the problems of applying the word 'genocide'
to expelled germans

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The definition of the word 'genocide' has become a subject of intense debate due to its severe political, diplomatic, historiographic, and inter-cultural consequences. The standard definition as accepted by the United States and United Nations (the most salient monitors of global human rights interests and prosecution) is the conscious attempt to target a specific race, culture, religion, or nation for extermination. Many peoples or social identities that have historically suffered discrimination or ethnic persecution readily employ the term for a variety of factors: 1) a shared feeling of calamity and tragedy for cultural solidarity; 2) as a means to gain political, economic, or commemorative subsidy or restitution and; 3) to depict the conscious and premeditated brutality performed by a rival ethnoracial or cultural group. Some peoples, especially the Albanians and Armenians, fervently choose the word genocide in order to emphasise the brutality of their political rivals, the Serbs and Turks respectively, who have denied them independence. As a result, the word 'genocide' is often used broadly in exaggeration and with great political motivation, and is often bitterly disputed by the ethnic group accused of that genocide. Read our Comparative Genocide Table to see these disputes. Many political pundits, representatives of expellee interests, and especially neo-Nazis and Antisemities are quick to describe the expulsion of Germans as a genocide. This is perhaps misguided. Indeed, it must be acknowledged that the governments of Poland (under Władysław Gomułka), of Czechoslovakia (under Edvard Beneš), and the Soviet Union (under Joseph Stalin) directly targeted Germans for removal, segregation, and exclusion simply because of their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity. The diverse political aspirations and convictions of the victims were dismissed (see our essay). Further, over two million starved to death after enduring forced labour in prison camps in Yugoslavia and Poland with white armbands and were shipped on railway trains to the wastelands of Kazakhstan (Burleigh 2001, 799). Many human rights groups cite ethnicity-based forced labour and relocation as legitimate qualifiers for a full-scale genocide, as in the case of Xhosa and Zulu clans in Apartheid South Africa, the Han Chinese and Koreans during the Japanese invasion, Native American peoples during American expansion, and the internment of Japanese-Americans by the American government during World War II. Under this criteria, the expulsion and forced labour of over 10,000,000 German civilians because of their ethnicity was a conscious genocide that has received far too little commemoration and attention. The huge death toll (over 2,200,000) alone enumerates this failure to honour the plight of German civilians after the war.

However, others are quick to criticise those who call the German expellees' case a genocide. The Soviet Union, which enacted atrocities against several ethnic groups, had every technical and administrative ability to exterminate racial or ethnic groups when they became a perceived threat, including almost all of the 1,084,828 Germans within the USSR's borders (see our essay). Nearly half of all Ingush, Chechens, Tatars, Meskhetians, Volga Germans, and other minorities were killed through forced labour and starvation, purging, and deportation to the gulags by the Soviets at the same time as they expelled nearly a million ethnic German civilians to Kazakhstan, all collectively labeled as 'dangerous populations' (Burleigh 2001, 748). Every single Chechen and Ingush was expelled from Chechnya by Stalin (Naimark 2002, 13). With this extensive administrative ability to remove potentially perfidious populations by the Soviets, many have emphasised that the suffering of German expellees was not a direct campaign to exterminate the Germans on racial grounds, but rather as an effort to eliminate a potential source of political antagonism for the Soviet regime. Not every single German was intended to be killed, as was the intention of the Germans against the Jews. No longer an intentional extermination of a racial group, the German expellees' case thus would not classified as a genocide. So too, due to longstanding Soviet influence prior to 1991, the United Nations does not consider the removal of economic or political dissident groups to be genocide. The liquidation of class enemies or potential localised threats is not officially classified as a genocide. The German expellees' plight may be categorised under these strictures, thus invalidating its status as a genocide. Nonetheless, regardless of whether the Soviets' motive was racial or political, the entire German population of Eastern Europe was specifically targeted not because of any proximity to Germany or any proven adherence to Adolf Hitler, or because of any economic or class conflicts, but simply because of their culture, ethnicity, and language that were deemed to be inherently connected with Nazi atrocities during the Nazi invasion. Every single Soviet citizen who spoke German was universally and legally proscribed, expelled, and segregated (along with Tatars, Chechens, etc.) as asocial threats to the state and fifth-column supporters of the SS. The universal targeting of the ethnic German minority along ethnic grounds disregarded the diverse political beliefs of the German-speakers. Most of the German settlers in Russia had not seen Germany for centuries, and had no personal allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Their ethnic identity alone was grounds to be removed, their livelihood, careers, legal independence, and property forfeited.

