Welcome/Willkommen

The Institute for Research of Expelled Germans (Institut für Vertriebenenforschung) is a non-profit academic research organisation working to document and bring social and historiographic awareness to the largely unknown story of more than 10,000,000 ethnic German civilians who were subjected to ethnicity-based forced deportation, compulsory labour, expulsion, and in some cases starvation and ethnic violence following World War II with varying support and involvement by the governments of the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Romania, and Yugoslavia. We are a non-political research institute; in no way do we justify the atrocities of the Nazis or undermine the genocides committed against other ethnic groups by the Germans or Soviets during the same timeframe. We strongly reject any revisionist, Antisemitic, or pro-Nazi tendencies. Rather, we merely aspire to commemorate and document the lost history, culture, and plight of one of the least-known, yet largest refugee communities of the 20th century.

The displacement of millions of German civilians mostly took place after World War II. By 1945, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union had finalised the Potsdam Conference, in which the border demarkations of post-war Europe were redrawn. Germany ceded nearly 30% of its official territory, leaving huge ethnic German minorities as new constituents of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland. The Soviet Union and the newly-independent Eastern European Communist states now included large German populations that had lived there for centuries (and in the Baltic for over 800 years). Considering these civilian populations 'dangerous' regardless of their diverse political ideologies, the governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the USSR forced the near entirety of the German civilian populations out of their homes to be force marched as refugees to a Germany that their ancestors had not seen for centuries. At the same time, Soviet Order #7161 planned to deport all physically-able men and women from German minorities to the Soviet Union for forced labour. Almost all of the 1,084,828 German settlers in the Soviet Union alone were forcibly shipped on trains to Siberia and Kazakhstan, with thousands starving to death in transit. In total, as many as 2,000,000 refugees died due to hypothermia, starvation, disease, and internecine violence. Many were proscribed with legal discrimination by being forced to wear white armbands to expedite their deportation and exclusion. The Allied and Soviet deportation programmes supplemented the previous displacement of nearly a half-million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe under diplomatic negotiation orchestrated by Adolf Hitler himself in negotiation with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 as part of Hitler's 'come home to the Reich' doctrine. Whole German settler cultures and communities almost completely disappeared because of innaccurate and generalised ethnic associations with Nazi atrocities. Even tens of thousands of German-American citizens were shipped alongside Japanese- and Italian-Americans to US internment camps and blacklisted. The expulsion and displacement of German civilians ultimately became arguably one of the most severe ethnicity-based human rights abuses of the 20th century that has still gone almost entirely unrecognised and uncommemorated.

The experience of millions of ethnic German families from 1945-50 was an unfortunate feature of far larger European historical processes, during which most nations defined their frameworks of citizenship and identity along exclusive biological and/or ethnic lines. Post-war Poland was to be a space to be solely inhabited by Poles; Ukraine by Ukrainians; and Czechoslovakia by Czechs and Slovaks. Regardless of their national loyalty, it was popularly deemed that minourities had no place in these new post-war states, and were therefore expelled universally. Although the expelled Germans were overwhelmingly the largest uprooted ethnicity in Europe and with by far the largest death toll of over two million, this same feature of national exclusivity led to the similar expulsion of millions of minourity ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Koreans, Finns, Tatars, and Hungarians during the same period by their host nations. The story of the expelled Germans thus commemorates the suffering of a far broader refugee and minourity experience.

Expelled and Displaced German Civilian Population Statistics
(see our scholarly articles at left for cross-referenced sources and statistics)

Baltic Germans (from 1939-45)- 150,000 displaced by Hitler and Stalin's negotiations and Soviet expulsions
Germans of the Soviet Union (Caucasus, Black Sea, Bessarabian, etc.)- nearly all of 1,084,828 (nearly 100% expelled), as many as 300,000 may have died (or 30% total)
Volga Germans (included within USSR stats)- over 400,000 (nearly 100%)
Dutch Germans- 3,691, or 15% of the total German population
Prussian, Silesian, Pomeranian Germans expelled by USSR and Poland- 5-8,000,000 (almost 100%)
Alsace-Lorraine Germans (after World War I)- over 100,000 expelled
Sudeten and Carpathian Germans of former Czechoslovakia- over 3,000,000 displaced and expelled (95% total)
Germans of Hungary- over 100,000 expelled, 300,000 displaced (88% total)
Transylvania Saxons and Banat Swabians of Romania- 700,000 displaced by Hitler, the USSR, emigration (91.5%)
Danube Swabians of Yugoslavia- over 200,000 gaoled, executed, expelled, displaced, or fled (98.5%)
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TOTAL= approximately 10-13,000,000 civilians expelled or displaced, over 2,000,000 dead.