Spartacus will pick this story up next week in a second episode on the German expulsions. He will also soon address the early war atrocities of the Korean War on our new channel. Join us to ensure these critical stories are remembered, so we may never forget: www.youtube.com/@TheKoreanWarbyIndyNeidell
You should moderate your comments more. This is not the first time i see very many comments justifying crimes against civilians just because they are german. As a german it makes me sick. Of course i know germany commited horrible crimes during the war and many people knew about it or even participated but this hate against civilians is not right.
Thank you so much for covering this sad topic. It is of outmost importance to tell the story of Europe right after the war, when victims became victors and enemies turned into the new victims of hatred and violence. Many people forget, that this is the time in which borders got established that are still in use today. I look forward to the coming episodes and your work in the Korean War Series.
Another defenestration in Prague involved with a giant humanitarian crisis and vast war crimes. Why does that sound familiar? I also was thinking early in the episode that you would indeed reference the deportations in the Greco-Turkish conflict and Indy says at the end of the episode that the biggest takeaway people should have from that coverage was the idea that it could now be legal for states to basically conduct ethnic cleansing if they wish. India and Pakistan will go through a similar process in only two years. I'm wondering what happened in Asclace and Lorraine. France, under occupation as well, would have enormous hatred of Germans as you might imagine.
We moderate heavily, but with volunteers on at different times during the day on two different continents. We try to catch all unacceptable comments. -TimeGhost Ambassador
muh gozzilion poor german colonizers, be sorry for your ancestors proving their superiority over the bloodthirsty germanic hun, you evil Slavic man! I encourage everyone to read the manuscripts of Himmler's speeches to the SS in regard to the USSR. The nerd keeps crying how the Soviets were more brutal than their childish SS death squads lol, the eternal Germanic crybaby.
My father (1925-2003) grew up in the Dutch city of Utrecht and the first German he saw was a German soldier in May 1940. From 1941-1945 he and his older brother were in hiding to avoid the Arbeitseinsatz. After the war he refused to have anything to do with Germans and would refer to them only with the derogatory "Moffen". In 1990 I fell in love with a German girl, in 1993 we married and had our first baby. On the night my eldest daughter was born, my father stayed up and wrote her a letter. In the letter he writes to her to tell her how her arrival on this Earth means so much to him ... and goes on to thank her because, as he puts it, "with your birth the War has finally come to and end for me!". She has that letter now ... and I still often think of the moment where he gave it to me, to pass it on to her. In the years after, he and my mother started visiting Germany frequently, catching up on so much that he had denied himself for decades. Wars leave wounds that take generations to heal.
@@semkoops Hij is geboren in de Jans steeg, maar halverwege de jaren '30 is de familie naar de Tesselschade straat verhuist, nabij de Croeselaan. De duitse militairen die hij tegen kwam was op 15 Mei 1940 op de Croeselaan. Ik zelf ben overigens ook in Utrecht geboren, in Tuindorp, aan de Linneaus laan, in '66. Maar heb maar tot mijn 3de verjaardag in Utrecht gewoond. Op late leeftijd begon mijn vader zich voor onze familie geschiedenis te interesseren. Hij realiseerde zich door wat naspeuringen (in een tijd zonder internet ☺) dat onze familie (van zijn kant) in het midden van de 19de eeuw uit Deventer naar Utrecht was gekomen. In de jaren na zijn overlijden heb ik zijn naspeuringen (nu met internet) opgepikt en heb achterhaald dat mijn vader's tak van de familie oorspronkelijk in het midden van de 18de eeuw vanuit Duitsland naar Nederland is gekomen. De eerste 4 generaties in Nederland zijn ook vaak met dochters of zonen van andere duitse migranten getrouwd. Maar tegen 1940 was die geschiedenis grotendeels vergeten.
Communists treated their own kinsmen in the same way. Immagine being a Polish partisan a anti-German occupation fighter and still be treated by the communits after the war on the same level as a Nazi criminal. That is the common story of milions of Poles after the war. In the best case scenario your family would have been robbed of their property if they possesed anything of value. The so called good Germans had the same "equal" threatment as the rest of society + the ideological/racial hate of party members. It is important to note that the communist parties of occupied central and easter Europe after the war were full of war time collaborators. In other words very bad peoples. Germans tend to forget that Poles were also expelled from their homes by the milions first by Nazi Germany then by Soviet Russia.
I always found the passage from MM's "Paris 1919" so haunting. "In 1939 Poland disapeared from the map once again. When it emerged in 1945 it was a strangly altered and shrunken Poland; emptied of its Jews by the Germans and its Germans by the Soviets and moved 200 miles to the west."
A case could be made that the 1921-1939 Poland was too large and had indefensible frontiers. The western part was almost perfectly designed to fall victim to pincer attack from the Germans, while the eastern frontier with the USSR was very long and difficult to defend along its entire length.
@@frozenfeet4534 Perhaps not, but if you can't defend your frontiers you may end up part of someone else's empire, or empires in the case of Poland, 1793-1918.
Poland's westward movement was definitely a positive. They got better more industrialized land and removed potential minority conflicts with Ukraine and Belarus.
The Poles ended up with 40,000 square miles of German territory, most of it better developed than what Poland lost to the Soviets. Interestingly all you hear from Poland is them demanding $ from Germany.....despite the vast German territories they ethnic cleansed after the war. These constant demands against Germany are retarding the development of Poland today by preventing stronger economic ties between the countries. In the end, all the territory the Poles lost went to the Soviets, yet you never hear the Poles trying to get a thing out of them.
My grandfther and grandmother were Germans who had not been expelled from Czechoslovakia, because they employed hundreds of Czechs in their textile factory and saved them from slave work in Germany during WWII. It is interesting that all sisters of my grandfather married SS officers and were explelled. It is even more interesting that communist government after WWII totally destroyed my grandfather. His factory was confiscated he was sent to work in coal mine - up to the point that his favourite quote was "If I f*ckef SS officers, like my sisters, I could have villa with pool and Mercedes in Stuttgart"
I strongly recommend the Polish movie "Rose" from 2011 by Wojciech Smarzowski. It tells a story of a Polish Home Army soldier, who fought in the Warsaw uprising and, in summer 1945, goes to Masuria, formerly Eastern Prussia, now Poland to find a Masurian woman and give her the letter from her now-dead husband, a Wehrmacht soldier, who gave it to him when dying. Smarzowski doesn't miss when it comes to historical drama. The movie is on Netflix, at least here in Poland.
@@Mi-bi6ez It isn't a Netflix original, it was produced independently in 2011 and put on Netflix only several years ago. HBO's Band of Brothers and The Pacific are also on Netflix, are they trash as well? Get a grip.
In the past, I talk to Polish soldier whose unit expelled Germans from Głogów in 1945. He told me, that he took part in it personally and personally expelled some German families from their houses saying "that land is no more Reich. It' s Poland now". I asked him if he had any remorse or reservations from doing this. He said "No, that time I didn't even think about this, but after some years I started thinking that that was unfair and cruel". Family of this soldier was killed by Germans in concentration camp, he was also prisoner of concentration camp, but he managed to escape somehow. He told me that during war, Germas commited to many crimes on Poles and almost everybody lost somebody or suffered from their hands and in 1945, right after war Poles didn't care about their ex-torturers and executioners. Whole Europe hated Germans for what ther did in occupied countries, especially on the East, where Germans cosidered Slavs as "Untermenshen" and people had no rights. Every german could just kill you freely.
Don't generalize about the 'East'. The whole region from Slovakia down to Greece had the status of 'Balkanic Southwest/Südwest', completely altering the situation compared to Poland or the USSR areas. Czechs and Slovenes could very well stick to their dual 'Austrian' identity from the Habsburg era, and get by. The citizens of the Baltic nations had more or less the same rights as German citizens, and were even allowed to flee to Germany when Soviets approached in 1944-45 (the same goes for the Galician Ukrainians).
I know Germans living in the east, half of my family got sent to Germany as my grandmother was hybrid and i learnt from People actually working in the camp how Polish people worked there aswell! treating Je*s like crap ;)
@HippasosofMetapontum This is complete bulshit lie Polish Polish people were one of the first ones sent to concentration camps as inmates. You are talking about German minority in Poland who spoke fluent polish. On August 22, 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to kill "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language." Nazi Germans crimes against the Polish nation claimed the lives of 2.77 million Christian Poles and to 2.9 million Polish Jews. From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize the plan of territorial expansion, put forth by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, demanding the acquisition of the so-called living space (Lebensraum) in the East for massive settlement of German colonists.The object of war was to fulfill this territorial Lebensraum refers to conceptions and policies of a form of settler colonialism connected with agrarianism that existed in Germany from the 1890s to the 1940s. One variant of this policy was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany. Originally a biology term for "habitat", the publicists for the German Empire (1871-1918) introduced Lebensraum as a concept of nationalism that became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in the First World War (1914-1918), as the Septemberprogramm (1914). Lebensraum was an ideological element of Nazism, which advocated Germany's territorial expansion into Eastern Europe, justified by the need for agricultural land in order to maintain the town-and-country balance upon which depended the moral health of the German people. In practice, during the war, the Nazi policy Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East) was to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and other Slavic populations and other peoples living there considered racially inferior to the Germans and to repopulate Eastern Europe with Germanic people to achieve Lebensraum.The populations of cities were to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus that would feed Germany, and thereby allow political replacement by and re-population with a German upper class. The eugenics of Lebensraum explicitly assumed the racial superiority of Germans as an Aryan master race (Herrenvolk), who, by virtue of their superiority (physical, mental, genetic) had the right to displace any people they deemed to be Untermenschen (subhumans) of inferior racial stock.
@HippasosofMetapontum Look who is talking about evil lol You germans are who invented concentration camps, you already experimenting with concentration camps before World War 1 in Africa. Poland didn't own colonies and didn't run concentration camps like you did. Here is the link educate yourself " Concentration camps were used by the Germans in South West Africa There were five concentration camps in all in Namibia, then German South West Africa, between 1904 and 1908. They were called Konzentrationslagern in reports and succeeded South African camps by two years." "Nazi Labor Camps in North Africa- Jewish Virtual Library
My great-grandmother was German living near east Prussian border. She would tell my grandmother of the looks she would get for decades after the war from people. The only reason she was allowed to stay was because her husband was Polish and a war hero.
My grandfather was only 9 years old when when a Germans start to occupy Poland during World War II. He had to work as a slave for the German farmer who like to beat him and calling him "Polish pig" the same thing did German kids. For 5 years he had to suffer this abuse but he still was lucky that he did not end up in concentration camp like other polish kids. Cry me the river or you poor poor Germans who started World War I World War II and tried to conquer the world.
This was my mother’s family’s fate being Sudaten Germans. My Opa (German) and Oma (Czech) along with two girls and one boy, all under age 7 were given 20 minutes to vacate their home in Aussig. As they moved out, a Czech family moved in. They were then forced to leave the Czech area and head west to Germany. After several trains and camps, they relocated to a small town in Bavaria. The local Germans weren’t exactly welcoming to them either. Housing was in short supply as was food. It took a while for things to settle down Germany. However, they persevered. Retribution was expected. Thank goodness my mom survived it.
My mother had much the same experience when she was 13. She was kicked out of her Silesian home after a Polish family had moved in. They ( her mother and 2 young brothers) had to travel to West Germany by train where she was deloused 2 times thus destroying all her clothes of course. Along the way she saw many horrors including thousands of young german men , ex-soldiers still in uniform, being machine gunned into ditches. And of course this was a month or 2 after the war was already over.
Bu hu, cry me a river. Always Germans was "victims". What a bulshit. Your grandmother probably waves flags with swastica, when Werhmacht invaded west Czechoslovakia.
My uncle Has been one of the Poles from the east who settled in Wrocław after war (german Breslau). He's been political prisoner of germans during their terror occupation of Poland. He was just a 17 year old boy who got accused of being member of partisan movement which got him to Auschwitz (yup, many prisoners were Polish, not only Polish Jews). He literally went to hell and back, after war he moved west looking for a place to start new life in peace. He moved to Wrocław and opened one of the first ice cream shops there. He Has always been so kind to others, give leftovers to people for free, but boy, he seriously didn't like germans, the sound od their language and anything german.
I would not blame him. My people did horrible things, and anyone who is not moved deeply by their suffering and does not feel at least some disgust for the Germans - who *as a people* MADE THIS POSSIBLE, condoned and celebrated it - is not quite right in the head. All the best and peace from Germany, and bless the memory of your uncle! He was a better man than those Germans who brutalized him and his loved ones. Much better. I mean, he gave away his leftover ice cream from one of the first ice cream shops in Wrocław. How awesome is that! You can truly say that in his own little way he made history. His ice cream shop must have healed so many broken souls, and given people peace and joy. People like him are why Polska jednak nie jest zginęła 🙂
My grandfather collectively blamed the German people for the war . My youngest uncle was assigned to the US Army occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war. My grandfather wrote to him threatening to disown him if my uncle made contact with any of the extended family members in Germany. One of my great uncles defied my grandfather and made contact with some surviving family members. The stories from them were horrific and caused my grandfather to relent on his no contact threats.
Your grandfather was very principled to choose to cut family ties over a guilt he saw as collectively held by all Germans. But it's good your uncle reached out and tempered those principles with human reality.
@gerardwall5847 My grandfather was only 9 years old when when a Germans start to occupy Poland. During World War II. He had to work as a slave for the German farmer who like to beat him and calling him "Polish pig" the same thing did German kids. For 5 years he had to suffer this abuse but he still was lucky that he did not end up in concentration camp like other polish kids.
I am Czech, and my grandmother is a Sudeten German. Fortunately, all members of her family could speak Czech back then, so they were not harmed. They lost all their property, but they were allowed to stay in Czechoslovakia. Thanks for this episode. It is necessary to constantly remind ourselves that we too have committed such crimes. Never forget.
Knowledge of Czech was not enough so there had to be another reason why they were spared. Official exceptions from deportations were German menbers of Czech families, people who can prove their anti-nazi involvement, and people with skills needed for the industry. Paradoxically my grandfather was also excluded despite being a Wehrmacht soldier - I think it was because he came back from the war after the deportations ended.
@@richardaubrecht2822 You are most likely correct, thanks for adding the details. However, this is how my grandma tells the story. She was 5 years old back then. I don't know whether she doesn't know all the details either, or if she just didn't want to tell us. Maybe I shouldn't have shared this story when I don't know all the details, sorry for that. But this episode hit hard, so I felt the need to add something.
