Slavic Revenge on the Germans - War Against Humanity 138

The governments of central Europe take revenge on their German populations. From Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, millions of people are thrown from their homes and banished to the shattered remains of Germany. This will be the largest forced migration in history.

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Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Marek Kamiński
Community Management: Jake McCluskey
Written by: James Newman & Spartacus Olsson
Research by: James Newman
Map animations by: Daniel Weiss, Karolina Dołęga
Map research by: Sietse Kenter
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Artwork and color grading by: Mikołaj Uchman
Sound design by: Marek Kamiński
Colorizations by:
MikoŁaj Uchman
Daniel Weiss

Image sources:
Bundesarchiv
Portrait of Harold Perkins courtesy of Special Forces Club
Deutsche Fotothek 0000126 029
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe NAC
Picture of Expulsion of Sudeten Germans courtesy of Sudetendeutsche Stiftung

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:

Deviation In Time - Johannes Bornlof
Document This 1 - Peter Sandberg
Guilty Shadows 4 - Andreas Jamsheree
It's Not a Game - Philip Ayers
Last Minute Reaction - Phoenix Tail
Leave It All Here - Fabien Tell
Not Safe Yet - Gunnar Johnsen
Please Hear Me Out S - Philip Ayers
Potential Redemption - Max Anson
Rememberance - Fabien Tell
Secret Cargo - Craft Case
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

[WorldWarTwo]

Spartacus will pick this story up next week in a second episode on the German expulsions. He will also soon address the early war atrocities of the Korean War on our new channel.

[frankwitte]

My father (1925-2003) grew up in the Dutch city of Utrecht and the first German he saw was a German soldier in May 1940. From 1941-1945 he and his older brother were in hiding to avoid the Arbeitseinsatz. After the war he refused to have anything to do with Germans and would refer to them only with the derogatory "Moffen". In 1990 I fell in love with a German girl, in 1993 we married and had our first baby. On the night my eldest daughter was born, my father stayed up and wrote her a letter. In the letter he writes to her to tell her how her arrival on this Earth means so much to him ... and goes on to thank her because, as he puts it, "with your birth the War has finally come to and end for me!". She has that letter now ... and I still often think of the moment where he gave it to me, to pass it on to her. In the years after, he and my mother started visiting Germany frequently, catching up on so much that he had denied himself for decades. Wars leave wounds that take generations to heal.

[nikoking]

I always found the passage from MM's "Paris 1919" so haunting. "In 1939 Poland disapeared from the map once again. When it emerged in 1945 it was a strangly altered and shrunken Poland; emptied of its Jews by the Germans and its Germans by the Soviets and moved 200 miles to the west."

[olseneudezet]

I strongly recommend the Polish movie "Rose" from 2011 by Wojciech Smarzowski. It tells a story of a Polish Home Army soldier, who fought in the Warsaw uprising and, in summer 1945, goes to Masuria, formerly Eastern Prussia, now Poland to find a Masurian woman and give her the letter from her now-dead husband, a Wehrmacht soldier, who gave it to him when dying. Smarzowski doesn't miss when it comes to historical drama. The movie is on Netflix, at least here in Poland.

[konstantinjirecek]

My grandfther and grandmother were Germans who had not been expelled from Czechoslovakia, because they employed hundreds of Czechs in their textile factory and saved them from slave work in Germany during WWII. It is interesting that all sisters of my grandfather married SS officers and were explelled. It is even more interesting that communist government after WWII totally destroyed my grandfather. His factory was confiscated he was sent to work in coal mine - up to the point that his favourite quote was "If I f*ckef SS officers, like my sisters, I could have villa with pool and Mercedes in Stuttgart"

[szaser]

In the past, I talk to Polish soldier whose unit expelled Germans from Głogów in 1945. He told me, that he took part in it personally and personally expelled some German families from their houses saying "that land is no more Reich. It' s Poland now". I asked him if he had any remorse or reservations from doing this. He said "No, that time I didn't even think about this, but after some years I started thinking that that was unfair and cruel". Family of this soldier was killed by Germans in concentration camp, he was also prisoner of concentration camp, but he managed to escape somehow. He told me that during war, Germas commited to many crimes on Poles and almost everybody lost somebody or suffered from their hands and in 1945, right after war Poles didn't care about their ex-torturers and executioners. Whole Europe hated Germans for what ther did in occupied countries, especially on the East, where Germans cosidered Slavs as "Untermenshen" and people had no rights. Every german could just kill you freely.

[szymonmaraszewski]

My uncle Has been one of the Poles from the east who settled in Wrocław after war (german Breslau). He's been political prisoner of germans during their terror occupation of Poland. He was just a 17 year old boy who got accused of being member of partisan movement which got him to Auschwitz (yup, many prisoners were Polish, not only Polish Jews). He literally went to hell and back, after war he moved west looking for a place to start new life in peace. He moved to Wrocław and opened one of the first ice cream shops there. He Has always been so kind to others, give leftovers to people for free, but boy, he seriously didn't like germans, the sound od their language and anything german.

