The German Expellees Victims in War and Peace

The closing phase and the aftermath of World War II saw millions of refugees and displaced persons wandering across Easter Europe in one of the most brutal and chaotic migrations in world history. The genocidal barbarism of the Nazi forces has been well documented. What hitherto has been little researched is the fate of the fifteen million German civillians who found themselves at the mercy of the Soviet armies and on the wrong side of the new postwar borders. All over Eastern Europe, the inhabitants of communities that had been established for many centuries were either expelled or killed. Over two million Germans did not survive their forced displacement. Many of these people had supported Hitler, and for the Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, and surviving Jews, their fate must have seemed just. However, most of these Germans - East Prussian farmers, Silesian industrial workers, their wives and children - were guiltless; their fate, sentenced purely by race, remains an appalling legacy of the period. Alfred de Zayas's book (first published in German to great acclaim) describes this horrible retribution. On the basis of extensive research in German and American archives, he sketches the history of these German communities, scattered from the Baltic to the Danube, focusing not only on their suffering but also on their pioneering achievements and the outstanding literature and art produced over the centuries. He also interviews many survivors from the catastrophic exodus that marked the final end to Nazi fantasies of Lebensraum.