@@alexandermalinowski4277 And neither were all Germans, but most people refuse to see that since they think it justifies their own country's atrocities. I know I constantly deal with poles who have deluded themselves into thinking one atrocity justified another and still think even after all the territory taken they are due $. Part of it clearly stems from the resentment of Germany's post-war recovery......not even thinking to look to blame the former Soviet Union for keeping them down while Germany crawled from the ruins and dusted herself off.
Liebgott, a real US paratrooper who is also a character in "Band of Brothers", appears to have come from a Danube Swabian background and was able to speak German, though many assumed he was Jewish. Presumably if his parents or grandparents had not emigrated to the USA, he might have been conscripted into the Waffen-SS, an increasingly "Volksdeutsch" organisation in the later war years, or been killed or deported after the end of the war.
@@stevekaczynski3793 Take origin with a pinch of salt I'm also called a Donauschwabe even though my ancestors fled to Debrecen exactly to avoid forced recatholization. Not so fun fact this is also why the Banat has and Germans. Now as for Hungary shortly after Ausgleich with the inaction from Austria, Hungary forcibly started to convert minorities into Hungarians. Yes that was one major driving force for people to leave the monarchy, we didn't had the cash. As such our names became Hungarized, that actually saved us during these deportations.
I’m glad for a similar reason; my grandma’s Danube Swabian grandparents left Romania and Hungary before WWI for the US, and married immigrants from Germany proper. Reading about what happened to those who stayed in the Banat after the war is not a fun time.
One half from following nations are asimilated slavs,Albania,Greece,Romania,Hungary,Austria,Germany,Italy,Litvia,Latvia,Estonia.PS:Read few things from Slawenischeberg,german acesable site only.
Almost half of the German population in Romania left the country after 1945. There were some 600 000 Germans in Romania before 1942, and less than 350 000 in 1948. During and after the communist regime another 300 000 Germans left the country in search of a better life in the West.
Today I learned Ceausescu shamelessly selling Germans to West Germany was a choice for a better life. It's not that you're wrong but this is an important detail, it was human trafficking, and the more money he needed the less voluntary it became. Somewhat shameful that in the myriad of productions and documentaries about the two Germanys we still have to wait if ever to see a movie or TV show about this journey into freedom.
@@akosbarati2239 I am not really making a judgement. Just sharing what I heard first hand from an ethnic German man who grew up in Romania. He told me his story earlier this year.
I'm polish German. No one from my family was persecuted after the war. But it was so because we were loyal for our new fatherland. My grandfather and his brother were both soldiers of polish army from 1939 through conspiracy (granfather) or Italy (grandpa's brother) till 1945. Grandpa who was before the war professional soldier (sergeant) of WP ended war in Germany als sergeant in new polish army ranks.
After the war, it was very clear - Polish and Czechoslovak Germans were allowed to stay as long as there was a proof (documents,testimony of a neighbor or a friend) that they were not nazis. Your family wasn't persecuted because they didn't betray their country, sadly, there were few like your ancestors. in Czechoslovakia in 1938 elections, some 90% of Germans voted for the nazis.
@@tomaszsebastian2970 Yes, the way your ancestors acted was honorable, they were loyal and didn't collaborate with the invasion force. Sadly, they were in the minority.
@@neverstopschweikingThis is false, if you were ethnically German or culturally, you were screwed no matter your alignments. Most Germans during WW2 are Russians today during the Russo-Ukrainian war, they didn’t really care as long as they weren’t harmed
Furthermore, as everyone is giving their family experience. I can share that of my father's uncle. I think I posted about him before in another comment. Essentially he was captured in North Africa, fighting with Montgomery. He was shipped off to Italy as a British POW, then I don't know how, he ended up somewhere in Poland. After being liberated he has to make his way across Europe to allied lines. But on the way, in each city in Poland along the way, he did witness the aftermath of the Soviets retaking towns, and hanged ethnic Germans in public squares. These stories are facts and are confirmed by the stories kept in my own family.
I am glad you talk about it.I have a little complicated personal story but I think it illustrates how mixed the situation was in the central Europe and the absolute human tragedy of both world wars. The story is all placed in Brno (Bruenn) and immediate surroundings. But also it is a tribute to my family members who lived through that time. My family comes from a mixed Czech-German background. As far as I can tell, my great great grandfather was Czech and married a girl from German family before the beginning of 20th century. They live with her family and were generally speaking German at home. Their first child was my great grandma who somehow went living with my great grandfathers family and was raised as a Czech, I am not sure about all the circumstances but most likely due to poverty. My great grandma eventually had more siblings (around 10) who were all raised as Germans. My great grandma married, had a son (my great uncle), her husband got killed or severely injured during the great war, she got a tobacconist store as a compensation but her son was at least for part of his life living with her parents family. In the 1920s, she got married again and eventually got my grandma. With the rise of Nazi Germany and the Anschluss of Austria, many people flee Vienna with the immediate stop in Brno which had roughly 40 % of German population. My great grandma provides a temporary shelter to some refugees (I assume those would be some distant friends from the past) on their way to he final destination. Her son finds liking in the Nazi uniforms and greets her with a Nazi salute which she replies with a slap saying that she raised him better. During the war my grandma (now a teenager) smuggles agricultural products from the nearby villages which they partially sell, partially give away at their store. My grandma always escaped suspicion at the train station due to the fact that she had blond hair and blue eyes and spoke a perfect German. By the end of the war, my grandma got drafted as a slave labor at what was probably a factory making parts for the V-rockets. My great uncle disappeared somewhere on the eastern front. When the war ended and the Czech state decided to expel the German population living there my great grandma and my grandma were allowed to stay as they have never claimed German citizenship. The rest of her family (her parents and siblings) were force to move as they accepted German citizenship during the war. My great great grandfather could not imagine leaving the house where he spent more than half of a century and hanged himself. The rest of the family ended somewhere in Bavaria but my trail ends here.
@@ives3572 This sentence sounds cute but Russell was a pacifist living happily on the island. The narrative that German, Soviet and now Russian meneaters were/are as right as their victims is sick. Don't help the beast and pretend that it has valid reasons to eat you.
Don't start a war, so your people will not suffer its effects - Every Reasonable Person Ever Do Shit, Get Hit - War Victors, probably Don't cry about genocide when the people you tried to genocide fights back, and wins - WW2 victims of German repression
@@janprochazka8095when it comes to Pruss territory, the Teutonic Knights were originally servants of Polish rulers. They betrayed them. Got second chance in 16 centaury and betrayed second time in 17 centaury.
That's why he stated at the start of the video that "their ancestors had lived there for centuries, if not millennia" Yes, the Kingdom of Poland had controlled parts of that territory... 200 years earlier, if not 400+ on some parts. Awesome. Truth is, after so long a time of shared existence in Prussia, Pomerania and Kashubia, no one had more right than anyone to the land. The Nazis were wrong and the Poles were also wrong. Germans were an intrinsic part of Poland, ever since Poland existed, now all what remains of them are headstones in graveyards and buildings that do not anymore resonate the language of those that built them. Still, credit where credit is due, you are better custodians of your conquered lands than the Russians are of theirs.
@@riograndedosulball248Why, when talking about German "ancestral lands", they suddenly have more rights to them then any other nation or ethnicity? If anything a huge chunk of those eastern (western from Polish perspective) territories can be considered reconquered, those taken in 18th/19th century having the strongest claim.
So many innocent people were "punished" for crimes committed by others On the other hand , so many criminals escaped justice That's one of the greatest horrors of WW2
Slavic? It was rather set up in Yalta between two English speaking and one Russian rulers of the world :) Neither US and UK had strength, morality and power to confront communism and both western “democracies” sold Poland and other Slavic countries for doubtful peace. All this after having atomic bomb as well! Poles didn’t get proper revenge, didn’t also get any help for 6 years of war and losing great number of its population. Very innacurate title.
It wasn't the British or the Americans who forced people out of their homes and told them to march west without food and water, and without roofs to sleep under during the night, but Poles and Czechs. "We have to kill people or displace them in terrible conditions because they are undesirables and our leaders decided as such" is fascist rhetoric. "Poles didn't get proper revenge" oh so forcible displacements where thousands of people died are not enough for you? Expelling millions from territories that were german before the war so they could be part of post-war Poland was also not enough? What would constitute a "proper" revenge? More death camps but this time for german civilians? I understand the bitterness towards the USA or UK for leaving Poland under Soviet management but you don't have to deny atrocities committed against german civilians by polish and czech governments and mobs to convey that.
@@Bravo-oo9vdhard to call polish and Czech governments at that time to be polish or Czech. They were Stalin’s puppets, established by force, commiting atrocities even against its own people to execute USSR’s policy.
This was no true universally. Poland sadly was under Soviet influence. In Czechoslovakia the communist took power not democratically, but did not need Soviet authorities. Austria did not end up like that (but could have).
@@pepenp Influence? In 1945 it was actually under occupation. The Red Army brought with it the Provisional Government that consisted of people unknown in Poland, with no legitimacy or local support. It was a puppet regime imposed by a foreign superpower. So in fact it was an occupation rather than liberation. It was all Stalin's idea executed by his puppets masquerading as the Polish Government.
What do you wish for? Backstabbing allied country which lost 7 million soldiers and killed 80% of dead axis forces in Europe? You got ancient Polish lands and had to give up ancient Rus lands, but I guess you lost your own "subhumans" and "schismatics" over whom you could feel superior and discriminate against as you have been doing for 400 years . It sucks but is more than fair, don't whine.
When we consider all atrocities of Nazi regime and existing prewar tensions between Germans and Slavs it’s a miracle that someone could survive in this situation
@@HebrewsElevenTwentyFive funny that you mention this. Ukrainians and poles hated each others for centuries. But they both hates Russia more so they work together but I can assure you that nobody forgot nothing
@@HebrewsElevenTwentyFive Lack of historical knowledge is evident - Germans has exterminated 18% of Polish citizens, destroyed almost completely Warsaw and cause massive destruction of the whole country. The level of German hatred towards Poles is difficult to comprehend and would require more space than available here. In the effect of the war Polend was moved away from its borders, shrinked in size and for the next 50 years thrown under Soviet domination. Resentments are still vivid.
In Czech Republic it left a scar that has not healed to this day (despite quite successful economic development). The Sudetenland border is still quite visible. The "newcomers" were often unskilled people who could not maintain the economy and also the infrastructure. Derelict houses, factories, fading cemeteries. This is what you can still see, sometimes with still fading German signs. All socioeconomic statistics are worse.
A friend pf mine visited Czech republic last year. He said "the roads within the villages where perfect, the roads outside of the villages, not so much".
The awful economic situation in border regions is not necessarily due to the deportation of Germans, but due to the 50+ years of centrally planned economy. There surely was a braindrain because of deportation, but that was a German braindrain, Czech braindrain came a bit later in the late 40s, 50s and 60s because of commies. If the communist coup failed, those regions would have recovered much quicker, because people would have property rights, relative freedom and means of production wouldnt be banned from private hands. So again, while the deportations of Germans were tragic, thinking that those regions are poorly performing economically because of lack of Germans is such a weird inferiority complex argument. We are a very capable and hardened nation, we always persevered and we should be proud of that. What really fucked us in the end were Russians (Soviets) and Czechs who appeased or supported communism/state socialism. But since 1989 we have been clearly getting back on track.
My grandpa as a boy lived in the city of Gniezno in Greater Poland which was annexed in 1939 directly to the Reich as Wartheland. In February 1940 he with his whole family was thrown out of their home by the German authorities under known circumstances (10 minutes to leave, shouting, brutal urging to hurry and weapons aimed at mother and five kids) and forcibly resettled to the General Government. In 1944 he was taken in a street roundup and sent to forced labour in the west of Germany. After the war they returned to Gniezno, my grandpa finished school, started working at the post office and soon was sent for postal work in Lower Silesia where Polish institutions were being organized and people were needed. There, in Wałbrzych (Waldenburg), he got to live as a sublocator with a German miner's family who wasn't yet expelled to Germany. The family accepted my grandpa almost like a son and they lived on the best terms to which perhaps the family's pretty daughter, a few years younger than my grandpa, greatly contributed. There were certainly some feelings between them but anyway, in 1948 the family had to depart for Germany and my grandpa soon returned to his home town. They kept exchanging letters until 1970s when both my grandpa and the German family's daughter had already their own families and the Germans sent even packages with small gifts from (East) Germany - they sent i.e. a Räuchermann, as they lived in the Ore Mountains, which I still have at home. Not a particularly dramatic story but certainly my grandpa, despite bad things experienced from Germans during the war, was rather free from any general grudge towards them. Well, I guess it might've been different, had not all in the family survived the war or had their experiences been even worse.
The Polish soldier image wearing a czapka is taken from a post-war poster showing him standing on guard next to a border post at the Oder (Odra) or Neisse (Nysa) river.
This is just a small part of much larger migration forced on millions of people. Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Hungarians, Greeks, Italians etc. A lot of people died.
It was mostly Germans who were singled out for the worst possible treatment though. Italians faced similar treatment when expelled from Istria and Dalmatia, but it was on a much smaller scale.
My Grandma was one of those Germans that were kicked out of the Sudetenland. From what I remember of what she told me, she saw her mom and older sister be raped by red army soldiers, and her mom had to give birth on a table while escaping to Bavaria
@@marknieuweboer8099fuck off, the sudenteland germans lived in that place for an incredibly long time.A lot of them did not even speak german, and the absolutely idiotic expulsion destroyed that place economically to this day.
And how did she, and her family, feel when the Germans came into their country and murdered many tens of thousands and took others away as slave labor? Either indifferent, or in favor, most likely. While there were a few, everywhere, who didn’t agree with the German actions when they invaded, or what happened when they made treaties with several countries, the majority were happy about the events. I’m not excusing retaliation, as I believe that if you consider yourself more civilized, then it’s inexcusable. But the reality is that people don’t feel that way, even if they are intellectually aware of it.
@@melgross What do you even want me to say? Of course I realise how horrible the actions of the Nazi government and all those who followed them was, I am watching this series as well. My grandma was maybe 3-4 years old, and her older sister was at most 13. Am I to condemn them for existing in the wrong place at the wrong time? I am trying to relay what I've been told by my own family, who witnessed all of this. Is it so hard to believe that what happened to them is a tragedy?
