Abstract
Many today ignore or minimize the horrors of the expulsion of the Germans. Journalists and politicians seldom speak about it. When they do, they mention a “transfer of populations,” which sounds harmless enough. Even historians in the East and in the West have had a tendency to use similar euphemisms. Yet, in order to understand how the Germans themselves perceive the expulsion, it is necessary to look for a more encompassing definition of the term Vertreibung, or expulsion, which is seen in Germany as embracing not only the mass expulsions in the summer and fall of 1945 but also the evacuations of German populations undertaken by German authorities beginning in the fall of 1944, the general flight of refugees in the spring of 1945 and the organized forced resettlements that began in 1946. The term is perceived in this manner because the evacuees and those who fled fully intended to return to their home regions at the conclusion of hostilities. However, Polish and Soviet authorities prevented the refugees from returning, thereby uprooting them and, in a very real sense, making expellees out of them.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
NOTES
German Federal Archives/Military Archive (hereafter BA-MA), Bestand H 3/493, Fremde Heere Ost. See also Alexander Werth, Russia at War (New York, 1964).
Ehrenburg, Russia at War, pp. 86, 113, 229, 234, 267. See also Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Das DeutscheReichundderZweite Weltkrieg, vol. 4 (Stuttgart, 1983), chapter by Joachim Hoffmann, “Die Kriegführung aus der Sicht der Sowjetunion”, pp. 713–809.
Order of the Day No. 55, Moscow, 23 February 1942, quoted in J. Stalin, Ueber den Grossen Vaterländischen Krieg der Sowjetunion (Berlin, 1951), 2nd ed., pp. 43 et seq.
Hans Graf von Lehndorff. East Prussian Diary, 1945–47 (London, 1963), p. 68. In the years 1975–78, the author visited the late Graf Lehndorff at his residence in Bad Godesberg to discuss his and other testimonies concerning the behavior of the Soviet Army in East Prussia.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York, 1974), p. 21.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights: A Poem (New York, 1977). Translated by Robert Conquest.
Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought (London, 1976).
Götinger Arbeitskreis, Dokumente der Menschlichkeit (Würzburg, 1960).
George Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston, 1967), vol. 1, p. 265.
Fritz Brustat-Naval, Unternehmen Rettung (Herford, 1970)
Christopher Dobson, J. Miller and R. Payne, The Cruellest Night (London, 1979)
Stephen W. Roskill, The War at Sea 1939–1945 (London, 1954).
Dobson, Miller and Payne, The Cruellest Nighg Jürgen Rohwer und Gerhard Hummelchen, Chronik des Seekrieges 1939–1945 (Oldenbourg, 1968)
Cajus Bekker, Flucht übers Meer (Oldenbourg, 1959).
Axel Rodenberger, Der Tod von Dresden (Frankfurt, 1960), p. 51ff.
See also: Max Seydewitz, Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau von Dresden (Dresden, 1955)
David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (London, 1963).
Gerhart Pohl, Gerhart Hauptmann and Silesia (Grand Forks, N.D., 1962), p. 8.
C.P. Snow, Science and Government (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 47ff
Max Hastings, Bomber Command (London, 1979).
Copyright information
© 1993 Alfred-Maurice de Zayas
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
de Zayas, AM. (1993). War and Flight. In: The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22836-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22836-2_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-22838-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-22836-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)