Why is the 1944-1950 German democide/genocide/forced migration ignored?

[Kingpoleon]

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944–50)

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think the reasons why it's ignored are rather obvious and understandable. That doesn't make it any less bad, of course.

[DPKdebator]

It is at least partially due to it being the end of World War II, since one way Germany was punished was through the removal of its territory. Probably because muh Nazis, uprooting millions of ordinary people from their ancestral homelands and forcing them out was seen as less immoral. Germany of course deserved punishment for World War II, though I think too much territory was taken (i.e. giving Poland land it hadn't had for almost 1,000 years) and there shouldn't have been so many people forced out.

[Kingpoleon]

It is at least partially due to it being the end of World War II, since one way Germany was punished was through the removal of its territory. Probably because muh Nazis, uprooting millions of ordinary people from their ancestral homelands and forcing them out was seen as less immoral. Germany of course deserved punishment for World War II, though I think too much territory was taken (i.e. giving Poland land it hadn't had for almost 1,000 years) and there shouldn't have been so many people forced out.

Is it ever right to evict an ethnic group?

The German population, in what had formerly been Prussia, was nearly destroyed. An entire culture was wiped out. The remnants of Prussian culture was dissolved in East Germany, which obviously had a culture that was the complete opposite of Prussian. The scapegoating of Germany in WWI may have been the main cause of tens of millions of deaths and more forced migrations.

I think the reasons why it's ignored are rather obvious and understandable. That doesn't make it any less bad, of course.

Though I normally consider myself understanding, the largest forced migration in all of European history is, strangely, hard for me to understand.

[Middle-aged Europe]

It isn't ignored.

It has been frequently (mis)used by German national-conservatives and neo-Nazis for the past 70 years as proof that the Germans were in fact the victims of World War II and not perpetrators (and if they were perpetrators, they were just as bad ones as the Allies) and that these territories must be therefore given back.

In the past two decades or so this has been a changed a bit, since a number of non-revisionist, mainstream novels, movies, and TV miniseries came out in Germany as well dealing with the subject in a more tasteful and non-nationalist manner.

[Kingpoleon]

It isn't ignored.

It has been frequently (mis)used by German national-conservatives and neo-Nazis for the past 70 years as proof that the Germans were in fact the victims of World War II and not perpetrators (and if they were perpetrators, they were just as bad ones as the Allies) and that these territories must be therefore given back.

In the past two decades or so this has been a changed a bit, since a number of non-revisionist, mainstream novels, movies, and TV miniseries came out in Germany as well dealing with the subject in a more tasteful and non-nationalist manner.

In America, it most certainly is ignored.

[Virginiá]

In America, it most certainly is ignored.

I'd have to agree. I don't really recall this being talked about much in HS or in college, and in all the times I've talked about this subject with people, I'm pretty sure it has never come up.

I'm sure its talked about in some corners as 0% alluded to but in the mainstream, at least in America, not really.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Given what the Nazis did to my country, I see territorial changes as absolutely justified (especially given the last we simultaneously lost in the east). Significant part of these territories also had strong historical-demographic links to Poland all that time. We've been screwed enough since 1939, so leaving us as a rump state... come on.

Term "genocide" indirectly implies these events being in the same league as Nazi genocide during the war, which is both idiotic and outright offensive.

And, for the record, I wish we could settle this without massive forced migration, but you have to remember this was just after the bloody World War II.

[Kingpoleon]

Given what the Nazis did to my country, I see territorial changes as absolutely justified (especially given the last we simultaneously lost in the east). Significant part of these territories also had strong historical-demographic links to Poland all that time. We've been screwed enough since 1939, so leaving us as a rump state... come on.

Term "genocide" indirectly implies these events being in the same league as Nazi genocide during the war, which is both idiotic and outright offensive.

And, for the record, I wish we could settle this without massive forced migration, but you have to remember this was just after the bloody World War II.

Perhaps I'm being insensitive, but the destruction of a culture, virtual enslavement of at least 500,000 Germans, and the largest forced migration in European history strikes me as something that needs to be discussed. Just because the victors write history doesn't mean we can ignore their flaws.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In Germany far from being ignored it has been talked about so much over the years - and as Old Europe rightly points out in a certain tone of voice - that many people are sick of hearing about it. It's barely even known about elsewhere of course, but that's for fairly obvious reasons (the classic 'Germans as Victims' problem). Neither situation is particularly positive. The good thing about time passing is that we can maybe now start to discuss events like this if not with objectivity but with a degree of perspective (for want of a better word; tragic perspective would perhaps be more accurate) that would once have been completely impossible.

[Associate Justice PiT]

In America, it most certainly is ignored.

I'd have to agree. I don't really recall this being talked about much in HS or in college, and in all the times I've talked about this subject with people, I'm pretty sure it has never come up.

I'm sure its talked about in some corners as 0% alluded to but in the mainstream, at least in America, not really.

     I think it is also worth noting that the mainstream just ignoring this tragedy because of the migrants' cultural link to a vicious genocidal regime is the sort of thing that would make this more salient for neo-Nazis. If we want to disarm it, we should at least acknowledge that it is a thing that happened and it was not a good thing.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Significant part of these territories also had strong historical-demographic links to Poland all that time.