This is why it’s so important for governments to observe the Geneva Conventions during conflicts. As soon as one side purposefully commits atrocities then that changes the norms of the conflict.
I am disappointed with the film and the complete lack of context where it is de facto shown as Poland in the western territories was foreign. These territories were territories of the Kingdom of Poland since the Middle Ages, settled by Polish tribes which the Germans successively colonized, this was no different from colonization in other parts of the world and was related to the prohibition of the Polish language (decrees of Frederick the Great in Silesia in the eighteenth century, city ordinances of the 15th and 16th centuries in Poland as in Koszalin or in the Czech Republic as in Olomouc), the settlement of people from Germany or the Netherlands, mass murders (Glogow), deportations (Pomerania), forced degeneration (Lower Silesia in the 19th century or Greater Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries). These areas were settled by Poles and it is hard to talk about the polynization of the Polish population like the Silesians, Mazurians, Warmians, Kashubians but rather about repolonization, which is mentioned in science and documents from that period. In the "Recovered Territories" lived about 2 million Poles who were indigenous there. Mainly in Upper Silesia, Pomerania, Warmia and Masuria, Greater Poland or the Lubusz land. The mentioned Swiebodzin reverted to its original name so the whole story is out of context. It was the Germans who germanized the Polish name and there were still Polish autochthons who stayed in the area, for example, the wrestler Leon Piniecki, a multiple European and world champion, came from that area. The most important context is also missing. Of the 740,000-strong German minority in pre-war Poland, about 100,000 were in the "Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz," a Nazi paramilitary organization that murdered the Polish population and in 1939-1940 alone murdered more than 100,000 Poles and before that, as the Selbstschutz and an organization of German nationalists, fought against the territorial integrity of the country in which they lived. In summary, the overwhelming majority of the male population of the German minority in Poland were active Nazis. In the "Recovered Territories" in many areas for hundreds of years there was a national conflict between Poles and Germans, which resulted in the fact that, for example, in Lower Silesia or Prussia, the majority of Germans supported Hitler and the NSDAP, and earlier German nationalism reigned there in the most heinous forms that resulted in the murder of Poles in the interwar period (the crime in Potepa). Also in these areas there were the largest number of branches of concentration camps and the highest percentage of forced agricultural workers, i.e. slaves forced to work on farms. In these areas, forced Germanization of names and surnames was carried out, bans on the use of the language were carried out, and the names of over 1,000 places were changed under Hitler.
To nie były ziemie odzyskane ale dostane od Stalina 😢 Nazwisko które noszę obecnie jest nie moje Polacy mi je zmienili dekretem wojewody Śląsko Dąbrowskiego buraku 😅
My Grandfather from Bulgaria lived with his family at around this time in Czechoslovakia with the rest of his family (my mother is in fact bulgarian but born in czechoslovakia) on the border to germany. When they began to expel the Germans there, he helped them to move their stuff out of Czechoslovakia to Germany, and got nearly a lot of trouble by the authorities. Following that my grandma convinced my grandfather to move back to bulgaria - which was now under communist rule as well...
In Europe we have terrible experiences with multiethnic countries. It usually leads to conflict.Just since the end of WWII we had: Balkan wars Chechen wars Troubles in Northern Ireland Basque separatist movent Turkish invasion of Cyprus All the Russian involvement: Transnistria, Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine. In addition: Russia using Russian speakers in Baltics to incite discontent and instability, Hungarian goverment still clamoring to "protect" Hungarians in neighbouring countries, Serbian-Kosovar tensions. And I am probably forgetting some others.
You're pointing out at ethnic diversity as the issue that caused those wars, but you're missing the fact that nany of those multi-ethnics empires and realms could have their origins traced back to the middle ages and the early modern period; times when the notion of "country" we have today didn't exist. In fact, there were little to no etnicity-based conflicts until the second half of the 19th century, which coincides with the boom of nationalist movements across Europe. So maybe the issue that caused so much war and suffering is not the etnic diversity within a nation-state... but the concept of nation-state itself. Just maybe.
OK… how about the very successful diverse societies like Germany? The UK? France? The common denominator between your examples is not diversity, but opposition to diversity. Germany tried the same thing, really, really tried, but it failed, and she returned to diversity and renewed growth and prosperity.
The nation that Valium’s to be the most multicultural is the US, the nation that has commented the most atrocities and deaths of innocents since 1945 is the US
@@spartacus-olsson Scotts held referendum on independence and nearly left the UK not long ago. Jews in France and Germany are facing increased antisemitism. Western Europe as a whole was rocked by a wave of Islamic terrorism ten years ago. What I would consider a success is the integration of Ukrainian refugees into other countries. It is too soon to tell whether ethnic diversity will cause major problems in the future or not. Personnally I am pessimistic though I hope I am wrong and you are right. Cheers.
@@Physicaque I think you might have misunderstood me to some degree, at least regarding Germany and France… I didn’t mean minority diverse, I meant diverse on the foundational level. The difference between for instance someone who identifies Bavarian and someone who identifies as Rheinländer are as big as between a Serb and a Croat. They are separated to the same degree by Christian denomination, language, customs, perceived history, and tradition. To not mention centuries of conflict. France is the lesser foundational diverse of the three I mentioned, but still has huge differences between for instance a Breton and a Auvergnac.
I listened to the whole thing carefully and it is typical of a certain trend of Western "RUclips historians" to look for controversies and winking at revisionists. This is the quintessence of why I hate RUclips as a source of knowledge - that is, because we are racing for the biggest crap under the guise of "professionalism". The guest brazenly chooses quotes from Western politicians that fit his vision of "civilized care for Germans", juxtaposing it with "bloodthirsty" Poles and Czechs. Of course, German crimes were mentioned, but they are presented in such a way that they "took place", but... they were as terrible as "shaving the heads of civilians" and "disorganized repatriation". The guy mentions that Poland received the lands regained as compensation for the loss of the eastern borderlands, but strangely enough he did not mention the fact that it was Churchill and Stalin's idea. The former also fully supported the expulsion of the German population, and the latter pressed for the creation of purely national states in Central Europe. Roosevelt was not even interested in how to feed the repatriates in the occupation zones - we will never find out. I am a fierce opponent of the inhumane treatment of civilians, regardless of whether we are talking about Nazi Germany. But there is no concern for civilians in this movie. This pretending to be a "civilized world" is a complete joke. For example, there was no mention of how the Nazi authorities treated their citizens in the winter of 1945, for example by ordering them to evacuate from Breslau/Wrocław. Instead, there is regret over the expropriation of Germans and the taking away of their property that they stole from the original owners in Greater Poland or Silesia. Citing Polish communists like Gomułka and Świerczewski as an example that Poles as a nation wanted revenge on German civilians and the Soviets had to defend them against the Poles? Amateur lack of knowledge.
As Czech - I am curious about the term "perceived Germans"... As far as I know it was the Nazis who were being "expelled" - those who supported Hitler. Sudeten Germans were known to be ardent nazis. But still I know many German families - not perceived german but German - who were not expelled from Czechoslovakia and remain living here to this day... So - I don't think it was all about "Germans" as much as it was about the German Nazis who in 6 years of occupation made the people very angry so much so some mob lynchings took place once the Nazis lost power. It's not like the Nazis were innocent victims here...
Czechs, as more or less atheists, were generally more bloodthirsty against Germans than Poles, and also a lot more hypocritical about it (.. all that classical Czech guise of always being humanist and an example of democracy for all, etc.). In German-inhabited areas of post-war Poland, the church and the cemetery were always sacred to Polish newcomers. In Bohemia and Moravia, not so much.. so many destroyed churches and desecrated graveyards in the Sudeten areas. 😢
Best comment so far, there were brutal and slaughtering Russians, Polish and Germans, but in the same way also harmless civilians who had to suffer.. all these decisions on the civilians were based on emotions, my Grandma who doesnt even have a German name got kicked out from poland during the great removal, all the massacres done on Civilians by Eastern were forgotten, they just wanted a black sheep and this was sadly the civilians. And Stalin just got his expansion plans a little further where he wanted them.
Blaming Churchill and Stalin is beside the point. Stalin was being pressed hard by Polish communists to be as hard as possible on the border and push it as far west as possible. Churchill actually only favoured Polish annexation of East Prussia, Danzig and Upper Silesia - nothing more. This was the policy of the western powers. It was Stalin, under Polish pressure, who insisted on the Oder-Neisse line, and when Churchill suggested the eastern Neisse, Stalin rejected it.
This subject is very difficult. Essentially what occurred following WW2 with the Benes decrees, with the expulsion of Germans past the Oder Neisse line, but more so, the wholesale deportation of other German communities across Eastern Europe, would nowadays be called what it is: ethnic cleansing. But it followed what the Nazi Regime practiced across all of its occupied territories. It followed the wholesale destruction of all Eastern European Jewish communities... and every other attempt to demographically alter the map in favour of Germans in these same places. I can't say I don't understand these countries, that had hosted Germans more or less peacefully, after everything that had just happened and said: not just for revenge, you people being here is a long term threat. We'll solve the question of German minorities this way. (particularly pointing to Benes, whose Czech government was very concilliatory to the German minority pre-war, even he just gave up). Every country leaves WW2 poorer and worse off. I am glad these days are over.
It's not a matter of relocating the german populations, that was done with all sorts of different ethnicities after WW2, the largest was by far the german ones though. The way in which it was done was the genocidal aspect and while all eastern european countries like to avoid that ugly part of their history, it was a horrendous act of violence through and through. Which is in the end the part that goes to show that the brutality of the Nazis, while not being met by its equal, is by no means unique or anything special.
@@DerLoladin Truly, a mere expulsion of "Nazi affiliated people" whom took part in literal blood and fire *cleansings* of their neighbors is totally comparable. Disgusting take, Germany and Germans barely suffered any consequences for their crimes against humanity.
I can guarantee to you that no German was expelled from Poland or Czechoslovakia because of the Jewish suffering. Occasionally, there were people hanged or lynched because they participated in the massacres or anti-Jewish politics, but that had to be massive enough for anyone to even care (like Hans Frank etc.). It was never deemed 'serious enough' reason to expel a whole ethnic group. The Germans were expelled because of their purported 'crimes against the state', as a collective danger to the Polish and Czech national interests; on the other hand, the Jewish grievances were largely ignored and downplayed, not really taking them into consideration when deciding upon the Germans' fate.
There are unfortunately many people who try to excuse these atrocities, and honestly, they're hardly any better than your average communist (or Nazi) since they all fundamentally believe in collective guilt and collective punishment. This is literally the same exact thinking that justified the Holocaust. On a related note, I find it curious how the same people who scream for "Palestine" completely ignore the events discussed in this video. I thought they viewed Israel as an evil coloniser, but I guess Russians, Poles, and Czechs get a pass since Germans are seen as evil cockroaches or something.
SDP (nazi party in Czechoslovakia) had in the last elections something between 81 and 90% of german votes. All that "collective guild is terrible" but we KNOW that almost all of them supported nazis (and many of those who didn´t had to escape). We also know that exodus of non-germans from Sudetenland was higher than nazi officials expected, so after they took over there were workforce shortages, because those "innocent germans" were attacking and killing non-germans more radically than nazis expected. Also Sudetenland has been ours for 1000 years, germans were just immigrants who got too many rights. They tried to take it in 1919, then in 1938 (together with planned end of our whole nation) and damn us if we risked it for the 3rd time. Those killings were terrible thing, expulsion not so much.
Well this probably wouldn’t happen if a guy with specific moustache got democratically elected by them and then conquered Poland because they were some Germans living there
A correction about Świebodzin (and similar towns): it was not a German town Polonized into Świebodzin. It was a Polish town (slavic settlements since early Middle Ages) that was Germanized, and now being reclaimed. However cruel it might sound, Stalin's ideas brought more stability in the region. Just look at post-Yugoslavian states in the 90s. This could've happened in Central Europe as well...
It was not just Stalin. All Big 3 knew and gave tacit acceptance. The biggest concern is the use of ethnic concern as cause for war had been used too many times by German. Big 3 made sure it wouldn't happen again. The ethnic line would be drawn as countries
The region of Lower Silesia was inhabited by Germans only, it doesn't really matter who lived there in the Middle Ages. BTW the rulers back then, Piasts in Silesia and Griffins in Pomerania, both of slavic orgin, choosed to switch their language, culture and politcal orientation to German states
@@michahalama17 They didn't really care through. All they wanted a neat border based on ethnic mostly. And Germany as the one started all these madness had to pay with its territories. That is way way more lenient than what the Nazi had in store for the occupied territories.
Not really. It is weird that this comes from a Pole. Stalin's policy had a net negative impact. People could live together for centuries. WWII was a unique case. Hungarians live in many countries and still there was no war.
The Abodrites and early Polish tribes left there but wooden-earthen huts and smoking cottages in the middle of unknown marshlands - when the Poles arrived in 1945, they received areas with historical, well-developed and civilised cities offering university education, electricity and running water. Truly ABSOLUTELY THE SAME level of development than what Swiebodzin had been like before it was civilised by the Germans. 😂 No one is interested who was where first (probably the East Germanic Burgundians and Vandals at that), but rather who brought the highest known/possible level of civilisation to that particular area. This the Poles were NOT, rest assured.
It's hard to put any good comment when you realize how many atrocities happened during or after WW2. Some can say: “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” But that is not true - many innocent Germans suffered while the Nazi Germans survived the war and lived in prosperity until their death (check what happened to the butcher of the Warsaw Uprising - SS commander Heinz Reinefarth). One more information about post-war Poland and Czechoslovakia: these countries suffered a lot during WW2, Germans murdered a lot of good and educated people, and then NKVD with the Red Army came and murdered or arrested a lot of others who could have been the opposition of communists. Poland and Czechoslovakia were not able to choose their representatives, government, police, etc. - everything was done under NKVD orders. There were indeed Poles, Chechs, or Slovaks who were responsible for these atrocities, but who knows what would happen if these countries were independent? War makes bad people criminals just because there is no punishment for them. Who could believe in 1933 that Germans, the nation of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven would be responsible for the 'factory-like' murders of millions?
Please, do not get the case of Poles and of Czechs mixed up. The Czechs were treated much better, like the cultural 'Austrians' of old, even receiving social benefits under the Protectorate regime - although being largely atheist and a culturally hussite factor through and through, shunned also by the Poles themselves. In fact, there was not a single neighbouring nation who could get along with the Czechs, especially during the First Czechoslovak Republic era. As for the Poles, they were just considered an old-time enemy and competing power of the Germans; on the other hand, Czechs were perceived either as more or less loyal 'Austrians' (working class), but also as a commonly dangerous element of left-liberal cultural decadence (intellectual classes).
