About 12.5 million citizens of the German Reich and members of German minorities in Eastern Central Europe were affected by flight and expulsion between 1940 and 1950. Hundreds of thousands were killed.
A good half of them escaped and evacuated to the territory of present-day Germany by the end of the war in May 1945.
The population that remained behind or was overwhelmed by the front were the victims of the so-called "wild" expulsions, i.e. expulsions without a legal basis. Poland and Czechoslovakia wanted to create a fait accompli by the Potsdam Conference in July. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, imprisoned in camps or deported to often years of forced labour.
The conference resolutions initiated the last phase of flight and expulsion: the organised forced resettlements. However, these were not carried out in an "orderly and humane manner" as agreed. The consequences of the German policy of conquest, occupation and annihilation were just as responsible for this as the desire of the Allies and the states of Central and Eastern Europe to create ethnically homogeneous nation states.
Illustrations:
1.)Potsdam Conference
In July 1945 the heads of state of the three Western Allied Powers Winston S. Churchill (Great Britain), Harry S. Truman (USA) and Josef Stalin (USSR) discussed the reorganisation of Germany and Europe in Potsdam's Cecilienhof Palace. As a result, the Potsdam Agreement laid the foundations under international law for the establishment of a peaceful and democratic German state. At the same time the Oder-Neisse line was provisionally recognised as the eastern border by the Western Allied Powers. However, the eastern border was not finally defined until 1990 after the end of the East-West conflict and German reunification.
Federal Archives, picture 183-H27035, photo July 1945
2.) Gertrud Lerbs-Bernecker, The road is not over yet, lithograph, 1946
East Prussian Gertrud Lerbs-Bernecker (1902-1968) was the first woman and master student of Heinrich Wolff to receive a studio at the Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad) art academy. After her escape she was accommodated in Luneburg and became one of the best-known German artists in the post-war period. She processed her experiences in a cycle about flight and expulsion.