In 1914, 2, 416, 290 German civilians were living in
Russia. When World War I began, a wave of hostility began, especially after the
Laws of Liquidation passed in 1915. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October
25, 1917, the ethnic Germans of the former czarist empire were subjected to an
organized campaign of terror: rape, drownings, torture, burning, mutilations, mass
shootings and extermination.
Between
1930 and 1937, Russian Germans lost another one-fourth of their population
through murder, starvation or deportation. In 1941, Moscow announced the mass „evacuation“
of approximately 440 000 Volga German farmers to remote regions of Siberia. The
Volga German Republic was dissolved and the entire German population was deported
to Siberia into Trud Army camps, yet Stalin's genocidal plans were all but
cheered in the New York Times.
EXPULSION from Eastern Europe!
Prior
to World War Two, approximately 1,5 million „Danube Swabians“ lived in Hungary,
Romania and Yugoslavia. The result of war deaths, expulsions, murder, deaths in
labor camps and emigration meant a two thirds reduction of that number. Of over
one million refugees who went to Germany and Austria, about 250 000 later
emigrated to other lands, including the USA, Canada, Australia, France and
South American countries.
After
World War Two, the large ethnic German population was murdered and expelled
when, once restored to leadership by the Allies, Benes „re-slovakization“
programs began in 1945. Benes had begun to issue murderous decrees from his
exile about postwar Czechoslovakia as early as 1940. On March 28, 1946, the
provisional Czech parliament gave its post-facto blessing to these decrees
where all German civilians were presumed collectively guilty and stripped of
their citizenship, with their property stolen. They included the most inhuman
and barbarous persecution and oppression of the minorities humanly imaginable:
deportations, expulsions, internments, kangaroo court verdicts, confiscation of
property and the use forced labor camps. Over three and a half million Sudeten
Germans were brutally expelled from their homes. Benes and his cohorts, in
their merciless persecution of the innocent, reserved much the same fate for
the Hungarians.
Virtually
all of the half million Germans in Yugoslavia fled, were murdered or expelled
in 1945, and thousands were sent to slave camps. Violence against Germans here
was probably more ruthless than in any other country. Whole villages were
burned down, and the Germans butchered. There were 8 separate death camps set
up where genocide against German civilians took place.
The
Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War One had already set the stage for
violence which gravely impacted minority German communities in Eastern Europe. Even
before the World War One was over, nationalities within Austria-Hungary were
eager for independence and France, Britain and the USA began investing and
instigating. With Allied victory, Eastern Europe was carved up with the primary
goal of destroying any possible future German prosperity and growth, and to
prevent Germany/Austria from ever becoming too powerful again.
This
„resettlement“ of over 1,5 million people during and after World War II
amounted to murder of the ethnic Germans. Moreover, the 1945 Potsdam Agreement
allowed each occupation power to repatriate „its own citizens“ into its country.
This led to enslavement and massive slaughter by the Red Army against the
forcibly returned ethnic Germans from Russia who had previously fled to German
areas for protection. By 1949, over one million ethnic Germans had perished in
Russia.
Khrushchev
himself later admitted that the famine of 1933 was 'an act of murder' on the
part of the government, and even in 1990, the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Ukraine confessed that the famine had been deliberately
created.
The
religious Volga-Germans were severely persecuted. By 1918, there were barely 1 621
000 Germans alive in Russia and by 1919, their pastors were sent to slave camps.
The requisitions of 1917-1921 threatened the existence of the Ukrainian-German
villages. In Kandel, Großliebental, Franzfeld, Josephtal and Landua, hundreds
died from starvation caused by the man-made famine crafted by the Bolsheviks to
exterminate them. Between 1921 and 1923, orchestrated famine created large
emigration and the population of Germans decreased by another fourth. During
this mass starvation, approximately 10 000 Volga-German children were forcibly
taken from their parents with promises of food when in reality they were
removed and sent to their deaths. 350 000 Germans in Russia and Ukraine
perished in the next arranged famine of 1932-1933.
