While the current  circumstances involve completely different scenarios in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it behooves us to highlight once again the incredible inhumanity inflicted on ordinary folks who end up paying the price of warfare  through absolutely no fault of their own.

Participants at the Potsdam Agreement. Stalin and Truman seen on the left.

As it turned out, the Potsdam agreement resulted in perhaps the largest documented case of state sanctioned ethnic cleansing on record, and one of the most disturbing events of relatively recent European history. It was a direct result of  the US and England giving in to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s demands to keep the part of Poland he had already annexed earlier under the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler in 1939 as well as  most of the German province of East Prussia.

Not only would two million Poles be forced to abandon their homes and lands and resettle behind the redrawn Polish/Soviet Union border (the Curzon Line) to the West,  the entire ethnic German population east of the Oder-Neisse line was to be expelled and “repatriated” to the remaining German territory west of the Neisse River.  The territories affected would be the German provinces  of Silesia, Pomerania, and East and West Prussia,  as well as sections of Czechoslovakia. This meant that a staggering number of around 13 million  ethnic Germans would be forced from their former homelands where many of their families had lived and worked as far back as the 13th century.

While the plan was to allow for “the orderly and humane repatriation of Germans”, this didn’t quite work out that way. Around 5 million people were forced to flee almost immediately ahead of the Soviet red army advance into East Prussia in the manner of a vicious barbaric horde bent on raping, killing and – in general – ransacking everything in their path.

Rape, in particular, was the highlight on the pillager’s menu. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then a young captain in the Red Army, described the entry of his regiment into East Prussia in January 1945 as follows: “For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction”.

German Expellees Leaving East Prussia

Of the remaining 8 million Germans that were forced to repatriate roughly 1.2 million did not survive the unassisted trek west across their now former homelands and through Polish territory to the relative safety of Allied-occupied German territory on the other side of the Neisse river. The survivors – typically not the very old or the very young, and mostly ordinary farm or small town folk who had done nothing more than toil ceaselessly for a living from dawn to dusk their entire lives – told of months and weeks of incredible suffering. They were habitually beaten, robbed of the few possessions they carried with them, the women raped repeatedly. Thousands of expellees committed suicide, not able to withstand the absolute barbarity inflicted on them any longer.

Expellees Leaving East Prussia

Looking back at this ignominious event some years later, the great 20th century humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, in his speech accepting the Noble Peace Prize in Oslo in 1954, said:

“The most grievous violation of the right based on historical evolution and of any human right in general is to deprive populations of the right to occupy the country where they live by compelling them to settle elsewhere. The fact that the victorious powers decided at the end of WWII to impose this fate on hundreds of thousands of human beings and, what is more, in a most cruel manner, show how little they were aware of the challenge facing them, namely, to re-establish prosperity and, as far as possible, the rule of law.”