The number is contested at the margins. The lowest serious estimate, from the Polish demographer Stanisław Jankowiak, is about ten million. The highest, from the Federal German Archives, is around fourteen. The number historians most often use, with appropriate caveats about its precision, is twelve million. What it counts is the German civilian population removed, by flight or by formal expulsion, from the territories east of the new Oder-Neisse line between October 1944 and the end of 1950. About eight million of them came from territories that had been part of the Prussian state — East Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg east of the Oder, Silesia, the eastern part of the former West Prussia. The remaining four million came from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, from Hungary, from Yugoslavia, from Romania, and from various other small German-speaking minorities across central and eastern Europe.
The scale is unfamiliar to most readers in the English-speaking world, where the events are little remembered. A useful comparison: the total wartime evacuation of Britain, including the entire London Blitz programme of moving women and children to the countryside, involved around three and a half million people, took five years, and is a defining national memory. The post-war German expulsions involved four times as many people, were carried out under far worse conditions, lasted longer, and are remembered, where they are remembered, by a population of survivors and their descendants that today still numbers in the millions.
The flight
The first phase, between October 1944 and May 1945, was the spontaneous flight of perhaps five million Germans westward ahead of the advancing Red Army. The Wehrmacht had attempted to keep the civilian population in place — partly to use it as auxiliary labour, partly because the Nazi authorities feared that mass civilian flight would demoralise the troops — and had begun official evacuation orders only in January 1945, by which time the Soviet armies had already reached the Vistula and the Oder. Local Nazi officials, ordered to stay in place, often disappeared in the last hours before the Soviets arrived, leaving the civilian population to make its own decisions about flight without coordination, without rail tickets, and in the worst winter of the war.
The columns of refugees from East Prussia in January and February 1945 were one of the iconic and most poorly documented scenes of the European war. The temperatures dropped to minus twenty Celsius. The carts were drawn by horses or by hand. The roads were jammed. The Red Army's advance units overtook many of the columns. The German evacuation of the East Prussian seaports — Operation Hannibal, the largest seaborne evacuation in history — succeeded in moving around two million people across the Baltic between January and May 1945, in a fleet of ferries, fishing boats, and warships running shuttle voyages between Pillau, Danzig, and the western Baltic ports under constant Soviet air and submarine attack. Three large evacuation transports were sunk with combined losses of perhaps fifteen thousand people: the Wilhelm Gustloff on the 30th of January (around nine thousand dead), the General von Steuben on the 10th of February (around four thousand dead), and the Goya on the 16th of April (around seven thousand dead).
The expulsions
The second phase, between May 1945 and 1947, was the more organised but in many ways crueller process of formal expulsion. The Polish and Czechoslovak governments, with the backing of the Soviet Union, proceeded immediately after the German surrender to drive out the remaining German civilian population from the territories they now controlled. The expulsions in this phase, sometimes called the "wild expulsions," were carried out before any formal international agreement, often by improvised local authorities with no transport, no provisions, and no procedure. Survivors describe being given two hours to pack one suitcase and assemble at a railway station. They describe being marched, on foot, across freezing or summer-baked countryside toward the new German frontier. They describe arriving at the Oder bridge to be searched, looted, beaten, or in some cases shot. The death rate during the expulsions of 1945 has been estimated at perhaps two per cent of those moved — which is, at the scale involved, a number with six figures.
The Potsdam Conference, in July-August 1945, gave international sanction to the process and called for it to be conducted in an "orderly and humane manner." This third phase, between January 1946 and 1947, was indeed somewhat more orderly. Trains were used. Rations were provided. International Red Cross observers were sometimes present. The death rate fell. But the population to be moved was enormous, and the political pressure on the new Polish and Czechoslovak authorities to be done with the matter was relentless.
By 1950 the process was effectively complete. The Polish census of that year recorded an ethnic German population in Poland of fewer than two hundred thousand people, almost all of them in Upper Silesia or in Masuria. The corresponding figure for 1939, in the same territories, had been approximately nine million. The Kaliningrad Oblast, taken into the Soviet Union in 1946, was emptied of its surviving German civilians by 1948 and repopulated with Soviet citizens — mostly Russians, with smaller numbers of Belarusians and Ukrainians — moved in under planned demographic transfers.