Importantly, if the plight of German expellees is ruled out as not a genocide but merely an attempt by the Soviets to maintain political or economic control, then the horrendous suffering of the Ukrainians during the Holodomor famine of the 1930's, the loss of nearly half of all Kazakhs during collectivisation, and the murder of over 20,000 Poles in the forests of Katyn are not genocides either. Nor are the slaughers of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians under the Communist Mengistu regime, the liquidation of the Five Civilised Tribes in the Trail of Tears by the US government, the conquest of Tibet by China, or the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus because of their higher economic station. All have gotten far more historiographic and social commemoration as either genocides or general human rights transgressions than the German expellees despite this discrepency. The death of more than 2,200,000 of these civilians instantly ranks this tragedy among the worst in terms of casualities. Whether a conscious genocide or a 'simple' human rights violation, the story of these expelled civilians remains largely unknown in historical memory and collective consciousness, and almost completely uncommemorated by modern governments (see our essay to learn why). Debates on motive, blame, and definitions of possible genocide do not dismiss the occurrance of ethnicity-based removal.

Another major problem for applying the term 'genocide' to the German expellees' case is the inter-cultural and political tension. Commemoration of a legitimate historical calamity against a racial or ethnic group is often dismissed in the interests of auspicious political diplomacy. Despite internal demands for restitution and commemoration of the expelled Germans, the German government has consistently declined to acknowledge the death of millions of German civilians because it has repeatedly damaged Germany's political relationships with Poland and the Czech Republic (read our article on the history of this problem). If Germany were to define this tragedy as a genocide, the Czech and Polish governments would be relegated under the human rights jurisprudence of the European Union to subsidise and compensate the descendants of the millions of civilians they expelled. As a result of this conflict, the word 'genocide' is greatly eschewed by these governments because of the impending political backlash. The Poles also insist that the possible genocide was carried out by occupying Soviet soldiers rather than the Poles themselves, and also that over two million Poles were expelled at the same time as the ethnic Germans by the Red Army from Galicia and eastern Poland when the Soviets incorporated eastern Poland and West Belarus into the Ukrainian SSR and the Russian SFSR. This dispute makes using the term 'genocide' for the German expellees very difficult and problematic. As a result, the suffering of one of the 20th century's largest refugee groups is therefore largely dismissed in the interests of economic and political relations. Ironically, at the same time, the United States and European Union refuse to overlook the [much debated] genocide committed by Turks against Armenians and Kurds despite Turkey's auspicious economic potential for European trade.

One final, and equally significant problem in using the term 'genocide' for the German expellees is its connotation with far-right Nazism, irredentism, and Antisemitism. The Jewish community, which has understandably monopolised commemoration of genocide altogether via the Holocaust, has consistently derided other groups using the word 'genocide' or 'Holocaust' because of a perception that it may undermine the tragedy endured by the Jews in the Shoah or divert blame from the Germans for their atrocities. Many Jews, hugely influential in human rights groups, fear that the idea that Germans were victims -- not only perpetrators -- of genocide would either reduce commemoration for the Jewish Holocaust or assuage the Germans of guilt and subsidy that have continued almost 70 years later. So too, many far-right and Antisemitic groups emphasise the German expulsions in order to further their claims that Jews deserve no more restitution than any other group, that Nazi crimes were only some crimes among many committed by several nations, and that the Germans have a historic right to re-incorporate Prussia, the Sudetenland, and Alsace-Lorraine into Germany's Fourth Reich. All of these fears among the Jewish community are generally valid: many commemoration groups for German expellees are actively attached to Nazi or far-right organisations, and several of the earliest political groups were staffed by ex-Nazis. Many Jews are furious that some German expellees are seeking direct court indemnities for stolen art and property in the same way that the Jews have received subsidy from German taxpayers (see article). Other Jews claim that the suffering of German expellees was insignificant and not comparable to the Holocaust in terms of extent and because Germans were not systematically interned in gas chambers (see article). Indeed, the German tragedy is not comparable to the organised massacre of more than 6,000,000 Jews. Regardless, it is unacceptable in our modern age of human rights to pay increasing and indefatiguable attention to the suffering of the Armenians, the Jews, the Hutus and Tutsis, the Darfur Christians, the Roma Gypsies, the Bosniaks, and the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey at the same time as the forced labour and expulsion of over 10,000,000 civilians – and the starvation of over 2,200,000 – are almost completely ignored and uncommemorated because of these economic, diplomatic, and inter-cultural tensions. The death of millions of civilians solely on ethnic lines, the confiscation of all of their property, and the forced deportation and disappearance of ancient cultural communities in the Baltic, Prussia, and Eastern Europe should remain unacknowledged.

Sources Used

Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. Hill and Wang, 2001.

Naimark, Norman. Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2002.

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