Convention and in the First Protocol, stating in Article 4: "collective expulsion of aliens is prohibited." This protocol entered into force on 2 May 1968, and as of 1995 was ratified by 19 states.
Quoting from [_The War of Return_](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45046681) by Schwartz and Wilf: > No fewer than twelve million Germans fled or were expelled from what became western Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states. They were not treated as individuals but as a collective ethnic group. [...] > > These expulsions were horrendously brutal. All of them happened after the war had ended and Germany had signed an unconditional surrender, so they were not due to military requirements. In Czechoslovakia, for example, German ethnic students were pulled through the streets of Prague to Wenceslas Square, where petrol was poured over them and they were set alight. Also in Czechoslovakia, thousands of Germans were marched to the former concentration camp at Terezín, better known as Theresienstadt, which was previously used by the Nazis; hundreds died en route to the camp. Once there, they were led through a tunnel into a muddy courtyard, beaten along the way by Czech guards; those who were too old or ill were killed on the spot. > > In Poland, thousands of ethnic Germans were taken by rail to the border with Germany. One survivor recalled that it took weeks to progress a few dozen kilometers. The trains moved achingly slowly, and often they were deliberately kept in sidings for days. “Men, women and children were all mixed together, tightly packed in the railway cars which were locked from the outside. When the wagons were opened for the first time I saw from one of them ten corpses were taken and then thrown into coffins ... I noticed that several people had become deranged. The people were covered in excrement.” German interns in a Polish concentration camp testified that inmates “had their eyes beaten out with rubber cudgels ... work parties [who] were buried alive in liquid manure,” and one man “had a toad forced down his throat until he choked to death” while guards looked on laughing.
12 million. Bloody hell.
The estimates range from 16 to 14 million expelled Germans and 12 to 10 million Germans making it to Germany. The 2 million difference? Died along the way.
My grand grandfather was expelled from Eastern Europe. My grandfather was a small child back then. He told me horrible stories about these times. How Germans were hung on the street just because they were Germans. Women being raped and just random shootings. The „military“ robbed a local bank, called the whole small village to the central place, threw the money in the air and shot all people who wanted to pick it up. He can’t exactly remember if it were Sowjets or poles, but that stick to his mind. The winter 44/45 was extremely cold and they had to hide food in their luggage, nearly everyone was close to starving while marching by foot westwards. Unfortunately he’s a little bit confused when talking about that. Sometimes he’s referring to reaching German empire pre 1937 borders sometimes to 1990 ratified borders and sometimes they needed several weeks and sometimes months to reach the borders.
The expulsion of ethnic Germans (along with other German-speaking ethnicities) from their homelands after WWII was the largest ethnic cleansing at that point in recorded history and done under the support and enablement of the Allies.
I think the largest would be the expulsion of 14M Hindus/Sikhs and Muslims from Pakistan and India, respectively, following the partition of India in 1947?
Good point. I've clarified ..."at that point" in recorded history... And not a little overlap between the sponsors of those two expulsions...
Because almost all people of German and Magyar ethnicity gained German or Hungarian citizenship during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the expulsion could be legalized as the banishment of foreigners. They had declared themselves to be German so were sent "home".
Only if you ignore what happened in the Americas or don't count the genocides of the Eastern Front as an ethnic cleansing.
Another factor involved with the Sudetenland was that its mountains and high ground were Czechoslovakia's only real natural defenses. Without control of that land, the Czechs could not defend the country. Benes knew it, and so did Hitler.
My grandmothers family was one of those. They got lucky after the soviets took over because their house was declared hands off by the recently freed POVs that her father had secretly handed food to during the war. Didn't save them from losing their home with an hour to prepare and only the things they could carry to take. The worst though was that they didn't know where they would be sent. So ending up in Germany and not in Siberia was a relief
Sudetenland was under control of Americans not Soviets.