The receiving country
The country that received the expellees — the four occupation zones of Germany, with a combined pre-war population of around sixty million — absorbed approximately twelve million new people in the space of five years. The proportional impact was enormous. In the British zone, more than a quarter of the post-war population were expellees or refugees from the east. In the Soviet zone, the proportion was similar. Some of the small Länder absorbed populations larger than their own pre-war size: Schleswig-Holstein, with a pre-war population of one and a half million, took in around a million expellees in eighteen months. Bavaria, by 1950, had a population of which roughly one in six was an expellee. The Federal Republic of Germany, on its founding in 1949, had a Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War Casualties — the only such ministry, anywhere in the world, ever to be a department of state.
"The cattle wagons stopped at Kohlfurt. The Polish soldiers opened the doors. We were given a bowl of soup and a piece of bread. We crossed the Neisse on foot, in single file, between a row of officers. They took my mother's wedding ring." — Else B., aged twelve in 1946, from a Silesian family. Federal Documentation of the Expulsions, vol. I (1956)
The empty country
The territories from which the Prussians had been expelled were, in many places, not repopulated at the same density. The Polish government, recognising the new responsibility of administering a vast area whose original population was gone, conducted its own large-scale internal migrations — particularly of Poles expelled by the Soviet Union from the eastern half of pre-war Poland, who had themselves been displaced from places like Vilnius, Lviv, and Stanyslaviv. About a million and a half such Polish expellees were settled in the former German territories. So were several hundred thousand Ukrainians, expelled from south-eastern Poland in the so-called Operation Vistula of 1947. So were tens of thousands of Greek Civil War refugees, settled in the Recovered Territories by an agreement of 1948.
The Kaliningrad Oblast — the former northern East Prussia, the Hohenzollern heartland — was repopulated, after a period of near-total depopulation in 1946 and 1947, with a Soviet civilian population shipped in from across the western USSR. The first Soviet settlers arrived to find a half-ruined city, frequently no surviving residents who could explain what had been there before, and a landscape of obscure German place-names which they were given a list of new Russian names for. Königsberg became Kaliningrad. Insterburg became Chernyakhovsk. Tilsit became Sovetsk. Cranz became Zelenogradsk. Pillau, the great port, became Baltiysk. The renaming was almost total. The German architectural inheritance, much of which had survived the war, was demolished in the 1950s and 1960s on the grounds that it was "Prussian-militaristic" and therefore politically dangerous.
This is the period in which Königsberg Cathedral, gutted in 1944, stood for forty years as a roofless ruin without restoration plans — partly because the Soviet authorities could not decide what its survival would mean, and partly because Immanuel Kant was buried inside its north wall. The cathedral was eventually restored, beginning in 1992, with German co-funding. Kant's tomb was preserved throughout the Soviet period precisely because Kant — though he had died in 1804 a loyal subject of the Hohenzollerns — was a philosopher whose work was approved by Soviet ideology. He was, by an accident of curriculum, the indirect protector of his own cathedral.
Memory
The expulsions are remembered differently in different countries, and the asymmetries of memory are themselves a piece of history. In Germany, the events are remembered, mourned, and — particularly in the literature of writers like Günter Grass, who was born in Danzig, or Siegfried Lenz, who was born in East Prussia — they are at the centre of a substantial body of post-war work. In Poland and the Czech Republic, they are remembered more cautiously: as a consequence, in the dominant narrative, of the German occupation policies that preceded them. In Britain and the United States, where they were endorsed by the wartime governments, they are barely remembered at all.
What is uncontested is the scale, and the demographic permanence. The eastern half of the Prussian state, an area of roughly 110,000 square kilometres — about the size of present-day Bulgaria — had been emptied of its inhabitants of seven hundred years' standing in five years. The towns are still there. The roads are still there. The castles, in many cases, are still there. The architecture is still there. The graveyards are still there, though the headstones, in most cases, have been broken or removed. Only the people are not.
And so the question of what is left of Prussia, in 1950 and afterwards, became — as it remains today — a question about places: where to go, what to look for, what survives, what was destroyed, what was reused, what was renamed, what is now Polish, what is now Russian, what is now Lithuanian, what is now in the western federal states of modern Germany. It is, in other words, the question that the next chapter — and, more practically, the travel guide that follows the chapters — exists to answer.
End of Chapter XIII