When did the Second World War end in Europe?
At one level, the answer to this question is obvious. VE Day was 8 May 1945 and we have recently marked the 70th anniversary of this event.
At another level, the answer is more complicated. The deaths and destitution went on for much longer. Many Holocaust camp victims contined to die after liberation – they were just too weak or too ill. Many citizens across Europe died from cold or starvation. Some 26 million were displaced.
But what is often overlooked is that, at the end of the war, ethnic Germans throughout Central and Eastern Europe were victims too. It is estimated that over two million women and children were raped, usually by the victorious Soviet troops. In what we would today call a process of ethnic cleansing, some 12 M ethnic Germans were expelled – including all the 3 M Sudenten Germans in Czechoslovakia – and at least half a million died. It was the largest forced migration on world history.
In many cases, the techniques used to expel, beat or kill ethnic Germans deliberately emulated the techniques and horrors and even the locations of the Nazi atrocities during their occupation of the previous years. War brutalises soldiers and citizens and one can under stand how Germans were treated after the war but we cannot condone or excuse it. These were crimes and most of the victims – especially the children – could not be held culpable for the Nazi horrors.
All this was brought home in a BBC2 television programme broadcast this week entitled “1945: The Savage Peace”. Newsreel footage and eye witness reports were truly shocking. My wife is half Czech and, for a few months just after the end if the war, she was in Czechoslovakia as a baby with her family. The accounts of the post-war retributions in Czechoslovakia were especially hard to view.
You can find an article on the treatment of the Germans post-war here and you can find a lot more detail on the expulsions here.
May 31st, 2015 at 11:49 pm
Roger
The BBC2 programme “1945: The Savage Peace” is currently available on the BBC iPlayer for another 22 days.
Peter Clark
June 12th, 2015 at 9:19 pm
Did you ever see the documentary ‘Hitler’s Children’ which documents the children of the SS army officers in Hitler’s Nazi Germany? Wonderful and very moving – makes you look at their plight and that sense of dislocation and not wanting to recognise their own family history and the ensuing negative effects that it had on them as people – do not blame the children for the sins of their fathers etc. Very, very good