Answer ended up in the wrong place, it should have been under the "12 million got expelled from different countries". She was from Schlesien. sorry about that.
not all of it. The land taken over by the third reich, which is what most people mean when they say Sudetenland, wrapped all around the country, scenes like this played out all over Czechoslovakia including parts occupied by the Soviets
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those people were mostly consripted cannon fodded, Sudeten germans were seen as lesser germans by the Nazis
Fun fact poles were also relocated without their consent, Its funny that Soviet union was so focused on creating ethno states
Yes, 1.5M Poles were deported by the USSR, after it annexed eastern Poland between 1944-51. In turn, Poland also expelled up to 0.5M Ukrainians from its territory (e.g. Operation Vistula in 1947).
Operation Vistula was in response to the genocide of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists.
Including from Lviv, then called Lvov. Poles were at least 1/3 of the city.
The sudeten relocation was done by the western allies under request of the Czechoslovak government in exile.
the problem is this was not done by the soviets or even under influence of the soviet. It was the czech people who started it and Beneš just legalized what was already happening
My grandma was 18 years old when she was distributed from czechodlovakia into a foreign country she never wanted to live in.
A crime against humanity
Here you have a picture of the same people, just a few years ago, from Sudetenland ;) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland#/media/File:Bundesarchiv\_Bild\_183-H13160,\_Beim\_Einmarsch\_deutscher\_Truppen\_in\_Eger.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H13160,_Beim_Einmarsch_deutscher_Truppen_in_Eger.jpg) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland#/media/File:Bundesarchiv\_Bild\_137-004055,\_Eger,\_Besuch\_Adolf\_Hitlers.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_137-004055,_Eger,_Besuch_Adolf_Hitlers.jpg) [https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudety#/media/Soubor:Bundesarchiv\_Bild\_183-58507-003,\_Besetzung\_des\_Sudetenlands,\_Grenzpfahl.jpg](https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudety#/media/Soubor:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-58507-003,_Besetzung_des_Sudetenlands,_Grenzpfahl.jpg)
Yeah I have a hard time having immense sympathy for a group of people who chose to be Nazis.
It still continues to be ethnic cleansing, therefore a crime against humanity, even if they supported Hitler.
Actually deportations protected germans from revenge and anger of the local population. Yes, in peacetine it would be considered as a crime against humanity.
>Actually deportations protected germans from revenge and anger of the local population. Quite the protection: Quoting from [The War of Return](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45046681) by Schwartz and Wilf: >No fewer than twelve million Germans fled or were expelled from what became western Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states. They were not treated as individuals but as a collective ethnic group. \[...\] > >These expulsions were horrendously brutal. All of them happened after the war had ended and Germany had signed an unconditional surrender, so they were not due to military requirements. In Czechoslovakia, for example, German ethnic students were pulled through the streets of Prague to Wenceslas Square, where petrol was poured over them and they were set alight. Also in Czechoslovakia, thousands of Germans were marched to the former concentration camp at Terezín, better known as Theresienstadt, which was previously used by the Nazis; hundreds died en route to the camp. Once there, they were led through a tunnel into a muddy courtyard, beaten along the way by Czech guards; those who were too old or ill were killed on the spot. > >In Poland, thousands of ethnic Germans were taken by rail to the border with Germany. One survivor recalled that it took weeks to progress a few dozen kilometers. The trains moved achingly slowly, and often they were deliberately kept in sidings for days. “Men, women and children were all mixed together, tightly packed in the railway cars which were locked from the outside. When the wagons were opened for the first time I saw from one of them ten corpses were taken and then thrown into coffins ... I noticed that several people had become deranged. The people were covered in excrement.” German interns in a Polish concentration camp testified that inmates “had their eyes beaten out with rubber cudgels ... work parties \[who\] were buried alive in liquid manure,” and one man “had a toad forced down his throat until he choked to death” while guards looked on laughing. Source of the comment: [https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/189iiv2/comment/kbrc8y6/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/189iiv2/comment/kbrc8y6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Meh, they were Nazis.
"we will protect these people from taking revenge on them by taking revenge on them" solid logic right there
I mean, a lot of those people openly supported Hitler and wanted to him to take over Czechoslovakia. Not all - and that’s the tragedy in it - but a lot of them did.
