German language areas in Poland, Czechia, Kaliningrad Oblast (Russia – formerly East Prussia), and Lithuania before expulsion of Germans (with green as completely German and yellow as ethnically mixed areas) – public domain image

(6) DEMOGRAPHIC WAR –

DEPORTATION, DISPLACEMENT & EXPULSIONS

(1939-1948)

“The Second World War caused the movement of the largest number of people in the shortest period of time in history.”

Of course, much of this movement was what might be described as ‘conventional’ refugees, caused by or fleeing from hostilities, from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 onwards.

However, much of it was what might be described as demographic war – “mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people…enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers…Belligerents on both sides engaged in forms of expulsion of people perceived as being associated with the enemy”.

Or just simply the enemy, targeted in a form of demographic warfare or in modern parlance, ethnic cleansing. We’ve already looked at the best known example of this in my special mention for the Holocaust – a primary component of which was the deportation of the Jewish population within Europe, as the preliminary step to something more…final.

That also illustrates the major location for demographic warfare was central and eastern Europe. The movement of people in more targeted expulsions than as refugees commenced with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 – on both sides of the line of Nazi and Soviet occupation. Both the Germans and Soviets expelled Poles in similar numbers – with the Germans expelling more 1.6 to 2 million Poles, not including “millions of slave laborers deported from Poland to the Reich”, while the Soviets expelled over 1.5 million Poles.

The Soviets were then the leaders in expulsions, either to secure the territory secured under the Nazi-Soviet Pact – Finns, Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians – or as ‘defensive’ measures against ethnic populations potentially aligned with the Germans. The latter involved the Soviets deporting ethnic populations from European Russia to Siberia, Central Asia or more remote areas of the Soviet Union – perhaps most famously the Volga Germans and Crimean Tartars, but also “Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays and Meskehtian Turks”. Many of these were in 1943-1944, arguably  well after the time of any ‘defensive’ emergency had passed.

The United States infamously had its own version of internal deportation with the internment of Japanese-Americans.

Elsewhere the Balkans was the scene of ongoing demographic warfare or outright ethnic cleansing, most well known of which was that of the Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia.

However, one of the largest but still least well known expulsions came at the end and in the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe – the flight and expulsion of Germans from central and eastern Europe, either of Germany minority populations from other countries, now seen as the vanguard or at least casus belli of German aggression against those countries, or Germans from former German territory now ceded to other states, notably East Prussia to the Soviet Union and other eastern German territory to Poland.

“Between 13.5 and 16.5 million German-speakers fled, were evacuated or later expelled from Central and Eastern Europe”. The primary parties responsible for the post-war expulsions were of the new governments of the central or eastern European states formerly occupied by or allied to Germany – and behind them of course Stalin’s Soviet Union – but the western Allies had agreed in principle to such expulsions provided they were carried out in a way that was “orderly and humane”.

Sadly, they were not – with estimates of the number of those who died during or from them ranging from half a million to two or even three million.

While the western Allies played no active part in the post-war expulsion of Germans, except of course to receive them as refugees in their occupation zones in West Germany or Austria, they did notoriously play an active role in the postwar repatriation of Russian Cossacks taken as prisoners of war to a grim fate in the Soviet Union.

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)