Schieder commission
The Schieder Commission did not inform the readers about the implementation of the earlier Lebensraum concept: in 1938 and 1939 Nazi Germany expanded its territory far into the east, annexing parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland (Sudetenland, Warthegau).
These motivations were fully endorsed by Schieder and other commission members[2] such as Diestelkamp, who felt that Germany had missed a similar chance after it lost the First World War, and that a related Polish project[3] needed a counter-weight.
[11] Non-board members included historians Hans Booms, Martin Broszat, Eckhart Franz, Kurt Kluxen, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and also several so-called "collectors" (of sources).
[12] The commission was created in 1951 by Hans Lukaschek,[13] former German propaganda chief throughout the Upper Silesia plebiscite after First World War,[14] known for his anti-Polish views[15] Minister for the Expelled in West Germany from 1949 to 1953.
[16] Lukaschek had before been an important Silesian politician responsible for persecution of Polish teachers and pupils in that region,[17] and lawyer, was actively involved in anti-Nazi resistance and in 1948 was appointed vice president of the British and US zones' supreme court.
[9][20][21] Schieder was also one of the primary authors of a document entitled Generalplan Ost which called for creating "Lebensraum" (living-space) for Germans in Eastern Europe by enslaving or starving to death the Slavs, and killing all the Jews who lived there.
[9] The propagandist aims of the German government at the time were to utilize the commission's work to keep the question of the territories lost by Germany as a result of World War II open.
[27] Schieder enthusiastically supported Hitler's invasion of Poland and wrote academic papers on Germany's role as a "force of order" and a "bearer of a unique cultural mission", in Eastern Europe.
[29] Werner Conze was a doctoral student of Rothfels in Königsberg under the Nazis, where he claimed in his research that Germans had a positive role in the development of eastern Europe.
[6] Part of Schieder's aim was to make sure that the expulsions were established as "one of the most momentous events in all of European history and one of the great catastrophes in the development of the German people".
[34] He sought to make sure that the publishing of selected documents would bring to light events which he felt had so far been "for the most part hushed up"[2] The intended audience of the commission's findings were not just Germans, but also readers in other Western countries, particularly the Allies who had signed the Potsdam agreement.
[2] They also hoped that the work of the commission would help to convince the victorious Western allies to revise their position with regard to Germany's post war eastern borders with Poland.
[2] In doing so Schieder endorsed the ties between work of his historians and the Federal Republic's desire to for revision of post-war boundary settlement, being fully convinced such result would outweigh the problem of responses from Eastern Europe.
[35] While the commission was aware that first person accounts of the expulsions were often unreliable, the members believed it was necessary to utilize these in their work, as they did not trust either Nazi era sources, nor those published by post war communist governments.
[38] In 1953, Hans Lukaschek presented a report of the commission for the former German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, pre-war Poland and the Free City of Danzig.
Apart from the Schieder commission the Statistisches Bundesamt Federal Statistical Office of Germany was responsible for issuing a final report analyzing the figures relating to the population losses due to the expulsions.
West German internal reports available at that time based on the classified records of the Search Service which traced those persons who were dead or missing indicated that there about 500,000 confirmed deaths and 1.9 million unresolved cases which lacked adequate support.
The Search Service data was archived and not released to the general public until 1988- according to Ingo Haar, this was due to a fear that they were "too low" and would lead to "politically undesirable conclusions" Harr points out that these issues were raised with the West German government but they insisted that the Statistisches Bundesamt match the figures published by Schieder's commission.
However, according to Overmans the 500,000 to 600,000 deaths found by the Search Service and German Federal Archives are based on incomplete information and do not provide a definitive answer to losses in the expulsions.
[41] Ingo Harr maintains that the figures for expulsion dead include children who were never born (due to lower wartime fertility), German speaking Jews murdered in the Holocaust and individuals who were assimilated into the local population after the war.
[40] He also stated that the Statistisches Bundesamt's 2.225 million number relied on improper statistical methodology and incomplete data, particularly in regard to the expellees who arrived in East Germany after the war.
