After World War II, anti-German sentiment pervaded Europe, particularly in the Eastern European countries that the war had hit hardest.  Countries such as Yugoslavia, Poland, the Baltic States, and Czechoslovakia had been the subjects of Nazi colonization efforts during the war.  Near the end of the war in late 1944 and 1945, as the German army retreated in the face of the Soviet Red Army, the ethnic Germans who had settled into the German-controlled territories of central and eastern Europe evacuated.  Officials postponed this evacuation, however, until the last minute, when defeat was all but certain. The resulting evacuation was a disorganized disaster, and reports of the total number of refugees from these evacuations are as high as six million.  Upon the formal defeat of the Nazi military forces, the formerly-occupied countries expelled still more ethnic Germans.

 

On August 1, 1945, Allies formally reached the Potsdam Agreement, which restored Germany to its pre-World War II state, with the exception of some of its eastern territories, which were restored to their pre-World War II owners.  This began the systematic expulsion of ethnic Germans living in these territories, regardless of their former associations with the Nazis.  In total, between 12 and 14 million people were displaced from Germany’s former territories between 1945 and 1950.  The German government estimates that over two million Germans died as a result of these expulsions, but some historians believe that the government artificially inflated the number of deaths to foster anti-Soviet sentiment during the Cold War.  Regardless of the actual numbers, at least hundreds of thousands of Germans died as a result of placement in refugee camps and ghettos with little to no access to medical care and supplies.  

 

The countries of central Europe had various reasons for expelling Germans, ranging from fears that they would not conform to their styles of government to desires to punish them, as many countries saw all Germans as guilty of their country’s crimes, regardless of their actual involvement in the war.  The largest reason for the expulsions, however, was a desire for ethnic uniformity, an irony apparently lost on those who had just escaped the yolk of the Nazi regime.