Between
1945 and 1950, 11 730 000 to 15 000 000 Germans fled and were expelled from
these eastern territories of Germany, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European
countries; specifically, over 6,9 million from the eastern territories of
Germany, more than 2,9 million Germans from Czechoslovakia, and more than 1,8
to 4 million from other parts of Eastern Europe. And besides the forced
expulsion of these 11,7 million people, another 3,1 million died or „disappeared“
during the expulsion/liquidation process. There are mass grave sites in various
areas which even today receive no publicity. In the summer of 1945, 20 000 weak,
confused, hungry and homeless people died in Germany every day, and a year
later at the peak of the expulsions in July of 1946, 14 400 people a day were
still being dumped over the devastated and famished frontier into a Germany
which had been reduced to a smaller size than it was in the 11th century. In
the USSR, over 75% of German civilian slaves worked within the Ukraine mining
and 11% worked in the Urals. By 1946, out of German „arrested internees“, 39% died,
and of an additional 875 000 German civilians abducted and transported to the
camps, almost 50% perished.
In
Slovakia, main German settlements were the region of Zips and the city of
Preßburg. In 1910, Slovaks made up only 14. 8% of its population and Preßburg
had an ancient Germanic and Magyar history and was built up and made prosperous
over the centuries largely by Austrian. Hungarian and German traders and
scholars. Overnight it became „Bratislava“, a name suggested by a meddling
Woodrow Wilson himself in March 1919 after Germany and Austria lost the First
World War. As „Slovakia“ became semi-independent in 1919, the 180 000 Carpathian
Germans became second class citizens overnight, but they at least had some
minority rights. Even German schools were allowed to re-open. In 1930, even
after attempts to artificially „restock“ the area with Slovaks, there was still
a German population of 31 000 in Pressburg itself and 19 000 in the environs. The
Czechoslovak census of 1930 cited 154 821 ethnic Germans in Slovakia. Most were
by then Czechoslovak citizens.
A
few stayed, despite all obstacles, and others returned after being released
from Siberia. The relation between the minority of surviving Germans and
Slovaks has since improved slightly. Some Carpathian-Germans even received 20%
of their confiscated property back. The majority, however, resettled in Germany
after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The
expelled German civilians were interned in concentration camps where many were
murdered by intentional starvation and ignored, unchecked disease. The still
valid Benes decree #115 of May 8, 1946 declared all deeds against Germans, down
to the rape and murder of children, were „justified acts of retribution“ that
could not be prosecuted.
Local
Carpathian Germans either fled or were killed in death camps such as Svaljava. 700
from the residential were taken for slave labor in Siberia, the last ones not
being freed until 1969. At the end of 1946, after „evacuation“, about 24 000
ethnic Germans still remained in Slovakia. Although most violence against
German civilians ended in the late 1940s, the discrimination resulted in assimilation.
In
the parts of Germany taken for Poland in 1945, the entire ethnic German
population was either murdered, expelled, or faced severe reprisals at war's
end. As in East Prussia, throughout Pomerania, from Danzig to Stettin to Elbing
and all of the old Baltic German cities, catastrophic Allied bombing was
followed by Red Terror. The few surviving Germans in these areas were placed
before violent Communist led „verification“ committees who decided their fate. Their
language and civil rights were immediately suspended and many innocents endured
horrible retribution. Thousands died fleeing. Aside from Polish camps, in early
1945 it was estimated that about 165 000 Germans were deported to the Soviet
Union from the German territories that were de-facto annexed by Poland.
Silesian
Germans, some of whom had roots in those areas going back centuries, and who
before World War II amounted to about 4 million, were collectively labeled
German partisans and either fled or were murdered, put in camps, sent to the
Gulags or expelled. Germans were forced to make public apologies for their „collective
guilt“ at social and governmental gatherings. Others were sent to camps with
unbearable conditions. Of 8 064 Germans in Camp Lamsdorf in Upper Silesia, 6 488,
including hundreds of children, died from starvation, disease, hard labor, and
physical maltreatment including torture. This repeated itself by the thousands.
90 000 civilians are believed to have died in their flight from Breslau as the
Red Army was invading the city. Those that were caught were murdered, sent to
the Gulag or put in concentration camps.
