German evacuation from Central and Eastern Europe
The evacuation of German people from Central and Eastern Europe ahead of the Soviet Red Army advance during the Second World War was delayed until the last moment.
[1][2] Until March 1945, the Nazi authorities had evacuated from the eastern territories (prewar Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia) an estimated 10 to 15 million persons, Germans as well as citizens of other nations.
[7] Meanwhile, the number of returning Reich Germans who had fled eastward temporarily in fear of the British and American bombings in the centre of Germany is also estimated between 825,000 [8][9] and 1,134,000.
[1][11] Statistics dealing with the evacuations are incomplete, and there is uncertainty that estimates are accurate because of the atmosphere of the Cold War period, when various governments manipulated them to fit ideological narratives.
[11][15] According to postwar affidavit submitted in 1947 by the Nazi governor of Warsaw, Gruppenführer Ludwig Fischer: "in roughly mid-August [1944] Gauleiter – of the Warthegau (Greater Poland) district – Greiser directed a huge column of trains and other transportation means filled with goods, furniture, textiles, and medical supplies from Warsaw to Posen (Poznań).
[4][19] Among them, were 2,000,000 Germans who had been evacuated to, or had been resettled during the war into occupied Poland, and who took up homes of Poles subjected to ethnic cleansing operations in the preceding years.
[23] According to Schieders calculations included in the total civilian population are 825,000 [22] persons evacuated eastwards to avoid Allied air raids and 1,174,000 Reichsdeutsche and re-settlers from other European nations.
[14] According to the German Federal Archives 100,000 to 120,000 civilians were killed during the wartime flight and evacuation from the territory east of the Oder Neisse line.
Despite the rapid advances of the Red Army, the German authorities in many areas forbade leaving one's place of residence without a permit and an officially valid reason.
The first mass movement of German civilians in the eastern territories included both spontaneous flight and organized evacuation starting in the summer of 1944 and continuing through to the spring of 1945.
However most of the evacuation efforts commenced in January 1945, when Soviet forces were already at the eastern border of Greater Germany, including the largest death marches.
[33] Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans panicked and fled to the west in 1945, particularly from East Prussia, attempting to seek safety within parts of Germany not yet occupied.
[34] Nazi propaganda widely publicized the details of the Soviet atrocities, such as the Nemmersdorf massacre of October 1944, in an attempt to strengthen German morale.
While advancing toward the West, soldiers of the Red Army committed a variety of atrocities, most notably rape, mutilation, murder and looting.
After the Red Army reached the coast of the Vistula Lagoon near Elbing on January 23, 1945, cutting off the overland route between East Prussia and the western territories,[41] the only way to leave was to cross the frozen Vistula Lagoon and to try to reach the harbours of Danzig (Gdańsk) or Gdingen(Gdynia), to be evacuated by ships taking part in Operation Hannibal.
[45][46] The number of fatalities is disputed by historian Ingo Haar who maintains that they were inflated by the West German government during the Cold War,[47][48][49][50] Haar pointed out that the West German search service was able to confirm 123,360 civilian fatalities in East Prussia due to the wartime flight and post-war expulsions[51] The evacuation of Pomerania was also delayed.
Kolberg, the main seaport within the German-held pocket, was declared a Festung and became the center for sea-based evacuation of both civilians and military from Farther Pomerania.
