[The following is in regards to forced evacuations of German citizens out of former German territory, now ceded to Poland, and other countries free from Nazi occupation, immediately following the Second World War.]
For those expelled, the experience was traumatic. Often accompanied by physical and sexual violence, expulsions followed patterns not all that different from what the Nazi regime had done to Poles and others during the war. In Czechoslovakia and Poland, Germans were beaten and raped, forced to perform humiliating tasks, subjected to sadistic violence in labour camps (sometimes in the same places – as in Theresienstadt – where the Nazis had run concentration camps), and compelled to wear armbands or letters on their sleeves identifying their ethnicity. Some were randomly killed, others marched out of their homes and herded onto railway cattle cars for long journeys in dreadful weather.
The worst of the violence appears to have been aimed at the Germans in Czechoslovakia. In 1947 a 70-year-old described his expulsion from the Sudetenland, together with his 61-year-old wife and 59-year-old-sister-in-law:
On 16 June we were […] driven out of our own house in Leitmeritz and had to appear at a barracks in two hours without valuables, without savings books, with only a little money and very limited baggage. Here our suffering began. Here what little we still possessed was taken from us almost completely, whoever had something forbidden with him was beaten, and almost all money was taken. We stayed there without food for two nights […] and we laid on wooden boards. At night shots were fired, doors were smashed in, girls and women raped and men bloodily beaten. […]
Not until the third day were we taken to the railway station and brought in an open coal car to Teplitz, where we 72 people remained with [our] baggage in this open car, exposed to all weather conditions until the morning of the fourth day. That same day we were deliberately driven for many hours on foot in the blazing sun to Geising on the other side of the border. There was no food and also no water. We had to depend on the meagre supplies that we had been able hurriedly to take with us from home. We called the incredibly exhausting march from Teplitz to Geising the death march and it took place in dramatic conditions that are indescribable.
Whoever could carry on no longer and remained behind was driven on with whip and revolver, and people exhausted to the point of death had to throw away their last possessions in order just to come through with their lives.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “The Loss of the East.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 217-18. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Naimark, Fires of Hatred, pp. 108-38.
Norman Davies and Roger Moonhouse, Microcosm. Portrait of a Central European City (London, 2003), pp. 417-425.
Bericht 320, from Adelheid, Marie and Karl Uiberla on 28 April 1947, printed in Alois Harasko, ‘Die Vertreibung der Sudetendeutschen. Sechs Erlebnisberichte’, in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten. Ursachen, Ereignisse, Folden (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), pp. 111-112.
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