Both
the first and second 'Yugoslavia' were the creation of the victorious French, British
and American leaders in 1919 at Versailles. In the first Yugoslav state of
1919-1941, approximately half a million ethnic Germans lived among 14 million
people. Following Yugoslavia's break-up in April 1941, approximately 200 000
ethnic Germans became citizens of the newly established state of Croatia while
most of the remaining approximately 300 000 ethnic Germans in other areas came
under the jurisdiction of Hungary.
By
the end of the war in May 1945, German authorities had evacuated 220 000 ethnic
Yugoslav Germans to Germany and Austria. Those 200 000 or so ethnic Germans
left behind in their ancestral homeland became captives of the Communists. After
Christmas of 1944, between 27 000 to 30 000 ethnic Germans (aged 18-40) were
sent to the USSR from Yugoslavia, with men making up 90% of the group. Most
were sent to labor camps in the Donbass where 16% of them died. Some 63 635
Yugoslav ethnic German civilians perished under the brutal Yugoslav reign of
terror between 1945 and 1950, most as a result of slave laborer, in ethnic
purges, or from disease and severe malnutrition.
The
Yugoslav Communists confiscated what would today translate into twelve billion
US dollars of German property (97 490 farms, stores, factories) and one million
acres of German land.
Of
Danubian ethnic Germans who served in the German military (many had no choice),
over half perished after the end of the war in Yugoslav camps, including about
150 000 of the troops who had surrendered to British military authorities in
the armistice of May 8, 1945 and were turned over to Communist Yugoslav
partisans! More than 7 000 captured German troops died in Communist-ordered 800
mile „atonement marches“ from Austria's southern border to the northern border
of Greece and many German soldiers in captivity in late summer of 1945 were
thrown alive into large pits and executed. Lastly, in the ten years following
1945, an additional 50 000 perished from malnutrition and exhaustion, worked to
death as Yugoslavia's slaves.
When
the Great War ended, Austria-Hungary was dissolved, the final revised
boundaries for Hungary were formed in June, 1920. Czechoslovakia became a new
country carved out of former Hungarian territory and historic German areas in
the Sudetenland, where German settlement had begun before the 13th century. The
new Yugoslavia gained land in Southern Hungary, including a strip of the
western Banat. Romania declared unity with part of the Banat and Transylvania. The
dismemberment of the 1 000 year old Hungarian Kingdom resulted in Hungary
losing 71,5% of its territory and 63,6% of its population at the „Peace Treaty“
of Trianon in 1920. Under the treaty, three and a half million Hungarians were
forced, without a right of self-determination, to live with Serbs, Croats, Slovenians
and Romanians in some areas, and in the new Czechoslovakia.
All
inherited a large number of ethnic Germans. Millions of Germans who were able
to left. The Swabian villagers whose families had lived in Hungary for 200
years suddenly found themselves in three different countries. Between the wars,
the lifestyle of rural Germans stayed somewhat normal but this changed
drastically after World War Two.
Hungary
and Romania initially sided with Germany then both changed sides. Thousands of
Germans escaped immediately in horse drawn convoys as the Soviets were taking
control. In Hungary, German owned land was immediately seized by the government
and „Non-Magyarized“ Germans were executed or expelled as traitors. The
expulsions took place in 1946 and 170 000 Germans were sent to the American
Zoneof West Germany and thousands upon thousands are unaccounted for.
Czechoslovakia,
despite promising to guarantee the rights of national minorities under the
protection of the League of Nations in 1918, never did during its first twenty
years. Instead, millions of ethnic Germans and Hungarians were victimized, harassed,
outrageously taxed and deprived of their civil rights. German and Hungarian
land was confiscated by the Czech government without compensation and
distributed among Czech and Slovak colonists and censuses were rigged to ensure
a majority. Czech intolerance under this First Czechoslovak „Republic“ had made
life a hellish misery for its minorities and these craftily created conflicts
led directly to World War Two, the groundwork having been conceived by its
illegitimate president Edward Benes and his comrades who hatched the diabolic
plan for the expulsion of the German and Hungarian population from their homes.