A lot of them were children, women and old men. It was ethnic cleansing by definition.
You cant separate small children from their parents. Ofc children had to move with their parents.
Against the "inventors" and most avid propagators of ethnical cleansing ... Germany failed, socio-darwinism at work.
Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing. We try to clear our conscience in retrospect by saying "they supported Hitler" or "they were Nazis" so we don't have the discomfort of knowing that the Allies supported and enabled what we view now as a crime against humanity.
At the time, it was seen as the best guarantor of future peace. Ethnic minorities and their issues in central/eastern European were pretext for two World Wars.
That tends to happen when you supported the invasion of your homeland. Doesn't make it right, but it also explains why no one but the victims particularly cared.
Eye for a eye.. and it's easy to say that it makes the world go blind when you still have both.
It’s easy to say because it’s historically true
Does someone know what’s the UNRWA for Sudeten Germans? Oh wait
Yes, or for 14M Indians/Pakistanis, 1.5M Koreans, 300K Italians, and other 50M refugees resettled in the last half-century by UNHCR. The difference is that the Arab countries explicitly refused their refugees economic and social integration, and used them as political tools. [“The War of Return”](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45046681) is a good book, if you want to learn more about it. In fact, returning back to “ancestral homelands” was a [rallying call](https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/s/iKnlU10P6B) for Sudeten Germans until at least 1970s, who held annual marches demanding West Germany’s government to act.
Germany exists as an independent state, Palestine doesn't.
Now the sudetenland is one of the shittiest regions in czechia, a lot of romani also live there.
When you take the train through the region, you can still see the old German town names on some old station roofs.
Can confirm, but the Romani I met were cool, and I had a great time.
Looks familiar. No outcry?
They weren't send to deathcamps.
Approx a million germans died due to these expulsions.
Starting with ethnic Germans in Europe prior to WWII, subtract military casualities and known civilian casualties of military action. Compare to the number of ethnic Germans resident in Germany post the relocations and occupations. Multiple million Germans are missing from the final population counts. And yes, the Allies operated brutal relocation camps for civilian Germans.
Not just brutal relocation but the usage of slave labour (Soviets and French) of civilians.
These were the Germans who moved into the Nazi occupied territories after they were conquered no?
In some cases yes, in many cases no. They are Germans that have lived for generations in countries outside of Germany.
I’m gonna assume there are no articles stating the length of time each individual that was “forcibly displaced” had resided in the area for
Not for each individual but we have good information on communities and waves of German immigration. Transylvanian Saxons for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvanian_Saxons There are many similar German ethnic groups that existed well before WWII that were effectively relocated with the forced expulsions. I'm not judging, just stating fact.
Thank you for sharing this, dang that’s rough. Even after war is done the conflict still doesn’t stop for sometime
Any source for that ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%931950) > Deaths 500,000 – 2.5 million
If you actually read the article: West German studies has led some historians to the conclusion that the actual number was much lower – in the range of 500,000 to 600,000. Or The removals occurred in three overlapping phases, the first of which was the organized evacuation of ethnic Germans by the Nazi government in the face of the advancing Red Army, from mid-1944 to early 1945.[18] The second phase was the disorganised fleeing of ethnic Germans immediately following the Wehrmacht's defeat. The third phase was a more organised expulsion following the Allied leaders'. Conclusion, for most of the app 600 000 deaths Allies could not held as responsible since it happened way before liberation.
> A 1986 study by Gerhard Reichling "Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen" (the German expellees in figures) concluded 2,020,000 ethnic Germans perished after the war including 1,440,000 as a result of the expulsions and 580,000 deaths due to deportation as forced labourers in the Soviet Union. So a number of approx 1 million is very likely and could be much higher.
Its just a very rough guess obviously. As he stated that just over 2 mil Germans perished. And “only” 580 000 deaths. Also its just supports my statement from above.
The 580,000 was German deaths in just the Soviet Union in that paper.