Let me begin with saying I have absolutely nothing against modern Germans either as individuals or as a nation, and on modern human level can "even" sympathise with tragic fate of wartime civilian Germans as individuals. The modern anti-german ramblings of some Polish politicians annoy me. However the Germans of WW2 time, as a nation, still got off very easy compared to what they were trying to do in the East. Bah, the worst that happened to them was still mild compared to what they actually DID. Did they really expect to actually murder 20% of neighbouring country and then go on living without any consequences, putting it all on some "evil nazis"? In Poland they murdered most of intellectuals: teachers, doctors, university professors, lawyers and thus opened up space for degenerate Soviet-imposed "new man" pseudo-elites, basically setting back the nation civilisationally for generations to come, we still see the results. In Warsaw alone more civilians were murdered during the occupation than all the US human losses in entire war. They destroyed hundreds of villages murdering all inhabitants. Those two villages in Czechoslovakia became a big deal and a symbol to Czechs and Europe- but things like that were almost everyday in occupied Poland. And let's not forget that it is those eastern provinces of Germany where the NSDAP got the biggest support, getting absolute majority of votes in 1933 elections. Even the German anti-nazi "heroes" had a lot on their heads. The modern German darlings of the July 1944 plot? Stauffenberg called Poles vermin fit only to live under German whip. Schulenburg in his dreamed negotiated peace with Allies "after Hitler is dead" still insisted that entire Poland should be annexed by Germany and Germans can replace the population. And still so many of the Germans (in the West Germany) could freely whine for decades after the war of the injustices that happened to them and how they lost homeland for no reason - while all they did in Poland was just handwaived as things that happen in war. "Somehow" I suspect that, had they've won, few of them would shed a tear over eastern "subhumans" being completely wiped out as planned.
I think genocidal ethnic cleansing is just must much more than an injustice which can be excused as an emotional revenge. Moreover, I doubt, that all 6 Mio. killed people in Poland were ethnic Poles. In interwar Poland, 3.5 Mio. Jews were counted as a proper ethnicity, but since 1945 they were counted as polish victims, all killed by Germans. Well, hundredthousands of them fled 1939 into Sovjetunion to escape antisemitism and went missing. And there were almost 7 Mio. Ukrainians, Belarussians in interwar Poland, of whom also Mios did not survive the war, killed or starved to death as civilians or soldiers. If one argues within the national framing, these circumstances have to be considered. The overall issue is if one recognizes a collective guilt of the enemy or not, often connected with whitewashing of ones own nation by patriots without much historical knowledge but filled with white and black nationalism.
As a german, I agree with you and in fact I support the Beneš-decrees in Czechoslovakia and Karl Kreibich, an etchnic german from Prague who defended the Beneš-decrees saying: "Even though some of these measures are cruel and will affect innocent germans, even the most innocent german has to understand, that as long as the sentiment that germans are in any way superior to all other peoples is ingrained into the german psyche, at least a tenth of what the germans have done to the slavic nations has to be paid back to them."
>"what they were trying to do in the east" They were just trying to reach Moscow and topple Stalin, that's all there is to it. The arguments of "war of extermination" are Soviet Propaganda designed to press gang and force civilians into fighting to the death. Many cities were forbidden from being evacuated (like Stalingrad) leading to civilian casualties to no end, to the delight of Stalin, as a furious confused population would only blame Germans. Also, Germany invaded the Soviet Union out of fear the huge Soviet Bear and its military might was preparing to invade Europe, and the only weapon a much smaller, weaker country had was the element of surprise. Which they used. It's like a huge school bully, threatening the small quiet kid: The small one can only act by surprise violently, because if he announces himself, he'll be beaten up.
Today, it is common sense, that the crimes, murders and ethnic cleansings of the Nazis are to condemn. However, how that should somehow justify equally severe crimes, rapes, murders, ethnic cleansing etc. - it boggles the mind. So many people here defending it. I mean the irony here - taking over a concentration camp and then putting a different ethnicity of victims in the same circumstances. And then defending it as somehow just. Czechs / Poles and those other nations certainly lost any sort of moral high ground due to their crimes and clearly showed that WW2 wasn't a fight of good vs evil, but evil vs evil.
21:58 again the Atlantic Charter bla, bla, bla....but he was not kind enough to tell that Germans and its allies during almost 6 years massmurdered or worked to death between 5,3 and 6 MILLION Polish citizens. 1/4 of them were children. So genocide that carried out by Germans in occupied Poland is incomparable to atrocities that sadly experienced Germans after the end of war. Just keep in mind that by the end of 1939, so since 1st September 1939 German neighbours together with Einsatzgruppen killed in North, West Poland (Pomerania, Greater Poland and Upper Silesia) up.to 100 000 people -Poles and Jews. And that was only the bloody beginning..... So save yourself bull*** about Atlantic Charter
This guy literally spent the last 6 years talking about German Atrocities on this channel. Not to mention he also said that these atrocities are a lesser evil compared to what the Germans did 5 second before talking about the Atlantic Charter
It was still a blatant violation of the Atlantic Charter. To claim "bUt tHeY dId iT first!" is at best disingenuous due to how irrelevant it is to the central point, but at worst some of the most vile shit I've witnessed come out of a person's head, rivalling the delusional ramblings of a communist.
@@randomclownguy6do you think these people hear that? They’re deaf to anything that isn’t hatred, and they still view themselves as superior to any other group of people that’s filled with hate.
As Czech myself I see this as sad and not right thing, but I totaly understand people that did it. And considerint that many Czech families had to move at first place in 1938. One of those families was family of my grandma that need to leave their house and move when war started. And also she told me that when war ended there was allready living family in their house. Actualy there was some time when both families live in the house until the German family moved away.
I’ll be happy when this senseless murder comes to an end, but I am gonna miss “WaH” in general. I hope to see Spartacus hosting a series in Korea, or just continuing with this channel and the new series on Hitler’s rise to power. Either way, you all clearly put a massive amount of work into this series, and it shows. Thank you for all of your efforts. I know this couldn’t have been easy information to wade through. I commend you for doing it.
*Thousands of Germans were left behind.* I read a couple of years ago about Wolf children in Lithuania, German kids who had nobody left or were simply abandoned. One man was 15-years old and was only saved because a sympathetic Lithuanian mayor convinced the Soviets that he was Lithuanian. He stayed and even served in the Soviet Army in the Caucasus in a mountain artillery unit. Another woman was a 9-year old girl who survived starvation because Russian soldiers took pity on her and gave her food when she snuck into their base, and was later adopted by a Russian family who moved into the area. Few ever saw their parents again, with one man who later reunited with his family being rejected by his own mother who refused to believe he had survived and was an impostor.
I try to look at the first and the second half of the 20th century to assess that. Which half, that before, and that after WW2, was there relatively more peace and prosperity? When you talk world war, you’re forced to assess worldwide results, not local. Despite all the conflicts in the second half of the 20th, I don’t believe any of them became globally active compared to the first half. If the option are more death camps or a decades long Cold War (read: political), I’ll take the latter.
Well, look at it this way: Before the two World Wars there had been many wars in Europe. After World War 2 there was a long stretch of peace (with the exception of the cold war), at least between the western european countries. More than 80 years of peace were unheard of before WW2!
@@olivermalter2673 the arguments I commonly hear against that way of assessing are “well, America in Korea and Vietnam”, “Soviets in Afghanistan”, “blah in blah”. Back to, those were smaller, almost local conflicts, the entire world wasn’t engaged in those unlike 2 WORLD wars. 80 years of “relative” WORLD peace.
Thanks for shedding light unto this neglected part of history. Just an anecdote: Back in 1998 I attended a science meeting at Kudowa in Poland, and went out to a café with some friends. We were concerned about how we would communicate. One of my friends used German, and there was no problem. Then it knocked me this was Silesia, I should have remembered... Afterwards I was confident to use German at the train station on the border with the Czeck Republic.
I hope that next week you will also have some time to tell the tale of the events in Yugoslavia, both regarding the Danube Germans in Slavonia and Vojvodina and the Italians in Istria, Rijeka and Zadar. That's a very dark chapter that rarely gets mentioned outside of ex-Yugoslavia and Italy.
Actually really like The content that you produce It's interesting and it's kind of fun to me mid-thirties and I still think to myself I wish school would have been a little more fun or a little more engaging, like your content is. This doesn't just go for this video It goes for all of your content keep up the good work man
Thank you for the very lovely comment, if you like what we do we also have another channel covering the Korean War: www.youtube.com/@TheKoreanWarbyIndyNeidell
@@WorldWarTwo thanks for the reply and the positive message. It is so depressing when you read comments that are gleeful or justify the horror. We need more positivity and understanding in the world.
@@alexandermalinowski4277 no. The ethnic cleansing of German speakers only happened after Germany surrendered . The war was officially over but the violence continued.
@@A1Kirazz #notaargument it is not a competition. You can still show sympathy and compassion to German civilians being killed and persecuted as well as victims of Hitlers government.
The end of WWII is almost as terrible as the war itself for both the civilian population and returning POWs. Human hatred is truly a terrible thing. My paternal grandparents were first generation German born in the US. My grandfather said his parents emigrated to the US to escape constant war in Europe.
I had many German relatives who left Germany after WW1 also to escape European wars. A great uncle used to say “you put a band behind any group of Germans and they think they are soldiers.
The author of the above film is not honest, because he talks about German crimes in Poland in the years 1939-1945 superficially, without going into details, and about the suffering of "ordinary Germans" a lot and colorfully, illustrating with individual stories to enhance the effect. Not much about the displacement of Poles from the territories incorporated into the Third Reich, nothing about mass executions, or about the forced deportations of Poles to work in Germany (at the age of 12, my father, along with his grandmother, was sent to work on a farm somewhere near the Swiss border, along with my great-grandmother, his 16-year-old brother was taken to a factory somewhere in eastern Germany earlier). The author of the film talks about humanism and the Atlantic Charter, but Poles under German occupation were quite officially subhumans (untermenschen) and had no rights (e.g. in 1939, secondary education for Poles was closed - only 6 grades of primary school and that's it), in contrast to their neighbors, who declared themselves Germans and these Germans somehow did not mind it much, on the contrary - too many accepted it and assumed that they belonged to the "master race" (Herrenvolk). After 1945, it turned out that the crimes were always committed by the mythical Nazis, and "ordinary Germans" never had anything to do with them, at most they "carried out orders", but without inner conviction. Certainly.
In most historical situations I would agree. But in this case it can be assumed we all know what Germany did in WWII. Every other documentary tells us about their crimes. You have to be living under a rock to not know about the holocaust or some of the nazi transgressions in Poland. Therefore I don't think a documentary on the suffering Germans went through at the end needs to repeat all that content in detail. We already know it, so it can just briefly mention it and move on. For lesser known conflicts this would be disingenuous though.
@thomasturski2837 As I'm sure you can tell from the title of this video, it's number 138 in a series of War against Humanity. It is a series about the many many crimes that happened in WW2 to go along with a general world war 2 series that focused more on the military side. This was done because the vast amount of things done to civilians in this war obviously actually really mattered as well. As such the reason that many parts of what happened to the Polish in 1939-1945 are only mentioned briefly here, is because they are mentioned in far greater detail in many of the other videos. The Polish deportations, mass executions and far more yet are laid out in far more detail then you'll probably find near anywhere else in video format. Of course it also covers many other quite unpleasant things in other countries as well though. Like the Soviets and Japanese. As such, this isn't some kind of slanted reporting, but just a continuation of noting all the terrible things that happened to everyone through out the war. With the current reporting now increasingly reaching the happenings at the very end of the war and beyond now. Thus it's talking about the deportations because that is where they now are in the timeline. And they are discussing how the war made everyone act ever more brutally against each other at the end. It's not a pleasant image to look at for anyone really, to see how nations that started with principles saying they wouldn't do such things eventually due to the countless suffering turned blind eyes or did some terrible things of their own for various reasons. If you want to argue that Germany was far worse in this then anything Poland did in retribution though, well in the previous episodes you would find quite enormous amounts of evidence for such a position. Even in this video they after all say that in comparison it's clearly less bad after all. It's the kind of obvious conclusion if one wanted to make such a comparison. But even so, it is still yet another painful thing that happened to many people, and as they noted in this video, the Germans didn't give much choice to anyone they decided to call German. You either agreed you were German up or got sent to the concentration camp. So it's unfortunate probably many a person who were just trying to survive got forced in to this position of getting caught up in yet one more retribution. I hope this clarifies more where the author of this video was actually coming from.
This is a part of WWII history that receives very little notice. My grandfather was originally from Breslau. He married my grandmother (an American citizen) in the 1920s and settled in Berlin. A few years later he emigrated from Germany to America. In 1937 they returned to Germany with my father, who was eight years old at the time. Their purpose was to meet with and advise the rest of his extended family to leave Germany as soon as possible, regardless of what had to be left behind. This idea was met with some resistance, but eventually all but one did so (thus sealing her fate). Granddaddy helped coordinate their immigration into the USA, some barely making it out of Germany with their lives. Had they remained in Berlin or Breslau, I doubt any would have survived the war. Had they survived the war, I can't imagine what would have become of those from Breslau after the Soviets and Poles took over in 1945. There but for the grace of God . . .
Look for photos of "Festung Breslau" and what Germands did there to Germans. When Poles took over city ruins only corps eating rats and bugs left there.
@@vesemirbozy1593They were Jewish, I mean if it was total war, the poles get remmed the hardest after the war. Basically became a Russian political bitch for 40 years, one of the worst polish nightmares came true
My high school German teacher survived the Czech camps for Germans after the war, he was very young. Thankfully, they had American relatives who were able to send some money to get them safe food, and then to get them to America.
@@radicalesotericcentrist Because we didn't suck america's d* to send us money after the war))). We had to rebuild alone. Even better the Soviet Union was stealing money from all satellite countries the whole time. But now we are growing slowly but surely every year. Btw how are your immigrants from 3rd world?
In many cases, it was rather 'a ripped eye for a piece of sugar' - such as in Bohemia, where the Czech working class experienced any kind of social system whatsoever for the first time in their history during the Protectorate era, not knowing this kind of 'Prussian/Bismarckian innovation' under the Austrian Empire nor under the First Czechoslovak Republic.
