Monday, October 28, 2013

Die Vertreibung der Deutschen



This is a pretty good video on the expulsion of  millions of ethnic Germans from what was eastern Germany and the East Central European and Balkan states of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania. I like that the narrative is written rather than spoken so it is easier for me to follow. The video gives the figure of 14 million ethnic Germans as being either expelled or fleeing westward. Other sources give lower figures. But, the total number of refugees and expulsion victims appears to have been at least 12 million. The only notable error I found was the estimates on the number of expelled Germans to die prematurely as a result of their forcible eviction from their homelands. This video gives the number at 2.1 million which appears based upon the early reports by the BRD government in the 1950s. More recent academic studies dealing with the losses have estimated the number of deaths directly caused by the expulsions to be around 500,000. Although as I noted earlier regarding the Russian-Germans the debate about numbers does almost nothing to change the fact that the expulsions were a massive crime against humanity and completely unjustified.

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