Flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland during and after World War II

[7] In mid-1945, 4.5 to 4.6 million Germans remained on the territories that were given under Polish control[8] pending a final peace conference with Germany, which eventually never took place.

[4] Contrary to the official declaration that the former German inhabitants of the so-called Recovered Territories had to be removed quickly to house Poles displaced by the Soviet annexation, the lands initially faced a severe population shortage.

While Generalplan Ost's settlement ambitions did not come into full effect due to the war's turn, millions of Germans, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, were settled by the Nazis to replace Poles removed or killed during the occupation.

[33] The final decision to move Poland's boundary westward, preconditioning the expulsion of Germans, was made by Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, when the Curzon line was irrevocably fixed as the future Polish-Soviet border.

[21][34] The precise location of the Polish western border was left open and, though basically the Allies had agreed on population transfers, the extent remained questioned.

It was an emergency measure, drafted and adopted in great haste, a response to the wild expulsions of Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland, which had created a chaotic situation in the American and British zones of occupation.

President Harry S. Truman complained that there were now five occupation zones because the Soviets had turned over the area extending along the Oder and western Neisse to Poland and was concerned about Germany's economic control and war reparations.

[39] On July 24, the Polish communist delegation arrived in Berlin, insisting on the Oder and western Neisse rivers as the frontier, and they vehemently argued their case before the foreign ministers, Churchill, and Truman, in turn.

[29] Poles wanted to avoid such events in the future and as a result, Polish exile authorities proposed a population transfer of Germans as early as 1941.

[44] Expulsions of Germans from East Prussia and pre-war Poland had become a war aim as early as in February 1940, expressed by Polish Foreign Minister August Zaleski.

[44] After Sikorski's death, the next Polish Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk in a letter to Roosevelt expressed his concerns about the idea of compensating Poland in the west.

A year later, before the Potsdam Conference, the western Allies followed Stalin, recognized the Soviet-sponsored government, which accepted the shift of the borders westwards, and withdrew their recognition for the Polish government-in-exile.

[citation needed] The first mass movement of German civilians in the eastern territories was composed of both spontaneous flight and organized evacuation, starting in the summer of 1944 and continuing through the early spring of 1945.

[55] Conditions turned chaotic in the winter, when miles-long queues of refugees pushed their carts through the snow trying to stay ahead of the Red Army.

[58] Refugee treks and ships which came into reach of the advancing Soviets suffered high casualties when targeted by low-flying aircraft, torpedoes, or were rolled over by tanks.

[21] The most infamous incidents during the flight and expulsion from the territory of later Poland include the sinking of the military transport ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine with a death toll of some 9,000 people;[21] the USAF bombing of refugee-crowded[59] Swinemünde on 12 March 1945 killing an estimated 23,000[60][61] to 25,000;[62] the desperate conditions under which refugees crossed the frozen Vistula Lagoon, where thousands broke in, froze to death, or were killed by Soviet aircraft;[63] and the poorly organized evacuation and ultimate sacrifice of refugee-crowded Breslau by the local German Nazi authorities headed by gauleiter Karl Hanke.

Data from the Russian archives published in 2001, based on an actual enumeration, put the number of German civilians deported from Poland to the USSR in early 1945 for reparation labor at 155,262 where 37% (57,586) died.

[77] The Polish historians Witold Sienkiewicz and Grzegorz Hryciuk maintain that the internment "resulted in numerous deaths, which cannot be accurately determined because of lack of statistics or falsification .

Polish settlers, who themselves had been expelled from areas east of the Curzon Line, arrived with about nothing, putting an even higher pressure on the remaining Germans to leave.

[93] Another problem the Germans and, to a lesser extent, even the newly arrived Poles were facing was an enormous crime wave, most notably theft and rape, committed by gangs not only consisting of regular criminals but also Soviet soldiers, deserters or former forced laborers (Ost-Arbeiter), coming back from the west.

complained about some Polish security forces and militia raping and pillaging the German population and a general loss of sense for right and wrong.

[citation needed] A high number of crimes committed by regular Soviet soldiers - on both Germans and Poles - had been reported (see Rape during the liberation of Poland).

[96] The damaged infrastructure and quarrels between the Allied authorities in the occupation zones of Germany and the Polish administration caused long delays in the transport of expellees, who were first ordered to gather at one of the various PUR transportation centers or internment camps and then often forced to wait in ill-equipped barracks, exposed both to criminals, aggressive guards and the cold and not supplied sufficiently with food due to the overall shortages.

On short notice, Germans were ordered to assemble in the local market square to march on to a relocation camp (obozy tranzytowe), allowed to take with them as much as they could carry.

[98] Close to three million residents of Upper Silesia (Silesians), Masuria (Masurs) and Pomerania (Slovincians, Kashubians) were considered of Slavic descent but many of them did not identify with Polish nationality, were either bilingual or spoke German only.

[citation needed] The word "autochthon", introduced by the Polish government in 1945 for propaganda purposes,[99] is today sometimes considered an offensive remark and direct naming as Kashubians, Silesians, Slovincians, and Masurians is preferred to avoid offending the people described.

[106] While those who had signed Volksliste category "I" were expelled, rehabilitation was offered to people who had been subject to forced labour before, spoke Polish and were rated as not constituting a threat.

[120] An unknown number left without formal registration or was expelled by Soviet military authorities without notifying by Polish officials responsible for statistics.

[121] German expellee organizations who did not accept the post-war territorial and population changes fueled Communist propaganda dismissing them as "far-right revanchists".

[125] Polish and joint German-Polish scholarly research and public debates in Poland were now concerned with issues like moral examination of the expulsions, responsibility for the inflicted suffering, terminology, numbers, and whether the expellee's status was that of a political subject or object.