Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia

While Tito is often praised by American "liberals" as representing a humane alternative socialism to Stalinism, his regime was extremely brutal from 1945 to 1948. The ethnic German citizens of Yugoslavia were singled out for special persecution by Tito's partisans after the end of World War II. In the 1990s a census of losses from ethnic German villages during the early years of the Tito regime confirmed the shooting of 7,199 and the death in concentration camps of 48,447 ethnic German civilians in Yugoslavia. In total 16.8% of the ethnic Germans of Yugoslavia died at the hands of Tito's new regime either in front of firing squads or in camps (Prauser and Sretenovic, p.57). In addition to those interned in Yugoslavia, the new communist regime also shipped 12,364 ethnic Germans to the USSR from January to March 1945 (Polian, p. 260). The horrors of the brutal internment of the ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia is best documented in the film series Millions Cried...No One Listened by Ann Morrison.

Sources:

Pavel Polian, Against their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004).

Steffen Prauser and Stanislav Sretenovic, "The 'Expulsion' of the German Speaking Minority from Yugoslavia" in Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, eds., The Expulsion of the 'German' Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of Second World War (Florence, Italy: European University Institute, 2004), pp. 47-58.