The Tragedy Europe Forgot (Expulsions of Germans From East of the Oder)

By the late spring of 1945, Germany had lost a war, its honor and millions of dead. There was more to come. The Allies had decided that the country's east should be carved up between Poland and the Soviet Union and that its German inhabitants should be moved to the truncated Reich. There they would encounter Sudeten Germans, Czechoslovakia's second largest ethnic group, now also scheduled for deportation. In August 1945, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed at Potsdam that these transfers, which had in any case already begun, should be "orderly and humane."

Waaah.....Germans expelled Poles from their lands during the war....and Poland had even more land stolen by the Soviets after the war....besides many of those lands Poland gained, went back and forth between Germany and Poland over the centuries.

Same happened to the Germans in the Sudetenland, better to expel them, then to lay the seeds for the next war.

The Germans were clearly begging for it, no tears shed there.

However, the Soviets did not deserve to control Koenigsberg, a coup which enabled them to exert further control over the Baltics.

The Communist government of Poland didn't deserve control of Danzig either, but a free government of Poland did, so in the end that part of the deal has worked out.

Beyond the suffering of millions of Germans from East Prussia, the Sudeten land, large areas of present-day Poland, and as far away as the Volga, we have half a century of enslavement of the people's of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.

In this context, the next time we hear some leftist in Hollywood deploring McCarthyism we ought to remind ourselves that for four years from 1945 until 1949 the United States of America had exclusive ultimate warmaking power in its hands and failed to use it, or even threaten to use it, on behalf of these enslaved peoples. From the time that Alger Hiss acted as a senior advisor to Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta in 1944 until the Soviets were able to acquire the bomb through espionage of United States atomic secrets, the Soviets were utterly defenseless but nothing could induce the United States to act. To the contrary a study of the reaction to Churchill's Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri reveals how he was reviled by the left in America and in Great Britain for warning the world of what was transpiring.

Much of the suffering endured by these German refugees from the East and by all the slave peoples of Eastern Europe occurred not solely as the inevitable consequence of the turmoil of the world war but through the calculated cruelty of the Soviets. Much of it could have been avoided or alleviated by an America vigorous and confident as the sole possessor of the world's ultimate weapon. Our inaction was not due to a disparity in military might but to an artificial state of purblindness.


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Thanks C19fan. By the late spring of 1945, Germany had lost a war, its honor and millions of dead. Nonsense -- Germany had willingly surrendered its honor with its campaigns of genocide, and were willingly herded by a cowardly idiot into the abbatoir, in a series of wars he started. After WWII the USSR moved Poland eastward, grabbing territory that had been the object of dispute between Russia and Poland for a long while. Prussia, which had been the core of the modern German state, had its territory in the east for the most part, and the German-speaking population was moved (or killed outright) by the Red Army, and the land given to Poland. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

True, but a great many of those who were forced out were not German citizens in 1938. Many never were.

The original plan was to kill enough German people to limit their numbers to around a few million, and then blast Germany back to the stone age. Ironically, the Soviet threat ended that plan, as we (the Western Allies) didn't want to waste that many potential anti Soviet troops.

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