While my direct ancestors from Bohemia left for Vienna already late in the 19th century, their relatives who stayed behind were forced to move. As far as I know, they were all from villages and towns close to the border, but that is the reason I have distant relatives in Germany today. While the Nazis started this war and many of the "Volksdeutsche" saw it positive for their status, so many were just ordinary people who did fight - but not because they were Nazis, but because they were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. And then they lost everything, which makes me even more angry, that so many real war criminals could escape or got light sentences and many could live a peaceful life at their homes after the 1950s, eg. Albert Kesselring. And while I acknowledge, that the towns and villages, where my ancestors lived, have been ethnically cleaned, I don't have hard feelings about it. Yes, another crime happened after the war, but it was a direct reaction to it. And I am glad, that after the war and especially after 1989 there were no hard feelings between the governments anymore, they mostly decided to accept what had happened. West-Germany never really accepted the new Polish border, but Helmut Kohl finally did in writing and this was the possibility to have good relations in Europe. I am glad, that I can visit the places, where my ancestors lived and that I can see with my own eyes where they lived. And have no hard feelings that I do not find relatives there anymore.
It was more complicated in the areas of mixed identity. Gunter Grass - German Kashubian great writer who admitted that he had joint SS... Another Kashubian was Józef Tusk who is the grandfather of the current Polish prime minister Donald Tusk. Józef Tusk was Polish activist in the Free City of Gdansk in the inter-war period , perecuted by Germans during WW2 and forced to fight in Whermacht, then escaped and joint Polish Army in the West..
All this ethnic turmoil and the clash with national borders still goes on in Europe. Just think about Spain with the Basques and Catalonia. Then there is the recurrence, periodically, in Belgium between French speakers and the Dutch speakers. Of course, you have the UK with its four "ethnicities" always in turmoil. Just recently Orban of Hungary was in Ukraine and brought up the issue of the Hungarian speaking minority in that country. This is a large part of the reason that Europe has been one of the most blood-soaked places on earth for centuries. The Swiss seem to be able to deal with the situation, but they are an outlier.
@@motherlesschild102 actually for a long time even after the initial set up of czechoslovakia the central government upheld their strict rules of equality among ethnicities tensions still rose due to outer region officials being dick heads
Pretty much the fate of my maternal grandparents. My Grandpa and his family were expulsed from Hungary while my Grandmother and her family were expulsed from Silesia. And as traumatic as that event may have been it's kinda strange when you realize that whithout it my mother and by extension I myself likely wouldn't exist.
I heard that during fall/winter of 1945, millions of Germans were moved out of Greater Germany and occupied territories. Not sure how many died… like to know the answer.
■ APRIL 1945, not only Lusatian Neisse have POLISH 2nd Army reached but furthermore Spree/Spréva river as well. ■ MOST mighty rulers of 13th century POLAND: * Henry the Bearded * Henry the Pious * Henry Probus They all ruled Polish territories, living in Southwest of current Poland in the land that they never imagined would be conquered by the Prussian kingdom 400-something years later and renamed "Germany" 100 years later. When these Henrys walked the earth, their Piast dynasty held Polish regions including Lower and Upper Silesia in their Piast hands for about 300 years, plus they ruled the Duchy of Legnica until 1675.
I'm not sure about relocation though. I can't possibly imagine how it would be to live as a Pole in same town with people who elected individuals who sent your family to concentration camps...
@Mergor_X Tako je brate zato je I prosla Kako narod ( U Srbiji) Kaze " U tri lepe picke materine" ...I Neka je otisla...Steta sto se nije mogla reformirat ili rasturit bez krvi jerbo je opet nevin narod platio svaki ceh.
In the war against humanity, there is no hierarchy of human suffering, only countries and nations seeing who can go lower themselves the lowest in the barrel to the level of their adversaries by doing the same actions, making the wheel of hate already spinning so fast before turning some more.
My grandauntie Hildegarda was a Moravian German but she never complained about being expelled from CZ. She realised what Germans did to Czechs not only.during the WW2.
We have a small memorial of the camp where the Germans were held and executed often without even a trial. When I was like maybe 9 or 10 we went past it with my dad. He told me that if someone does something horrible to you. And you do something horrible to them in return you're no better than the one who harmed you. Of course as an child I was rather confused by that. But recently I came across by that memorial by chance... Forgiveness is the most powerful thing anyone can do. And as an Hultschiner. I forgive the Czechs and Poles.
In Czechoslovakia,the expulsion was somehwat brought upon by the state. The Benes decrets declared the Germans' property seized and them to be expelled. Also,the expulsion was not carried out by normal people. It was carried out by the armed forces,which are a state organisation. Without doubt,the Germans'atrocities were bigger and on a greater level. But their expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia was not done individually,it was organized and carried out by mostly state organs.
@@heermannmorrerNo the Czech expulsion was carried by civilians. Thats why even Jews were deported. And if the Bohemians were deported why not the slovaks? Which were the greater evil of the three?
@@fabianauer1986 Uhh,again,the Benes decrets. He was the literal leader of the country. Also, police and military were present,as being confirmed by eyewitnesses. For example,the Usti nad Labem massacre. Regarding the role of Slovaks,i cannot and will not say anything.
Germans literally choose nazism, started terrible war, committed terrible attrocities. And at the end they payed the price. I really would like to feel compasion towards expelled, but then i think about Austchwitz and I simply can't.
I mean most Germans didn’t have a lot of choices, you got economic turmoil, you got three choices, moderates, communists, and right wingers. Moderates have no confidence from the people and failed them countless times. Communists are hated by a lot of people. Basically so many factors went to them being voted
That's a massive oversimplification of rhe political climate leading up to ww2. "A minority of germans operated brutal slave camps, so that means they all deserve to be killed, raped, or death marched". It doesn't make it. Most Germans didn't even know about the concentration camps until after the war
@@chadwick8193 Of course, they had no idea of anything wrong. Vanishing neighbouring Jews and G. antinacists - nothing, assault of other countries - nothing, presence of quite a lot wehrmacht soldiers by mass murdering - nothing. Such a bad luck....
Germans chose whichever national, anti-Versailles movement was around at that time; the Braunau guy and his particular brand of national anti-Communism was just the most popular and well funded. That's the end of the story, basically.
@@petrcervenka3148 Atheist pan-slavic deranged ramblings.. at least, the Sudeten Germans were still a proper Catholic ethnic group at that time, like the Austrians, while Czechs were rabid atheists or revolutionary hussite sectarian fanatics even in the 1920s. The First Czechoslovak Republic was a den of left-liberal cultural destruction in Central Europe.
As a Czech, I'd like to point out several things: The expulsions, especially their "wild" part right after the end of the war, were in many cases criminal and totally deserve condemnation. I'd just like to put it in some context: during 1938, the Sudetengerman Freikorps basically started an armed insurrection in the border regions with ambushing of police stations, border guards, post offices etc. 90% or so of Sudeten Germans voted for Henlein in elections that took place in 38. Completely free elections might I add. After the Munich conference, Germans likewise expulsed approximately 750 thousand Czechs from Sudetenland into wha was left from Czechoslovakia. So eventhough I don't like the idea of collective responsibility, it's not that hard to see why a lot of people saw it that way at that time and after all that happened between 1938 and 1945. Again, the violence and killing that happened was criminal and I do not want to say that it didn't happen or find some excuses for it. There are non. But it has to be said that in the end this solved the centuries-long conflict that plagued this country and Czech-German relations are now possibly at the very best they ever were (basically we don't give a shit about each other except trading and economic ties). Plus one thing (and don't get me too serious on this one, I know it was brutal and those people lost everything etc): most of Sudeten Germans ended up living their lives in West Germany and Austria. Free prosperous countries. Unlike the communist shithole we turned into. I don't think many would want to settle back being asked in e.g. 1975...
Voting for SDP in 1938 is not that relevant. It has autonomy in its agenda (nothing criminal). 170 thousand people Left Sudetenland in 1938 an this number includes German SDP opponents and Jews and of course many of those were government employees and their families
They most likely wanted autonomy, any sizable minority would want what’s within their interests. Wanting some rights guaranteed is bare minimum, or you become the Kurds lol.
Rather, it was the Czechs who started an insurrection in autumn 1918; even forcing their 'national revolution' to the populations like Sudeten Germans, Hungarians and also many Slovaks, who did not give a damn about their hussite fanatic sectarianism. Btw why were the Slovaks 'allowed' to take up arms against their own state in 1944, whilst the Sudeten Germans were not allowed to do the same against the state they hated and never wanted to be part of in the first place?
Many Czech people fled in 1968 over the same roads in direction west and north. Because they arrived when the economy was doing well, such early arrivals did well and are better off today than those who left after 1990.
The level of tribalism that continues to plague Humanity to this day disgusts me, ethnic tribalism, religious tribalism, political tribalism, often on a daily basis. Will the majority of us ever see ourselves first as what we really are, a vast extended family, a planet-wide community? I used to think so, but I don't anymore.
Humans are animals not some damm angels, so of course we act as animals and build everything upon animal basics. Even in your utopia there still would be wars and crimes. Only way for peace would be turning humans into ants like beings without free will and opinion, obeying orders of single person
I would like to make some remarks to the intro to this video, to put itinto context. Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia was inhumane, and in many cases clearly criminal, no doubt about that. But in May 1938, shortly before Munich crisis, during municipal elections Sudetendeutche Partei aligned with Nazis (and later merged into NSDAP) got 89,87% German votes (rest voted for social democrats). When the Hitler´s star was rising they were eager to scream "Heim ins Reich" and "Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer". And it was after Kristalnacht, after Night of the Long Knives and many other Nazi political crimes when they certainly should and could know better. But they still turned against the liberal-democratic state whichguaranteed them civil rights, ability to study in their own language, right to establish their own clubs, civil associations, businesses, political parties etc. And I do not claim that Czechoslovakia was paradise on the Earth, and there certainly was some petty discrimination against Germans especially if they wanted to make career as a public officials, but no doubt they had more rights than in the Nazis regime (Mann stated it precisely when he wrote after Anschluss, that Czechoslovakia is last state in Central Europe where German can live freely). But after the war they actively helped to start, after the rationing, conscriptions to the Wehrmacht, after Holocaust they suddenly discovered that many of them were in fact anti Nazi from the start? And 90% voted pro Nazi by accident, no big deal, nothing to see here, carry on... Reminds me of East Germany - of course none of East Germans did anything bad to the Jews or served in Wehrmacht. No, no all Nazis were in the West. Sorry but this story is not completely true. And sad truth is that despite great suffering and many criminal acts during expulsion nowadays the relationship between Czech republic and Poland on one side and Germany on the other is not bothered by minority rights issues at all. In the contrast originally there was also plan to expel Hungarians from Czechoslovakia, but that never happened (there was only small scale voluntary population exchange) And nowadays 80 years later Hungarian politician casually provoke its neighbours like when Viktor Orban publicly says that 5th generation after Trianon will change everything, or when Jozsef Antall back in 1990 declared that he wants to be prime minister of 15 million Hungarians. In conclusion that expulsion was criminal, barbaric and inhumane, but in the end solved a lot. And under no circumstances, should not be repeated anywhere else...
Even Putin is waging war because Russian minorities are "threatened" but it's plain lie in order to pursuit an imperialistic agenda. The resolution of conflicts in Europe didn't come through erasing minorities but changing foreign politics among the states. Inception of EU, shared guarantees and Rights has cooled the tension in public that nurtured that kind of muscular approach to ethnic questions.
Not really. Votes for the SDP for municipal election did not really mean much. It was not a time of mass media a you cannot blame people for wanting autonomy/independence. German could stay the same way they stayed in France, Holland, Italy...Hungarian issue in Slovakia is now practically nonexistent. The issue with Hungary is specifically tied to the current Hungarian government and it relates to the Trianonif anything
@@pepenp At that time there already were international news agencies, international press, radio and something you could call international public opinion. Sorry to break it to you, but mass media did not start with the internet. They are more like 150 years old. And what do you mean that voting in the municipal election did not mean much? In the time of international crisis when dictator of the neighbouring country makes claim on your territory voting for the local party which supports his position is a strong signal internally and also internationally. Especially if that party gets almost 90% of german votes. I do not blame them for wanting autonomy and independence. I blame them for trading functional democracy (that does not mean ideal) for well proven dictaroship. And when comes time to bear consequences of past decisions suddenly everyone was anti Nazi... And to the last point "issue with Hungary is specifically tied to the current Hungarian government and it relates to the Trianonif anything". Same was true in 2013 in relations between Russia and Ukraine. Minority issues in Donbass were non-existent and locat got along well and transfer of administration of Crimea under Ukraine was long forgotten thing from 1950s. And you are probably aware where are we now in 2024... To be tied to the current government and some long gone treaty is plenty enough...
@@pepenp It showed how many Sudeten Germans supported the Nazis. In 1938 almost every household had a radio. They could have been informed very well about what is going on they just chose not to. They all listened to Hitler and closed their ears to anything else.
I come from a settler nation. Everybody’s ancestors come from somewhere else. Europe was settled too… but it happened far enough in the past for food to forget about it
Tam gdzie Niemiec postawo nogę, to już jest jego. Co za mentalność. Polskie ziemie zachodnie, to ziemie odzyskane. Całe Niemcy wschodnie są położone na ziemiach słowiańskich. Nazwa Berlin, Lipsk, Lubeka, Drezno i tysiące innych to nazwy słowiańskie a nie germańskie.
@@dusansuhajda6273 Those territories were originally inhabited by Celts, then invaded by Germanic tribes from Denmark but too dumb and primitive to establish any towns, over time after domestication and christianization throughout history copying Jews, Romans and Greeks you managed to stabilize some civilization lol Polish nobility was never of Asiatic origin, it was a myth. Chaos and barbarism are what characterize German society today, your cultural legacy.
