Were the Allies responsible for the expulsion of Germans?

The short answer

• The lesson drawn from Munich. Hitler invoked the grievances of three million Sudeten Germans when he dismembered Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Poland’s German minority when he justified invasion in 1939. Czech and Polish leaders, followed by British supporters of transfer, drew a lesson from those precedents: a mixed borderland could supply a pretext for another war. Removing the minority appeared both a response to occupation and a lasting security measure.
• Six years of occupation. Occupation gave many Poles and Czechs reasons to associate their German neighbors with Nazi rule. About six million Polish citizens were killed, half of them Jews; villages including Lidice were destroyed in reprisal, and Nazi plans envisaged deporting or eliminating Slavic populations. Many local Germans served the occupation, and in 1935 about two-thirds of Sudeten German voters had backed Konrad Henlein’s pro-Nazi party. These facts helped make collective blame plausible, though individual Germans had made very different choices.
• Poland moved west. Poland lost its eastern provinces to the Soviet Union under the settlement accepted at Yalta, with compensation to come in the west. Potsdam placed the Oder–Neisse lands under Polish administration “pending the final determination” of the border. Warsaw sought permanence by settling Poles there and removing Germans. The uprooting of Poles in the east and the expulsion of Germans in the west were connected.
• Allied consent and the Lausanne precedent. The 1923 Greek–Turkish exchange, which moved about 1.6 million people, offered Allied planners a precedent they thought had brought peace. Churchill called expulsion the most “satisfactory and lasting” method in December 1944. Belief that transfer could prevent conflict and be managed humanely helped secure great-power support for Polish and Czechoslovak plans.

What it changed

A sixth of West Germany. West Germany’s September 1950 census counted 7.9 million expellees, 16.5 percent of its population. Many were first housed in rural Bavaria, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. Housing programs, the Equalisation of Burdens law of 1952 and the postwar boom helped integrate them, a founding achievement of the Federal Republic explored in chapter 6. Expellees also organized a party and associations that kept claims to the lost east in politics for a generation.

Room for Poles from the east. The departure of Germans opened homes in Silesia and Pomerania to Poles from central Poland and provinces annexed by the Soviet Union. Breslau became Wrocław within three years. Some settlers found German furniture still in their houses; many expected for years to be moved again. Chapter 3 follows these linked journeys, in which one removal made room for another.

Outside the refugee regime. German expellees arriving in Germany were generally treated by international agencies as Germany’s responsibility. The 1951 Refugee Convention excludes people recognized by their country of residence as having the rights and obligations attached to nationality there. Chapter 5 examines a protection system in which access depended in part on whether a person had a state’s protection.

A memory still contested. Expellee associations became influential in West German politics. Remembering German suffering alongside responsibility for Nazi occupation remained a question in relations with Poland and the Czech Republic for decades. The 1990 border treaty and the Berlin documentation center opened in 2021 mark later stages of the argument, discussed in the epilogue.