Expulsion of the Ethnic Germans: An Overview - Part III

"Since the end of the war about 3,000,000 people, mostly women and children and overaged men,  have been killed in eastern Germany and south-eastern Europe; about 15,000,000 people have been  deported or had to flee from their homesteads and are on the road. About 25 per cent of these  people, over 3,000,000, have died. About 4,000,000 men and women have been deported to eastern  Europe and Russia as slaves. It seems that the elimination of the German population of eastern  Europe - at least 15,000,000 people - was planned in accordance with decisions made at Yalta."  

The story of the expulsion of Eastern European Germans, which ended close to 1,000 years of  German presence in areas now considered to be parts of Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia and  other Eastern European states, has not been fairly regarded as the epochal event that it was: the most  horrendous ethnic cleansing in the history of the world and one which changed the ethnic face of  Europe. The expulsions resulted in the largest exchange of population in European history and were  the result of three undeniably predominant factors: Greed, politics and revenge.

A generation is dying or already dead, a generation of human beings who hold in their hearts and  minds the memory of being violently torn from a cherished homeland and subjected to barbarities  few of us can even imagine. They bore witness to catastrophic and untold hardships which we are  forbidden from referring to as genocide. Soon, their voices will be silent. Alone, the expulsion of  millions of Prussian Germans between 1944 and 1947 was accomplished in an immensely sinister  manner, yet it is an event that has been ignored, minimized or rationalized by the mainstream media.

Most countries which once had a substantial ethnic German presence no longer do. Entire ethnic  German cities and regions vanished in the aftermath of World War Two. When Stalin promised a  "modest reduction in the German Population" to Churchill and Roosevelt, his homicidal plans were  greeted with a wink and a nod, and that goal was accomplished with lethal zeal. Although, as in the  case with mortality figures from Allied bombing, the number of victims is relentlessly downsized,  these violent expulsions displaced and murdered millions of innocents in any case.

Agreeing to Stalin's murderous plans to uproot both Poles and Germans, Churchill said in the House  of Commons in 1944:

"Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be  the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble. A  clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences."

In November 1944, President  Franklin Roosevelt agreed, and chief advisors to both Roosevelt and Churchill argued for a solution  to the "German problem" as calculated and as chilling as Stalin's.

Aside from countless German civilians who fled in advance of the Red Army and were bombed,  drowned or shot at, since the British and Americans agreed at Yalta to redraw historic German  borders, they abetted, authorized and encouraged the deportation of millions of ethnic German  civilians and gave to vengeance-fueled communist governments the power for who, where and how  these citizens would be deported, a power which would inevitably be greatly abused.

Chaos, kidnapping, rape, thievery and mass murder were the order of the day. Poles, Czechs and  others, with the assistance of the Red Army, sometimes gave the populations of whole German  villages only minutes to vacate their homes. The Germans were either collected by force or ordered  to gather at a central location where selected individuals were ripped from the group and beaten,  executed, or dragged off for slave labor in a ruthless process which even tore children from their  mothers' arms. The evicted Germans were methodically stripped of their most personal and dearest  possessions before being taken to train stations where they were indecently prodded for hidden  valuables, shoved aboard cars without adequate food, water or sanitation facilities, and speedily  shipped to occupation zones in Germany where they were simply dumped. Others were forced to  walk hundreds of miles to destinations which were often in rubble, and few of them reached these  destinations with even a handbag left in their possession. Many died on the roadside from disease,  exposure or starvation. Forbidden to ever return home, all of their worldly goods were confiscated.

But many never made it to a home in Germany. Thousands were deported for forced labor in the  USSR after Secret Order 7161 of 1944 issued by USSR State Defense Committee made possible the  internment of all adult Germans from Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria.  About ten per cent of the victims died just in the course of transportation to Russia as a result of  hunger, murder and cold.

Half of the so-called 'repatriated displaced persons' died in camps,  one of the worst being the Kolyma Camp. The numbers of deaths  and expulsions sky-rocketed at war's end. In the USSR, over 75%  of German civilian slaves worked the mines in Ukraine and 11%  worked in the Urals. By 1946, out of the German "arrested  internees", 39% died, and of 875,000 other German civilians who  were abducted and transported to the camps, over 50% perished.

Labor camps for Germans existed not only in the Soviet Union, but in almost all the regions from  which Germans were displaced, the last ones not being closed until 1950. In Poland and areas under  Polish administration, there were 1,255 camps: 6,048 out of about 8,000 people died in Lamsdorf  camp alone. In Czechoslovakia, 2,061 camps existed: in the Mährisch-Ostrau camp around 350  people were tortured to death by early July 1945. In Yugoslavia, there were gruesome death camps:  the Red Cross found 1,562 camps and prisons there. By May of 1945, practically all of the Yugoslav  Germans who did not flee in time were living and dying in camps.

The standard, unrevised estimates which have stood for sixty years say that between 1945 and 1950,  from 11,730,000 to 15,000,000 German civilians fled and/or were expelled from the eastern  territories of Germany proper and from the Eastern European countries. Other estimates were much  higher. "Population transfers", from highest to lowest, were from former eastern Germany, then  Czechoslovakia next, then Poland, Danzig, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, the Baltic states and,  lastly, the USSR. And besides the forced expulsion and murder of millions of these people, at least  another 3.1 million simply "disappeared" during the expulsion/liquidation process.

But figures do not tell the story. They are not only untrustworthy, they are inconsequential. The  consistent "debates" which take place over mere numbers and petty statistics serve only to deflect  attention from the real issue: the intentional persecution of innocent people, whether they be one  thousand or fifteen million, and a wrong which history has thus far not set right.

 (Source: http://www.exulanten.com/hell.html )

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