@@dusansuhajda6273 well, the russians certainly knew how to kick the shit out of the germans and you must be mentally retarded if you think concentration camps are a sign of a superior culture germans are huns, and they were mongols last time i checked
Polish people would never try to conquer their neighbors or believed themselves to have a right to territory that wasn’t theirs, nope it’s never happened. Poles are perfect and Germans bad, right? Go back to your goblin cave in Łódź
I don't support these kinds of atrocities but in this case, we need to remember the context of why they happened. The Nazis had a plan to mass murder and enslave the people of Eastern Europe. Many of these Germans were there as part of the Nazi's colonial and genocidal project and supported it. This situation very much reminds me of the Haitian slave rebellion or violence by native peoples against colonialism. Obviously, violence, particularly against civilians, is wrong and should be avoided even if the group committing this violence were previously oppressed. However, the burden is ultimately upon the colonisers to end the violence. They are the ones who started it and have the power to end it at any time. Whatever cycle of violence that occurs or hatred is ultimately their fault. I say this because certain people are going to use this event to try and minimise the evil of the Nazis. Just like how some people will use violence by colonised people and rebelling slaves as a means to minimise the the evils of slavery and colonialism by framing it as a "both sides" issue. However, whether it is the French in Haiti, the British in India, the US against Native Americans or in this case the Nazis in Eastern Europe, it is ultimately they that bare responsibility of the blood shed and destruction that happens.
"colonizers" is such a loaded word. Africans in Haiti are just as much colonizers these days as the Europeans were. Stop trying to frame everything as oppressed vs oppressor.
In these instances "responsibility" is not a binary "all or nothing thing". Real life so complex and messy that humans are always trying to simplify it. Tragedy ensues.
@@motherlesschild102 in most cases both the responsible and victims are all long gone so assigning blame is a fruitless effort. Understanding so that another cycle can't start is a much better use of our time.
These crimes committed toward Germans were terrible but not surprising. Even though some might see it as evil done in the name of historical injustices or previous relations build on ethnic roots i kinda see stronger and more of the basic human instinct getting loose. These peoples were tortured, killed and victimized by Nazis for years. Living in constant fear for wellbeing of your loved ones and they lived like that minute after minute, day after day for years. Fear building up. Once they've lost that fear they've lost what we consider humanity and rage overcame them. Crimes were committed and even though evil is evil and we shouldn't look for lesser or greater evil, these people were pushed far beyond their limits and their basic instinct came to surface. Lesson here is that even though most of these Germans were innocent as far as Nazis crimes goes they did nothing to fight or to stop them. After the war world saw them as one and same. If we let our corrupted or evil governments to build up hate and prepare for wrongdoings, when time for retribution comes, we might end up like these Germans. Even if we don't support our representatives.Never forget.
We had relatives from East prussia in the 80`s I found always extremely conservative, a bit bitter and grumpy. When I visited grandma(mother´s side) in the "Ostpreußenverein" and found a newspaper which headlines read "Hitlers Präventivkrieg im Osten" (Hitlers preventive war) that confirmed my prejudices. At school we were vigorously reminded of the crimes of the 3rd Reich every year and and I knew the Nazis had no small support in former Eastern Prussia back in the day. In these circumstances I began to loathe my relatives from the east prussian side and embraced those ones from the other(from my father´s side from Bremen). Today I don´t condone their actions or election choices, but I begin to undestand (partially through this series) how much they probably have suffered in return and wonder if I would´t be depressed or bitter after all what happened.
It would have taken super-human moral courage for the countries of eastern Europe to allow their German minorities to remain after what the non-Germans had gone through. It really was a case of the Nazis sowing the whirlwind, hell, a hurricane of years duration, and the ethnic German minorities to reap a bitter, but qualitatively different wind. As it was, the 'Slavic' people were vastly more forgiving than the German peoples had been and they should get one hell of a lot of credit for that. Getting on one's high horse when one is asking people to be saints is rankest self-righteousness. BTW, the title of "Slavic Revenge" makes it seem like revenge flowed out of their nature as Slavs. Anti-Slavism much?
@@pepenpWe weren't affected that much by the war itself, but we got under occupation mostly thanks to local german traitors, who were also more than happy to kick out or kill all non-germans from Sudetenland. When those people got the chance to return to Sudetenland after the war they also remembered why they had to leave in the first place ...
Many of those countries, prior to post-WWI independence, had been part of German speaking empires. Poland mostly the German Empire (and bits of Russia though to my understanding it was more of a nice-to-have asset to Russia than an integral part of the country the way Silesia and eastern Prussia was to Germany) and Czechoslovakia the Austro Hungarian Empire (confusingly for an outsider Czechia was held by the Austrians and Slovakia by the Hungarians). So in particular Czechia and Poland contained large German speaking minorities who had lived there for many many years and it was a sensitive thing to suddenly be on the other end of the table and now be ruled by Polish and Czech governments speaking their own language. Especially if those German minorities saw Versailles which caused this as purely victor's justice aimed at suppressing the countries they had been part of until recently. The existence of the Soviets gave some motivation to band together especially in the beginning but that didn't last. Czechoslovakia especially tried to walk the tricky balancing of respecting the German minority, but this was then exploited by both the Sudeten locals and by the Nazis in Germany. Then on top of being invaded with the collaboration of the local Germans, you the Czechoslovak or Pole are treated worse under this new Nazi occupation than you ever were under German rule in the old days before independence--being a second class citizen vs being rounded up and shot summarily. The well was quite poisoned after all of that, and the Soviets were happy to have more homogenized satellites so they didn't object.
Apart from the Poles and Serbs, no non-Jewish and non-Romani ethnic group or nation in the non-Soviet areas of Eastern Europe could claim to be hated or targeted by the Germans as a whole. Compared to the Netherlands, the 'loyal', Austrian-minded Czechs (esp. the working class) were actually pretty well off during the Protectorate era, as far as the social security system went.. The biggest bluff was how the Czechs managed to convince the world how 'greatly' they supposedly suffered throughout the centuries.
The result of WW2 for Poland was that it became the most ethnically homogenous it has been since the early High Middle Ages. A lot of Poles were also forcefully resetteled from the Eastern Borderlands to the Western Borderlands. There is quite a lot of posters from early communist era that reference the Piast rule over Western Pomerania or Silesia & the Polishness of the so called Regained Lands. There were actually concentration camps for the Germans (often repourpused N*zi camps) as well as non-communist Poles during the Stalinist era in Poland which is often ommited in Polish history lessons.
@@arturart2480 Me and my people? I'm Polish from Podlasie, born and bred. 💀 I did not learn about the post-war concentration camps at school or about people like Salomon Morel. I also never claimed that those were as bad as the German death camps. I was just descrribing what happened in relation to the borders changing and forced resetelmemt.
After some time they returned. So what's the problem? Check out modern Slovakia. 450,000 Hungarians still live there. By your logic, there will be not a single Hungarian in former Czechoslovakia (Slovakia).
@@fixative2866 I didn't suggest what you wrote to be fair. I just wrote a historical data from that era. Carpathian Basin was and always will be a home for many etnicities like slovaks, swabians, hungarians etc. etc. which is nice and should always stay it like this.
My mother in law was originally from Silesia. She met my father in law in Berlin right after the war. While he'd walked ahead of the Russians and was caught by them soon after meeting lizbette, she was forced from her home in Poland and wound up in East Berlin. At least I think that's the order of events. Somethin like that anyway
I read a book about the agreement of the Allies at Yalta to return all citizens to their "home countries." and how soviet prisoners in Britain were shipped to russia, where they were all machine gunned immediately. The sailors said this went on for days.
"where they were all machine gunned immediately." Let Me Guess Nikolay Tolstoy " Victims Of Yalta" AKA "Uncritical Regurgitation of Nazi Collaborators Anti Communist Ramblings"
It was easy for British and Americans to judge on these deportations when there were not Geman boots on their soil. Also those Germans outside Germany could be used for anti soviet politic matters.
@@alexandermalinowski4277 you have population on certain teritory that is more aligned with the west than the east. From voting machine to the instability creator.
@@siux94 An eye for an eye leaves the world blind. It’s about stopping the cycle of violence and learning to live together. And I say that as part of an ethnic group which has mostly been on the receiving end of history. As someone who has indeed been directly affected.
The atrocities are made by bad people and every country has them. It the good people that we all should be keep giving support for because they make the difference, not race, color, nationality or prejudgement.
No, atrocities are done by good people who have been mistreated long enough. Besides, there are no really any good or bad people. There's just people. Everyone has a good and a bad side.
@@jancyraniakhow small minded. You actually think that the only atrocities are the ones committed by victims who lash out? Your half assed sense of morals is just a justification for bad behavior
The term "Recovered Territories" (Polish: "Ziemie Odzyskane"), how postwar Poland called the former East German (Prussian) areas ("ehemalige deutsche Ostgebiete") that were annexed to Poland after WW II, was unknown to me until 2 weeks ago, when I checked Polish stamps in a catalogue. Neither did I understand "Marriage to the Sea", which meant the access of Poland to the Baltic Sea (which they had between the wars as "Polish Corridor") after WW II. While many families had many relatives that were expelled, there were others who were lucky enough not to live that far in the German East (Prussia). In my family there is only one member who was on the "trek" as a child. I heard about her story only one time, and only some few snippets. The reception of the German refugees in the remaining Western parts of Germany was "mixed". Some people helped, but there are many stories how ice-cold and merciless these refugees were treated by their "fellow countrymen" - especially when they had "the wrong religion" (Prussian Protestants clashing with West German Catholics). On top of this, psychological effects like trauma etc were literally unknown as concepts to common people. Those who lamented were told "You survived, so what more do You want?!". Only some 50 years later people started discovering that topic ... I wonder if this channel will spend some time on post-WW II time until 1945, it would depict the general chaos. The economic miracle (in the West) came only after 1950 with the Korea boom - which might be a good link between this gigantic series with the new one that Indy started already.
the term recovered may work for Silesia and Pomerania but it most certainly does not work for East Prussia that was never Polish but in fact had belonged to the Baltic Prussian people - the actual original Prussians .
@@Lukejb2ButterworthPoland used Teutonic Order to show Germans as colonizers in that area as well(ignoring fact that Ducy of Mazovia fought against prussian natives too xD)
@@Lukejb2Butterworth I know the term is kinda bizarre, but that is history as well all along. Today Poland calls them "regained" and Germany calls them "lost" - cough... - "former German territories". At least, politically, there is no more will for any revanchism anymore, because the people who were refugees had by large died by now. And _nobody_ wants to have Kaliningrad back.
@@alexandermalinowski4277 what was most astonishing to me about this term was how "poetic" or "romantic" it was. I was completely clueless when I read it the first time in the Polish wikipedia.
@@funtecstudiovideos4102 but its not native Polish territory , the times they ruled were only as colonizers like the Germans so no East Prussia is not recovered land
Terrible, just terrible. No crime equals out another one. But does anyone really believe that something different would happen? Germany did treat the Slaves like absolut dogshit and murdered millions of them. Could anyone just move back to life before the war? Could anyone live next to the people who just yesterday wanted you to be exterminated in the name of living space? Don´t get me wrong, that´s in no way a defense. I just don´t see any way a prewar situation would come without deportations. Some of my family was expelled from Königsberg, modern day Kaliningrad and I feel with them. They were children at that time and yeah they might be more or less be pro Nazi, but again they were children. They didn´t murder anyone. They did nothing besides fleeing from Soviet tanks. It´s a horrible story.
The one in India is ranked at #2. The German one still comes out on top, especially since it was even more so a FORCED migration, and it only went in one direction (to Germany only), as opposed to both ways (Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan, Muslims fled India).
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Spartacus will pick this story up next week in a second episode on the German expulsions. He will also soon address the early war atrocities of the Korean War on our new channel.
Join us to ensure these critical stories are remembered, so we may never forget: www.youtube.com/@TheKoreanWarbyIndyNeidell
You should moderate your comments more. This is not the first time i see very many comments justifying crimes against civilians just because they are german. As a german it makes me sick. Of course i know germany commited horrible crimes during the war and many people knew about it or even participated but this hate against civilians is not right.
Thank you so much for covering this sad topic. It is of outmost importance to tell the story of Europe right after the war, when victims became victors and enemies turned into the new victims of hatred and violence. Many people forget, that this is the time in which borders got established that are still in use today. I look forward to the coming episodes and your work in the Korean War Series.
Another defenestration in Prague involved with a giant humanitarian crisis and vast war crimes. Why does that sound familiar? I also was thinking early in the episode that you would indeed reference the deportations in the Greco-Turkish conflict and Indy says at the end of the episode that the biggest takeaway people should have from that coverage was the idea that it could now be legal for states to basically conduct ethnic cleansing if they wish. India and Pakistan will go through a similar process in only two years.
I'm wondering what happened in Asclace and Lorraine. France, under occupation as well, would have enormous hatred of Germans as you might imagine.
We moderate heavily, but with volunteers on at different times during the day on two different continents. We try to catch all unacceptable comments.
-TimeGhost Ambassador
muh gozzilion poor german colonizers, be sorry for your ancestors proving their superiority over the bloodthirsty germanic hun, you evil Slavic man! I encourage everyone to read the manuscripts of Himmler's speeches to the SS in regard to the USSR. The nerd keeps crying how the Soviets were more brutal than their childish SS death squads lol, the eternal Germanic crybaby.
My father (1925-2003) grew up in the Dutch city of Utrecht and the first German he saw was a German soldier in May 1940. From 1941-1945 he and his older brother were in hiding to avoid the Arbeitseinsatz. After the war he refused to have anything to do with Germans and would refer to them only with the derogatory "Moffen". In 1990 I fell in love with a German girl, in 1993 we married and had our first baby. On the night my eldest daughter was born, my father stayed up and wrote her a letter. In the letter he writes to her to tell her how her arrival on this Earth means so much to him ... and goes on to thank her because, as he puts it, "with your birth the War has finally come to and end for me!". She has that letter now ... and I still often think of the moment where he gave it to me, to pass it on to her. In the years after, he and my mother started visiting Germany frequently, catching up on so much that he had denied himself for decades. Wars leave wounds that take generations to heal.
War even after it's conclusion, has profound impacts on people. Thank you for sharing such a touching and personal story.
Ik woon tegenwoordig in Utrecht. Weet u toevallig in welke wijk / buurt van Utrecht uw vader is opgegroeid?
@@semkoops Hij is geboren in de Jans steeg, maar halverwege de jaren '30 is de familie naar de Tesselschade straat verhuist, nabij de Croeselaan. De duitse militairen die hij tegen kwam was op 15 Mei 1940 op de Croeselaan.
Ik zelf ben overigens ook in Utrecht geboren, in Tuindorp, aan de Linneaus laan, in '66. Maar heb maar tot mijn 3de verjaardag in Utrecht gewoond.