All those mixed ethnicity German-speaking families in Upper Silesia, sure (not that they were treated particularly well in the new state, but then the Communist regime in Poland was addicted to crass racism against its remaining minorities, as you know), but that's a difficult argument to make for Breslau and so on. But those were extreme and dreadful times in which a lot of people did awful things to each other. Lots of new families in the new Wrocław were themselves victims of ethnic cleansing of course, and there's no harm at all in finding it very sad that the 20th century produced places like that; ethnically cleansed cities populated in part by families who were ethnically cleansed from elsewhere.

[Rob Bloom]

In West Germany, these incidents did play a major role in politics until the 1980's. The displaced people from Silesia and Sudetenland formed powerful associations, with big influence in CDU and especially CSU, since most migrants finally settled in Bavaria.

In the beginning, they even had their own party, the BHE (Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten/Association of deported and disenfrachised people), which was temporarily part of Chancellor Adenauer's coalition and administration.

"Germany in the borders of 1937" was an important and undisputed claim of the CDU/CSU platform at least until the 1970's. Chancellor Brandt's efforts to settle the border argmuent with Poland and Russia, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, where highly disputed. CDU/CSU fought against it tooth and nail because it meant giving up the homeland of the Silesians, Sudeten and East Prussians.     

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In the beginning, they even had their own party, the BHE (Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten/Association of deported and disenfrachised people), which was temporarily part of Chancellor Adenauer's coalition and administration.

They were particularly strong in Schleswig-Holstein; took over a fifth of the vote in the 1950 state election.

[Figueira]

Because people can't deal with nuance while studying history. Obviously if the Germans were the bad guys in WWII, they can't suddenly become the victims.

[Cory]

Given what the Nazis did to my country, I see territorial changes as absolutely justified (especially given the last we simultaneously lost in the east). Significant part of these territories also had strong historical-demographic links to Poland all that time. We've been screwed enough since 1939, so leaving us as a rump state... come on.

Poland shouldn't have been as big as it was in 1939 to begin with, honestly.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

It wasn't just the Germans. Many Poles had to move west because the Soviet Union got to keep their half of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (I realize there were some changes to the border since then).

[Green Line]

I would have wanted them out of my country too.  They did terrible things, and were all complicit at a certain level.  You people need to think what it was like in 1945.  A good chunk of the world was killled because of them.

[Associate Justice PiT]

I would have wanted them out of my country too.  They did terrible things, and were all complicit at a certain level.  You people need to think what it was like in 1945.  A good chunk of the world was killled because of them.

     We can recognize that people had comprehensible reasons for doing bad things in the past and also recognize that those things were bad.

[angus]

Why is the 1944-1950 German democide/genocide/forced migration ignored?

But it isn't.  I just finished The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert, which is three short stories set in Germany near the end and just after the fall of Berlin.  The main characters aren't directly involved in the forced migrations, but it is mentioned.  Leon Uris and James Michener also writes about it.  There are a number of other scholarly works.  Here's one you might like.

You don't really have time to go over it in your ninth grade world history class because they are expected to take you from the conquest of South Egypt by Menes some 5200 years ago through the fall of communism and beyond.  It's a lot to cover.  They don't mention ethnic German dislocations, but then they don't mention the Rape of Nanjing either, do they?  You have American history in another class, but that's of course only History as it relates to the United States.  From that point of view, the Marshall Plan and the rise of anti-communist paranoia is more economically relevant to the history of the US than the migrations, forced and free, after world war 2.

In University, you get more options.  For example, Millersville University offers a history course, label HIST 224, called Modern Germany which begins around 1806 after napoleon swept through and collected little states into bigger ones and goes all the way through to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond.  In that course there's at least one lecture devoted to the contraction of German borders in 1945 and the herding of Germans like cattle into locked boxcars and former Nazi concentration camps for resettlement within the new borders of Germany.  Best of all, the instructor's name is Kevorkian, although I've never asked her if she is related to Doctor Death.  There's another one, HIST 342, called Hitler and Nazism, which surveys the origins and impact of National Socialist theory.  I'm told that the the forced migrations which resulted after the war get more attention in that class. 

So I don't think the migrations are ignored.  It's not as sexy a topic as the Communism, Nazis, the trans-atlantic slave trade, and terrorism are, but there are plenty of books and lectures on the subject so you can get your fill.

[mencken]

I would have wanted them out of my country too.  They did terrible things, and were all complicit at a certain level.  You people need to think what it was like in 1945.  A good chunk of the world was killled because of them.

This sounds like the German nationalist argument against the Jews during the 1920s.

[Green Line]

I would have wanted them out of my country too.  They did terrible things, and were all complicit at a certain level.  You people need to think what it was like in 1945.  A good chunk of the world was killled because of them.

This sounds like the German nationalist argument against the Jews during the 1920s.

Wow, comparing Jews to what the Nazis did?? 

[mencken]

I would have wanted them out of my country too.  They did terrible things, and were all complicit at a certain level.  You people need to think what it was like in 1945.  A good chunk of the world was killled because of them.

This sounds like the German nationalist argument against the Jews during the 1920s.

Wow, comparing Jews to what the Nazis did?? 

The vast majority of the fifteen million Germans killed or expelled from their homes bore little personal responsibility for the Holocaust, other than through support of a totalitarian dictatorship that was not shy in exacting retribution against political dissidents. Now that we have hopefully dispensed with that accusation against my character, let us compare the two arguments:

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While the latter argument is more grounded in reality and uses a much more horrific event as justification, you cannot get around that both are using horrible actions by a few as justification for horrific reprisal against the entire group.