Ethnic cleansing in Europe after World War II

27 comments
  1. For some more context, the “Czech resettlers within Czechoslovakia” were largely Hungarians transferred from their native communities in Slovakia to the Czech borderlands.

    “These “labor recruitings” were named by Czech historian Karel Kaplan as “internal colonizations”, and according to him their “political aim… was to transfer a part of the Hungarian minority away from the Hungarian border and to destroy it as a compact territorial unit. This colonization also had an immediate industrial goal – to provide the depopulated areas with a workforce”.”

    The most screwed up part of it all is that that many of them ended up living in the former homes of expelled Germans.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportations_of_Hungarians_to_the_Czech_lands

  2. It’s missing the Italians that were ethnically cleansed from Slovenia and Croatia by Titos Partisans.

  3. My hungarian-german (in hungary they are called “Sváb” but i don’t think there is an english name for them) great-grandma and my grandpa hid in a barn for 3 years in hungary until the dust settled a little and they could go back to their house without being immediately deported (my grandpa’s sister did get deported to germany and she lived there till she died), but the russian soldiers were still living there and so my grandpa and his mother were forced to live only in their own house’s bathroom.

  4. It was cruel, no doubt. But thanks to that, 80 years later we live in a country without border disputes like Ukraine or Moldova.

  5. People don’t really talk about this, but post WW2 the Germans weren’t treated lightly. They were ethnically cleansed.

  6. Most of the German expellees appear to have been from Eastern Poland, and IIRC in the late 18th century Prussia, Austria, and Russia had **partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth three times.** I’m not certain, but many of the Germans expelled from Poland were probably descendants of German settlers **during the partitions** of Poland around the time of the American Revolution–the *Federalist Papers* cite the partitions as reasons for adopting the Constitution BTW.

    Prussia as a German State was De Jure abolished after World War II, though Hitler’s Nazi Germany had De Facto abolished it anyway. Poland got much of Eastern Prussia, though to this day the former Prussian-parts of Poland tend to vote for the Civic Coalition (“KO”) during Polish general elections while the rest of Poland tends to vote for the Law and Justice Party (“PiS”). I have no comment on the expulsion of ethnic Germans at the end of the World War II, bye.

  7. Not that it’s worse in any way, but it’s interesting that more Germans were expelled than victims in the Holocaust.

  8. It looks like then and even now central and Eastern Europeans been and are in trouble from Russia all the time.

  9. Two things:
    – These are mass deportations, not genocides, which is what eyhnic cleansing usually means
    – The world had just fought a massive war which started on the grounds of ethnic exclaves needing rescuing from oppressive governments. Current Ukraine war had a similar justification.

  10. Over 45000 Romanians were removed from Moldova by the Soviets between 1940 and 1950. This is documented by the Soviets themselves.

  11. WW2 was the biggest mistake Germany could have made. It erased a millennia of German culture and heritage from Eastern Europe.

    The original partitions of Poland were a complete strategic misstep because they erased a key counterbalance to Russia which had been an ally of Germany for centuries.

    Following WW2 when Poland and other eastern European countries were reestablished, it could have been the perfect opportunity to rebuild that.

  12. Ethnic cleansing would to my pov also include killings, but that may be not in the intention of the creator of the map)

    So eg. the 6-500.000 killed jews of hungary maybe, or the countless poles and russians in poland and the sovjet union)

    in the case of hungarian jews, almost all killings took place starting spring of 1944, so even if you take the arbitrary timeframe of the map would have had to be included.

    but as I said in the beginning, this was not the intention of this map in the first place.

  13. part of my family lived in the Gmina Borzytuchom/Gemeinde Borntuchen during the war and fled just before the deportation if I recall correctly. They fled to Schleswig-Holstein and were treated worse than shit by the local germans. Literal refugees in their own country, treated like they didn’t belong. Everything about this time was horrible, literally everything

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