The
artificially built Second Czechoslovak „Republic“ was abetted by foreign
assistance and endorsement which it received despite the megalomaniac and
xenophobic Benes Decrees which substituted the once harmonious coexistence of
the Czech, German, Slovak and Hungarian people with brutality, denial of basic
human rights, theft and murder.
The
first Transylvanian Germans, the „Sasi“, had come to Romania in the 12th
Century. In January, 1945, 100 000 ethnic Germans (women aged 18-30 and men
aged 17-45) were sent into slavery in the Soviet Union from Romania. 10% died
in the either the camps or in the transports. From 298 000 ethnic Germans in
Siebenbuergen in 1941, 50 000 simply vanished. In 1945, 30 000 were sent to
hard labor into the Ukraine and other areas. The remaining German civilians
were robbed of all factories, machines, business, banks, farms, fields, forests,
vineyards and properties. They were discriminated against, violently repressed,
stripped of the right to vote and deprived of their property, churches and
voting rights.
Secret
Order 7161 (December 1944) issued by USSR State Defense Committee made possible
the internment of all adult Germans from Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia
and Bulgaria. Aside from the unprecedented expulsion and ethnic cleansing of
millions of Prussians, 3 million of whom died in the process, between 1944 and
1947, all other ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe were expelled. With the start
of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, at least 900 000 ethnic
Germans were deported from the autonomous Volga German Republic and other parts
of the Soviet Union. Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan were the deportation
areas. In addition, about 300 000 refugees were forcibly „repatriated“ after
the war. About 40 per cent of the people died as a result of massacres or as a
result of catastrophic situations during or after transportation.
Over
500 000 German civilians from the Oder-Neiße areas (Silesia, Upper Silesia, East
Pomerania, East Brandenburg, East and West Prussia) and Poland, some 10 000
from central Germany, 30 000 Sudeten Germans and 160 000 civilians from
south-eastern Europe lost their homes and were deported for forced labor in the
USSR as early as 1944. About ten per cent of the victims died in the course of
transportation to Russia as a result of homicide, hunger and cold. Practically
half of the so-called repatriated displaced persons died in the camps, one of
the worst being the Kolyma Camp.
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 were not closed until
1950. In Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, there were death camps. 2 061
camps existed in Czechoslovakia. In the Mährisch-Ostrau camp around 350 people
were tortured to death by early July 1945. In Poland and the areas under Polish
administration, there were 1 255 camps. 6 048 out of about 8 000 people died in
the Lamsdorf (Upper Silesia) camp alone. For the Yugoslavian area, the Red
Cross found 1 562 camps and prisons. In May 1945, practically all the Yugoslav
Germans there were living and dying in camps.
Most
countries that once had a substantial ethnic German presence no longer do. Whether
through wars, government upheavals, relocation or murder, entire ethnic German
cities, regions vanished.
During
the final months of World War II, especially after the founding of the second
Yugoslavia, the lives of the ethnic Germans under Josip Broz Tito's Communist
state became perilous and the majority of them were forced to flee. Tito, who
ruled from 1945-1980, carried out „ethnic cleansing” and mass murder with the
sanction of the British and American governments. One of his first acts was a
decree transferring „enemy property“ into the property of the state, therefore
confiscating all property of the ethnic Germans without compensation, and
declaring those of German origin as „enemies of the people” with no civil
rights. Next, their Yugoslav citizenship was cancelled.
While
the expulsions in Eastern Europe are more common knowledge, there were some
other cases of ethnic cleansing, although on a much smaller scale. After war's
end, for example, the Dutch decided to expel 25 000 Germans living in the
Netherlands, labeling them 'hostile subjects'. Beginning September 10, 1946 in
Amsterdam, Germans and their families were taken from their homes in the middle
of the night and given one hour to collect 50 kg of luggage. They were allowed
to take 100 Guilders with them, but their other possessions went to the Dutch
state. They were taken to internment camps near the German border, the biggest
of which was Mariënbosch near Nijmegen. In total, about 3 691 Germans were
expelled. The operation ended in 1948. Germans were no longer regarded as state
enemies after July of 1951, when the state of war between the Netherlands and
Germany officially ended.
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