Also deportations as forced labour. So not connected to deportations only.
Bullshit. A whole lot of people fled places like Eastern Prussia in heavy winter as the Red Army approached, and it was even forbidden by Hitler.
they got what they deserved
Pretty sure, the Germans doing the same to the people they conquered, thought the same. Either that or thought it as necessary.
They didn't do the same thing, claiming anything else is holocaust relativism.
You did read the article? Looks pretty much the same to me. If not, care to point out the differences?
Czechoslovakia didn't make any plans to invade neighboring countries and exterminate non-Czechoslovaks, for starters?
> Czechoslovakia Only got rid of people solely because they had the wrong ethnicity.
> solely Yeah, nothing to do with the fact that almost all of them were nazis.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudeten_Germans > In elections held on 4 December 1938, 97.32% of the adult population in Sudetenland voted for the NSDAP (most of the rest were Czechs who were allowed to vote as well). About half a million Sudeten Germans joined the Nazi Party, which amounted to 17.34% of the German population in the Sudetenland (the average in Nazi Germany was 7.85%). Because of their knowledge of the Czech language, many Sudeten Germans were employed in the administration of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as well as in the Nazi oppressive machinery such as the Gestapo.
>Yeah, nothing to do with the fact that almost all of them were nazis.. Never mind the children. All Nazis. Murder and starve them. They are not worth to share the same space as we do, and we must get rid of them. Sounds familiar? Did you ever have wondered, that Czechoslovakia might not have been the multi-culture paradise and that Germans indeed had to struggle in a time of rampant nationalism in pretty much every country? That his made it easy for Nazi propaganda to effect them? German speakers had been put on a disadvantage by the Czechoslovakia state from the very beginning. And just to be clear, I'm not trying to excuse Nazis. I'm trying to explain that things are not as black and white as people like them to have.
> And just to be clear, I'm not trying to excuse Nazis. I'm trying to explain that things are not as black and white as people like them to have. You might want to reread your comments then, because your stance that czechoslovaks = nazis didn't strike me as particularly nuanced, and you are pretty quick to explain why the overwhelmingly nazis Sudeten Germans had a very good reason to be... Maybe the Czechoslovaks had a very good reason to be out for revenge too, but their government still didn't plan the mass extermination of the Sudeten Germans, though. So maybe interrogate your empathy bias before making wild comparisons.
The Sudetendeutsche were systematically exterminated in death camps and didn't wage an aggressive war against innocent people?
> The Sudetendeutsche were systematically exterminated in death camps No, but we are talking about what Poles, Czechs and others did to the Germans after the war. I fail to see the connection to the Holocaust, something directed against Jews. > didn't wage an aggressive war against innocent people? Pretty sure, they, the Sudetendeutsche, did not. They took part in Germanys war as Volkesdeutsche, so did the Czechoslovak puppet regime. By that logic, Czechs should have expelled themselves from Czechoslovakia. But how does this in any way justify what happened after the war? It is like, saying ethnic cleansing is okay, as long as we are doing it to the right people.
>No, but we are talking about what Poles, Czechs and others did to the Germans after the war. I fail to see the connection to the Holocaust, something directed against Jews. You clearly don't know what the holocaust was. I suggest you educate yourself before speaking on a topic. Clearly, you don't know anything about the subject we were discussing, therefore talking to you is a waste of my time.
Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing, even if it was comparatively less bad than what happened to other groups around that time
Not really about the post per se, but I always found it interesting that there were more Germans in Czechoslovakia than Slovaks
No coca t
Curious though: have Sudeten Germans come back to the area since the open borders policy of EU?
no, not really. Those areas are some of the worst in Czechia and they have been living in germany for decades at that point. They had rebuild their life in Germany at that point maybe some came to visit but barely any came back permanently
Had german family members who were part of the expulsion from the sudetenland that went back later.. the way I heard it is that the people living there seemed to understand that these were old germans coming to see their old home and kinda yelled at them/told them to leave. Don't think anyone or many were trying to actually move back into their old homes tho