[cogman]

This was my mother’s family’s fate being Sudaten Germans. My Opa (German) and Oma (Czech) along with two girls and one boy, all under age 7 were given 20 minutes to vacate their home in Aussig. As they moved out, a Czech family moved in. They were then forced to leave the Czech area and head west to Germany. After several trains and camps, they relocated to a small town in Bavaria. The local Germans weren’t exactly welcoming to them either. Housing was in short supply as was food. It took a while for things to settle down Germany. However, they persevered. Retribution was expected. Thank goodness my mom survived it.

[xSuperSS]

My great-grandmother was German living near east Prussian border. She would tell my grandmother of the looks she would get for decades after the war from people. The only reason she was allowed to stay was because her husband was Polish and a war hero.

[yurik]

I am glad you talk about it.I have a little complicated personal story but I think it illustrates how mixed the situation was in the central Europe and the absolute human tragedy of both world wars. The story is all placed in Brno (Bruenn) and immediate surroundings. But also it is a tribute to my family members who lived through that time.

My family comes from a mixed Czech-German background. As far as I can tell, my great great grandfather was Czech and married a girl from German family before the beginning of 20th century. They live with her family and were generally speaking German at home. Their first child was my great grandma who somehow went living with my great grandfathers family and was raised as a Czech, I am not sure about all the circumstances but most likely due to poverty. My great grandma eventually had more siblings (around 10) who were all raised as Germans. My great grandma married, had a son (my great uncle), her husband got killed or severely injured during the great war, she got a tobacconist store as a compensation but her son was at least for part of his life living with her parents family.

In the 1920s, she got married again and eventually got my grandma. With the rise of Nazi Germany and the Anschluss of Austria, many people flee Vienna with the immediate stop in Brno which had roughly 40 % of German population. My great grandma provides a temporary shelter to some refugees (I assume those would be some distant friends from the past) on their way to he final destination. Her son finds liking in the Nazi uniforms and greets her with a Nazi salute which she replies with a slap saying that she raised him better. During the war my grandma (now a teenager) smuggles agricultural products from the nearby villages which they partially sell, partially give away at their store. My grandma always escaped suspicion at the train station due to the fact that she had blond hair and blue eyes and spoke a perfect German. By the end of the war, my grandma got drafted as a slave labor at what was probably a factory making parts for the V-rockets. My great uncle disappeared somewhere on the eastern front.

When the war ended and the Czech state decided to expel the German population living there my great grandma and my grandma were allowed to stay as they have never claimed German citizenship. The rest of her family (her parents and siblings) were force to move as they accepted German citizenship during the war. My great great grandfather could not imagine leaving the house where he spent more than half of a century and hanged himself. The rest of the family ended somewhere in Bavaria but my trail ends here.

[ives]

"War does not determine who is right, only who is left." — Bertrand Russell

[PetrMervart]

I am Czech, and my grandmother is a Sudeten German. Fortunately, all members of her family could speak Czech back then, so they were not harmed. They lost all their property, but they were allowed to stay in Czechoslovakia. Thanks for this episode. It is necessary to constantly remind ourselves that we too have committed such crimes. Never forget.

[gerardwall]

My grandfather collectively blamed the German people for the war . My youngest uncle was assigned to the US Army occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war. My grandfather wrote to him threatening to disown him if my uncle made contact with any of the extended family members in Germany. One of my great uncles defied my grandfather and made contact with some surviving family members. The stories from them were horrific and caused my grandfather to relent on his no contact threats.

[joejankoski]

"This would be the largest population transfer in history..." India and Pakistan in 1947, "Hold my beer."

[gurufabbes]

Furthermore, as everyone is giving their family experience. I can share that of my father's uncle. I think I posted about him before in another comment.

Essentially he was captured in North Africa, fighting with Montgomery. He was shipped off to Italy as a British POW, then I don't know how, he ended up somewhere in Poland. After being liberated he has to make his way across Europe to allied lines. But on the way, in each city in Poland along the way, he did witness the aftermath of the Soviets retaking towns, and hanged ethnic Germans in public squares.
These stories are facts and are confirmed by the stories kept in my own family.

[stanwojcik]

Many of geographical names in todays western Poland were re-Polonized rather than Polonized.

[KerianRegis]

Poor poor Germans. What did they ever do to deserve such cruel fate?

[ckiottest]

Glad my German speaking grandparents from what today is Serbia and Hungary came to the US just before WW1.

[tomaszsebastian]

I'm polish German. No one from my family was persecuted after the war. But it was so because we were loyal for our new fatherland. My grandfather and his brother were both soldiers of polish army from 1939 through conspiracy (granfather) or Italy (grandpa's brother) till 1945.
Grandpa who was before the war professional soldier (sergeant) of WP ended war in Germany als sergeant in new polish army ranks.

[dragosstanciu]

Almost half of the German population in Romania left the country after 1945. There were some 600 000 Germans in Romania before 1942, and less than 350 000 in 1948. During and after the communist regime another 300 000 Germans left the country in search of a better life in the West.