Op late leeftijd begon mijn vader zich voor onze familie geschiedenis te interesseren. Hij realiseerde zich door wat naspeuringen (in een tijd zonder internet ☺) dat onze familie (van zijn kant) in het midden van de 19de eeuw uit Deventer naar Utrecht was gekomen. In de jaren na zijn overlijden heb ik zijn naspeuringen (nu met internet) opgepikt en heb achterhaald dat mijn vader's tak van de familie oorspronkelijk in het midden van de 18de eeuw vanuit Duitsland naar Nederland is gekomen. De eerste 4 generaties in Nederland zijn ook vaak met dochters of zonen van andere duitse migranten getrouwd. Maar tegen 1940 was die geschiedenis grotendeels vergeten.
Wow. I have heard it said that on average, it takes three generations for a family to heal war trauma. Looks like your father did it in one lifetime.
Communists treated their own kinsmen in the same way. Immagine being a Polish partisan a anti-German occupation fighter and still be treated by the communits after the war on the same level as a Nazi criminal. That is the common story of milions of Poles after the war. In the best case scenario your family would have been robbed of their property if they possesed anything of value. The so called good Germans had the same "equal" threatment as the rest of society + the ideological/racial hate of party members. It is important to note that the communist parties of occupied central and easter Europe after the war were full of war time collaborators. In other words very bad peoples.
Germans tend to forget that Poles were also expelled from their homes by the milions first by Nazi Germany then by Soviet Russia.
I always found the passage from MM's "Paris 1919" so haunting. "In 1939 Poland disapeared from the map once again. When it emerged in 1945 it was a strangly altered and shrunken Poland; emptied of its Jews by the Germans and its Germans by the Soviets and moved 200 miles to the west."
A case could be made that the 1921-1939 Poland was too large and had indefensible frontiers. The western part was almost perfectly designed to fall victim to pincer attack from the Germans, while the eastern frontier with the USSR was very long and difficult to defend along its entire length.
@stevekaczynski3793 modern national borders should not be created based on military strategy
@@frozenfeet4534 Perhaps not, but if you can't defend your frontiers you may end up part of someone else's empire, or empires in the case of Poland, 1793-1918.
Poland's westward movement was definitely a positive. They got better more industrialized land and removed potential minority conflicts with Ukraine and Belarus.
The Poles ended up with 40,000 square miles of German territory, most of it better developed than what Poland lost to the Soviets. Interestingly all you hear from Poland is them demanding $ from Germany.....despite the vast German territories they ethnic cleansed after the war. These constant demands against Germany are retarding the development of Poland today by preventing stronger economic ties between the countries. In the end, all the territory the Poles lost went to the Soviets, yet you never hear the Poles trying to get a thing out of them.
My grandfther and grandmother were Germans who had not been expelled from Czechoslovakia, because they employed hundreds of Czechs in their textile factory and saved them from slave work in Germany during WWII. It is interesting that all sisters of my grandfather married SS officers and were explelled. It is even more interesting that communist government after WWII totally destroyed my grandfather. His factory was confiscated he was sent to work in coal mine - up to the point that his favourite quote was "If I f*ckef SS officers, like my sisters, I could have villa with pool and Mercedes in Stuttgart"
Hahah, nice nazi try. Your grandparents were earning on slave labour and your family is connected to nazi SS. Now you cry about how bad Czechs were...
Thats Bolshevism for you...
At last he realized he was standing on the wrong side.
" Grandfather married SS officer?" Pardon me,but wasn't same sex marriage banned then?
@@captain4595 he wrote "all sisters of my grandfather married SS officers".
I strongly recommend the Polish movie "Rose" from 2011 by Wojciech Smarzowski. It tells a story of a Polish Home Army soldier, who fought in the Warsaw uprising and, in summer 1945, goes to Masuria, formerly Eastern Prussia, now Poland to find a Masurian woman and give her the letter from her now-dead husband, a Wehrmacht soldier, who gave it to him when dying. Smarzowski doesn't miss when it comes to historical drama. The movie is on Netflix, at least here in Poland.
This movie also depicted how Masurian were treated by Poles and Russians (in general really bad)😢
@@Yuritsuki666 based
Netflix.....say no more, this is where you people learn about "history"
@@Mi-bi6ez this movie was made before netflix was even a thing in Poland u dumbass
@@Mi-bi6ez It isn't a Netflix original, it was produced independently in 2011 and put on Netflix only several years ago. HBO's Band of Brothers and The Pacific are also on Netflix, are they trash as well? Get a grip.
In the past, I talk to Polish soldier whose unit expelled Germans from Głogów in 1945. He told me, that he took part in it personally and personally expelled some German families from their houses saying "that land is no more Reich. It' s Poland now". I asked him if he had any remorse or reservations from doing this. He said "No, that time I didn't even think about this, but after some years I started thinking that that was unfair and cruel". Family of this soldier was killed by Germans in concentration camp, he was also prisoner of concentration camp, but he managed to escape somehow. He told me that during war, Germas commited to many crimes on Poles and almost everybody lost somebody or suffered from their hands and in 1945, right after war Poles didn't care about their ex-torturers and executioners. Whole Europe hated Germans for what ther did in occupied countries, especially on the East, where Germans cosidered Slavs as "Untermenshen" and people had no rights. Every german could just kill you freely.
Don't generalize about the 'East'. The whole region from Slovakia down to Greece had the status of 'Balkanic Southwest/Südwest', completely altering the situation compared to Poland or the USSR areas. Czechs and Slovenes could very well stick to their dual 'Austrian' identity from the Habsburg era, and get by. The citizens of the Baltic nations had more or less the same rights as German citizens, and were even allowed to flee to Germany when Soviets approached in 1944-45 (the same goes for the Galician Ukrainians).
I know Germans living in the east, half of my family got sent to Germany as my grandmother was hybrid and i learnt from People actually working in the camp how Polish people worked there aswell! treating Je*s like crap ;)
@@HippasosofMetapontum pathetic
@HippasosofMetapontum This is complete bulshit lie Polish Polish people were one of the first ones sent to concentration camps as inmates. You are talking about German minority in Poland who spoke fluent polish. On August 22, 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to kill "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language." Nazi Germans crimes against the Polish nation claimed the lives of 2.77 million Christian Poles and to 2.9 million Polish Jews.
From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize the plan of territorial expansion, put forth by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, demanding the acquisition of the so-called living space (Lebensraum) in the East for massive settlement of German colonists.The object of war was to fulfill this territorial Lebensraum refers to conceptions and policies of a form of settler colonialism connected with agrarianism that existed in Germany from the 1890s to the 1940s. One variant of this policy was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany.
Originally a biology term for "habitat", the publicists for the German Empire (1871-1918) introduced Lebensraum as a concept of nationalism that became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in the First World War (1914-1918), as the Septemberprogramm (1914).
Lebensraum was an ideological element of Nazism, which advocated Germany's territorial expansion into Eastern Europe, justified by the need for agricultural land in order to maintain the town-and-country balance upon which depended the moral health of the German people. In practice, during the war, the Nazi policy Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East) was to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and other Slavic populations and other peoples living there considered racially inferior to the Germans and to repopulate Eastern Europe with Germanic people to achieve Lebensraum.The populations of cities were to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus that would feed Germany, and thereby allow political replacement by and re-population with a German upper class. The eugenics of Lebensraum explicitly assumed the racial superiority of Germans as an Aryan master race (Herrenvolk), who, by virtue of their superiority (physical, mental, genetic) had the right to displace any people they deemed to be Untermenschen (subhumans) of inferior racial stock.
@HippasosofMetapontum Look who is talking about evil lol You germans are who invented concentration camps, you already experimenting with concentration camps before World War 1 in Africa. Poland didn't own colonies and didn't run concentration camps like you did. Here is the link educate yourself " Concentration camps were used by the Germans in South West Africa There were five concentration camps in all in Namibia, then German South West Africa, between 1904 and 1908. They were called Konzentrationslagern in reports and succeeded South African camps by two years."
"Nazi Labor Camps in North Africa- Jewish Virtual Library
My great-grandmother was German living near east Prussian border. She would tell my grandmother of the looks she would get for decades after the war from people. The only reason she was allowed to stay was because her husband was Polish and a war hero.
My grandfather was only 9 years old when when a Germans start to occupy Poland during World War II. He had to work as a slave for the German farmer who like to beat him and calling him "Polish pig" the same thing did German kids. For 5 years he had to suffer this abuse but he still was lucky that he did not end up in concentration camp like other polish kids. Cry me the river or you poor poor Germans who started World War I World War II and tried to conquer the world.
Did your great-grandmother speak Polish?
@@rojiblanco299 As far as I know, no
"the looks she would get" and.....
Such a victim
This was my mother’s family’s fate being Sudaten Germans. My Opa (German) and Oma (Czech) along with two girls and one boy, all under age 7 were given 20 minutes to vacate their home in Aussig. As they moved out, a Czech family moved in. They were then forced to leave the Czech area and head west to Germany. After several trains and camps, they relocated to a small town in Bavaria. The local Germans weren’t exactly welcoming to them either. Housing was in short supply as was food. It took a while for things to settle down Germany. However, they persevered. Retribution was expected. Thank goodness my mom survived it.
My mother had much the same experience when she was 13. She was kicked out of her Silesian home after a Polish family had moved in. They ( her mother and 2 young brothers) had to travel to West Germany by train where she was deloused 2 times thus destroying all her clothes of course. Along the way she saw many horrors including thousands of young german men , ex-soldiers still in uniform, being machine gunned into ditches. And of course this was a month or 2 after the war was already over.
Expected, maybe. Justified, No!
And very well, the Germans achieved what they used to attack Czechoslovakia - they united the Sudeten Germans with the Germans
After agression on Poland in 1939, Germans deported every Poles from west polish occupy teritorry to General Governatory.
Bu hu, cry me a river. Always Germans was "victims". What a bulshit. Your grandmother probably waves flags with swastica, when Werhmacht invaded west Czechoslovakia.
My uncle Has been one of the Poles from the east who settled in Wrocław after war (german Breslau). He's been political prisoner of germans during their terror occupation of Poland. He was just a 17 year old boy who got accused of being member of partisan movement which got him to Auschwitz (yup, many prisoners were Polish, not only Polish Jews). He literally went to hell and back, after war he moved west looking for a place to start new life in peace. He moved to Wrocław and opened one of the first ice cream shops there. He Has always been so kind to others, give leftovers to people for free, but boy, he seriously didn't like germans, the sound od their language and anything german.
I would not blame him. My people did horrible things, and anyone who is not moved deeply by their suffering and does not feel at least some disgust for the Germans - who *as a people* MADE THIS POSSIBLE, condoned and celebrated it - is not quite right in the head.
All the best and peace from Germany, and bless the memory of your uncle! He was a better man than those Germans who brutalized him and his loved ones. Much better. I mean, he gave away his leftover ice cream from one of the first ice cream shops in Wrocław. How awesome is that! You can truly say that in his own little way he made history. His ice cream shop must have healed so many broken souls, and given people peace and joy. People like him are why Polska jednak nie jest zginęła 🙂
@@PreußenGloria71no to powiedz nam co takiego strasznego robili Polacy, błyśnij nam tu swoją wiedzą
@@PreußenGloria71 well, you can always use Google translate
@@PreußenGloria71 what did Poles do to Germans?
@@PreußenGloria71 you are retarded
My grandfather collectively blamed the German people for the war . My youngest uncle was assigned to the US Army occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war. My grandfather wrote to him threatening to disown him if my uncle made contact with any of the extended family members in Germany. One of my great uncles defied my grandfather and made contact with some surviving family members. The stories from them were horrific and caused my grandfather to relent on his no contact threats.
Your grandfather was very principled to choose to cut family ties over a guilt he saw as collectively held by all Germans. But it's good your uncle reached out and tempered those principles with human reality.
@gerardwall5847 My grandfather was only 9 years old when when a Germans start to occupy Poland. During World War II. He had to work as a slave for the German farmer who like to beat him and calling him "Polish pig" the same thing did German kids. For 5 years he had to suffer this abuse but he still was lucky that he did not end up in concentration camp like other polish kids.
I am Czech, and my grandmother is a Sudeten German. Fortunately, all members of her family could speak Czech back then, so they were not harmed. They lost all their property, but they were allowed to stay in Czechoslovakia. Thanks for this episode. It is necessary to constantly remind ourselves that we too have committed such crimes. Never forget.
Thank you for sharing your family's story. Never forget.
Knowledge of Czech was not enough so there had to be another reason why they were spared. Official exceptions from deportations were German menbers of Czech families, people who can prove their anti-nazi involvement, and people with skills needed for the industry. Paradoxically my grandfather was also excluded despite being a Wehrmacht soldier - I think it was because he came back from the war after the deportations ended.
@@richardaubrecht2822 You are most likely correct, thanks for adding the details. However, this is how my grandma tells the story. She was 5 years old back then. I don't know whether she doesn't know all the details either, or if she just didn't want to tell us. Maybe I shouldn't have shared this story when I don't know all the details, sorry for that. But this episode hit hard, so I felt the need to add something.
@@alexandermalinowski4277 Us, the Czechs (Czechoslovaks). Crimes like executions, mentioned in the episode
@@alexandermalinowski4277 And neither were all Germans, but most people refuse to see that since they think it justifies their own country's atrocities. I know I constantly deal with poles who have deluded themselves into thinking one atrocity justified another and still think even after all the territory taken they are due $. Part of it clearly stems from the resentment of Germany's post-war recovery......not even thinking to look to blame the former Soviet Union for keeping them down while Germany crawled from the ruins and dusted herself off.
Glad my German speaking grandparents from what today is Serbia and Hungary came to the US just before WW1.
me too man but i do have family that stayed in croatia and serbia
Liebgott, a real US paratrooper who is also a character in "Band of Brothers", appears to have come from a Danube Swabian background and was able to speak German, though many assumed he was Jewish. Presumably if his parents or grandparents had not emigrated to the USA, he might have been conscripted into the Waffen-SS, an increasingly "Volksdeutsch" organisation in the later war years, or been killed or deported after the end of the war.
@@stevekaczynski3793 Take origin with a pinch of salt I'm also called a Donauschwabe even though my ancestors fled to Debrecen exactly to avoid forced recatholization. Not so fun fact this is also why the Banat has and Germans. Now as for Hungary shortly after Ausgleich with the inaction from Austria, Hungary forcibly started to convert minorities into Hungarians. Yes that was one major driving force for people to leave the monarchy, we didn't had the cash. As such our names became Hungarized, that actually saved us during these deportations.
I’m glad for a similar reason; my grandma’s Danube Swabian grandparents left Romania and Hungary before WWI for the US, and married immigrants from Germany proper. Reading about what happened to those who stayed in the Banat after the war is not a fun time.
One half from following nations are asimilated slavs,Albania,Greece,Romania,Hungary,Austria,Germany,Italy,Litvia,Latvia,Estonia.PS:Read few things from Slawenischeberg,german acesable site only.
What is meant here by "the massive German resistance" to Nazis?
Delusions
For example, in Hungary, the Hungarian germans dared to rebell against nazi Germany. Yet, they were deported as nazis ...
@@xerxen100 yeah sure. It was german Hungarians definitely not the local Hungarian population.
@@Bolshevik.remover The local Hungarian population was alredy died on the eastern front at the time.
Almost half of the German population in Romania left the country after 1945. There were some 600 000 Germans in Romania before 1942, and less than 350 000 in 1948. During and after the communist regime another 300 000 Germans left the country in search of a better life in the West.
Romania is more complicated as the communist regime was essentially "selling them" to West Germany to raise funds.
Today I learned Ceausescu shamelessly selling Germans to West Germany was a choice for a better life. It's not that you're wrong but this is an important detail, it was human trafficking, and the more money he needed the less voluntary it became. Somewhat shameful that in the myriad of productions and documentaries about the two Germanys we still have to wait if ever to see a movie or TV show about this journey into freedom.
@@akosbarati2239 I am not really making a judgement. Just sharing what I heard first hand from an ethnic German man who grew up in Romania. He told me his story earlier this year.
@@akosbarati2239he also did the same with the remaining Jewish population of Romania, selling all of them to Israel
My father was a Donauschwaben in Romania. My grandparents actually lived there after after the war.So, I guess they were lucky.
I'm polish German. No one from my family was persecuted after the war. But it was so because we were loyal for our new fatherland. My grandfather and his brother were both soldiers of polish army from 1939 through conspiracy (granfather) or Italy (grandpa's brother) till 1945.
Grandpa who was before the war professional soldier (sergeant) of WP ended war in Germany als sergeant in new polish army ranks.
After the war, it was very clear - Polish and Czechoslovak Germans were allowed to stay as long as there was a proof (documents,testimony of a neighbor or a friend) that they were not nazis. Your family wasn't persecuted because they didn't betray their country, sadly, there were few like your ancestors. in Czechoslovakia in 1938 elections, some 90% of Germans voted for the nazis.
@@neverstopschweiking We hadn't other country. We live in Poland since 1784.
@@tomaszsebastian2970 Yes, the way your ancestors acted was honorable, they were loyal and didn't collaborate with the invasion force. Sadly, they were in the minority.
@@neverstopschweikingThis is false, if you were ethnically German or culturally, you were screwed no matter your alignments. Most Germans during WW2 are Russians today during the Russo-Ukrainian war, they didn’t really care as long as they weren’t harmed
Husband of my grandmother's sister was a German from Curland and he died as a Polish soldier in 1939
Furthermore, as everyone is giving their family experience. I can share that of my father's uncle. I think I posted about him before in another comment.
Essentially he was captured in North Africa, fighting with Montgomery. He was shipped off to Italy as a British POW, then I don't know how, he ended up somewhere in Poland. After being liberated he has to make his way across Europe to allied lines. But on the way, in each city in Poland along the way, he did witness the aftermath of the Soviets retaking towns, and hanged ethnic Germans in public squares.
These stories are facts and are confirmed by the stories kept in my own family.
I am glad you talk about it.I have a little complicated personal story but I think it illustrates how mixed the situation was in the central Europe and the absolute human tragedy of both world wars. The story is all placed in Brno (Bruenn) and immediate surroundings. But also it is a tribute to my family members who lived through that time.
My family comes from a mixed Czech-German background. As far as I can tell, my great great grandfather was Czech and married a girl from German family before the beginning of 20th century. They live with her family and were generally speaking German at home. Their first child was my great grandma who somehow went living with my great grandfathers family and was raised as a Czech, I am not sure about all the circumstances but most likely due to poverty. My great grandma eventually had more siblings (around 10) who were all raised as Germans. My great grandma married, had a son (my great uncle), her husband got killed or severely injured during the great war, she got a tobacconist store as a compensation but her son was at least for part of his life living with her parents family.
In the 1920s, she got married again and eventually got my grandma. With the rise of Nazi Germany and the Anschluss of Austria, many people flee Vienna with the immediate stop in Brno which had roughly 40 % of German population. My great grandma provides a temporary shelter to some refugees (I assume those would be some distant friends from the past) on their way to he final destination. Her son finds liking in the Nazi uniforms and greets her with a Nazi salute which she replies with a slap saying that she raised him better. During the war my grandma (now a teenager) smuggles agricultural products from the nearby villages which they partially sell, partially give away at their store. My grandma always escaped suspicion at the train station due to the fact that she had blond hair and blue eyes and spoke a perfect German. By the end of the war, my grandma got drafted as a slave labor at what was probably a factory making parts for the V-rockets. My great uncle disappeared somewhere on the eastern front.
When the war ended and the Czech state decided to expel the German population living there my great grandma and my grandma were allowed to stay as they have never claimed German citizenship. The rest of her family (her parents and siblings) were force to move as they accepted German citizenship during the war. My great great grandfather could not imagine leaving the house where he spent more than half of a century and hanged himself. The rest of the family ended somewhere in Bavaria but my trail ends here.
"War does not determine who is right, only who is left." - Bertrand Russell
@@ives3572 This sentence sounds cute but Russell was a pacifist living happily on the island.
The narrative that German, Soviet and now Russian meneaters were/are as right as their victims is sick.
Don't help the beast and pretend that it has valid reasons to eat you.
Don't start a war, so your people will not suffer its effects - Every Reasonable Person Ever
Do Shit, Get Hit - War Victors, probably
Don't cry about genocide when the people you tried to genocide fights back, and wins - WW2 victims of German repression
Many of geographical names in todays western Poland were re-Polonized rather than Polonized.
Exactly, like Germans didn't forcefully assimilated whole Polabia, Pomerania etc. + Prussia.
@@janprochazka8095 Pomerania, Prusia and Silesia are Germany
@@janprochazka8095when it comes to Pruss territory, the Teutonic Knights were originally servants of Polish rulers. They betrayed them. Got second chance in 16 centaury and betrayed second time in 17 centaury.
That's why he stated at the start of the video that "their ancestors had lived there for centuries, if not millennia"
Yes, the Kingdom of Poland had controlled parts of that territory... 200 years earlier, if not 400+ on some parts. Awesome.
Truth is, after so long a time of shared existence in Prussia, Pomerania and Kashubia, no one had more right than anyone to the land. The Nazis were wrong and the Poles were also wrong.
Germans were an intrinsic part of Poland, ever since Poland existed, now all what remains of them are headstones in graveyards and buildings that do not anymore resonate the language of those that built them.
Still, credit where credit is due, you are better custodians of your conquered lands than the Russians are of theirs.
@@riograndedosulball248Why, when talking about German "ancestral lands", they suddenly have more rights to them then any other nation or ethnicity? If anything a huge chunk of those eastern (western from Polish perspective) territories can be considered reconquered, those taken in 18th/19th century having the strongest claim.
So many innocent people were "punished" for crimes committed by others
On the other hand , so many criminals escaped justice
That's one of the greatest horrors of WW2
Didn't stop the British trying it on an even larger scale in 1947 in the partition of India!
That could have been prevented if Jinah and the Muslim League did not demand a Muslim state seperate from India ...
@@TheCapnCanuck the british, nonetheless, agreed to it.
@@doctorscootthe mess it would have been if they didn't agreerd would have been even worse
"This would be the largest population transfer in history..." India and Pakistan in 1947, "Hold my beer."
"Hold my ghee"
Slavic? It was rather set up in Yalta between two English speaking and one Russian rulers of the world :) Neither US and UK had strength, morality and power to confront communism and both western “democracies” sold Poland and other Slavic countries for doubtful peace. All this after having atomic bomb as well! Poles didn’t get proper revenge, didn’t also get any help for 6 years of war and losing great number of its population. Very innacurate title.
It wasn't the British or the Americans who forced people out of their homes and told them to march west without food and water, and without roofs to sleep under during the night, but Poles and Czechs. "We have to kill people or displace them in terrible conditions because they are undesirables and our leaders decided as such" is fascist rhetoric.
"Poles didn't get proper revenge" oh so forcible displacements where thousands of people died are not enough for you? Expelling millions from territories that were german before the war so they could be part of post-war Poland was also not enough? What would constitute a "proper" revenge? More death camps but this time for german civilians?
I understand the bitterness towards the USA or UK for leaving Poland under Soviet management but you don't have to deny atrocities committed against german civilians by polish and czech governments and mobs to convey that.
@@Bravo-oo9vdhard to call polish and Czech governments at that time to be polish or Czech. They were Stalin’s puppets, established by force, commiting atrocities even against its own people to execute USSR’s policy.
This was no true universally. Poland sadly was under Soviet influence. In Czechoslovakia the communist took power not democratically, but did not need Soviet authorities. Austria did not end up like that (but could have).
@@pepenp Influence? In 1945 it was actually under occupation. The Red Army brought with it the Provisional Government that consisted of people unknown in Poland, with no legitimacy or local support. It was a puppet regime imposed by a foreign superpower. So in fact it was an occupation rather than liberation. It was all Stalin's idea executed by his puppets masquerading as the Polish Government.
What do you wish for?
Backstabbing allied country which lost 7 million soldiers and killed 80% of dead axis forces in Europe?
You got ancient Polish lands and had to give up ancient Rus lands, but I guess you lost your own "subhumans" and "schismatics" over whom you could feel superior and discriminate against as you have been doing for 400 years .
It sucks but is more than fair, don't whine.
When we consider all atrocities of Nazi regime and existing prewar tensions between Germans and Slavs it’s a miracle that someone could survive in this situation
That anyone survived.
Seems like everybody hates everybody.
@@HebrewsElevenTwentyFive funny that you mention this. Ukrainians and poles hated each others for centuries. But they both hates Russia more so they work together but I can assure you that nobody forgot nothing
@@HebrewsElevenTwentyFive There is another reason why Ukraininans and Poles don't hate each other though - a shared enemy.
@@HebrewsElevenTwentyFive Lack of historical knowledge is evident - Germans has exterminated 18% of Polish citizens, destroyed almost completely Warsaw and cause massive destruction of the whole country. The level of German hatred towards Poles is difficult to comprehend and would require more space than available here. In the effect of the war Polend was moved away from its borders, shrinked in size and for the next 50 years thrown under Soviet domination. Resentments are still vivid.
I@@HebrewsElevenTwentyFive I reckon they detest each other, as Ukrainians are praising that WW2 murderer whom Polish loathe for killing them.
My grandparents were ethnic Silesians and German citizens. After WWII they were allowed to stay in Silesia and were not harassed by anyone.
Presumably because they spoke Polish and chose to become Polish.
In Czech Republic it left a scar that has not healed to this day (despite quite successful economic development). The Sudetenland border is still quite visible. The "newcomers" were often unskilled people who could not maintain the economy and also the infrastructure. Derelict houses, factories, fading cemeteries. This is what you can still see, sometimes with still fading German signs. All socioeconomic statistics are worse.
Only Liberec was the successful city, after the German forced migration, thanks to the textile industry
A friend pf mine visited Czech republic last year. He said "the roads within the villages where perfect, the roads outside of the villages, not so much".
@@AG26498 Coincidence, could be the other way around :)
The awful economic situation in border regions is not necessarily due to the deportation of Germans, but due to the 50+ years of centrally planned economy. There surely was a braindrain because of deportation, but that was a German braindrain, Czech braindrain came a bit later in the late 40s, 50s and 60s because of commies. If the communist coup failed, those regions would have recovered much quicker, because people would have property rights, relative freedom and means of production wouldnt be banned from private hands. So again, while the deportations of Germans were tragic, thinking that those regions are poorly performing economically because of lack of Germans is such a weird inferiority complex argument.
We are a very capable and hardened nation, we always persevered and we should be proud of that. What really fucked us in the end were Russians (Soviets) and Czechs who appeased or supported communism/state socialism. But since 1989 we have been clearly getting back on track.
And the area in South Moravia around Mikulov fits your theory how ?
My grandpa as a boy lived in the city of Gniezno in Greater Poland which was annexed in 1939 directly to the Reich as Wartheland. In February 1940 he with his whole family was thrown out of their home by the German authorities under known circumstances (10 minutes to leave, shouting, brutal urging to hurry and weapons aimed at mother and five kids) and forcibly resettled to the General Government. In 1944 he was taken in a street roundup and sent to forced labour in the west of Germany. After the war they returned to Gniezno, my grandpa finished school, started working at the post office and soon was sent for postal work in Lower Silesia where Polish institutions were being organized and people were needed. There, in Wałbrzych (Waldenburg), he got to live as a sublocator with a German miner's family who wasn't yet expelled to Germany. The family accepted my grandpa almost like a son and they lived on the best terms to which perhaps the family's pretty daughter, a few years younger than my grandpa, greatly contributed. There were certainly some feelings between them but anyway, in 1948 the family had to depart for Germany and my grandpa soon returned to his home town. They kept exchanging letters until 1970s when both my grandpa and the German family's daughter had already their own families and the Germans sent even packages with small gifts from (East) Germany - they sent i.e. a Räuchermann, as they lived in the Ore Mountains, which I still have at home. Not a particularly dramatic story but certainly my grandpa, despite bad things experienced from Germans during the war, was rather free from any general grudge towards them. Well, I guess it might've been different, had not all in the family survived the war or had their experiences been even worse.
The Polish soldier image wearing a czapka is taken from a post-war poster showing him standing on guard next to a border post at the Oder (Odra) or Neisse (Nysa) river.
What does czapka mean in Polish? In Bulgarian it just means any hat (шапка).
@@EvilSmonker It polish it means pretty much the same.
@@nobleman9393 so then why did he type czapka instead of just saying hat lol
@@EvilSmonker No Idea.
@@nobleman9393czapka (moreso in english nomenclature) is sometimes used to refer to a military rogatywka (the modern Polish term for a 4-corner hat)
This is just a small part of much larger migration forced on millions of people. Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Hungarians, Greeks, Italians etc. A lot of people died.
It was mostly Germans who were singled out for the worst possible treatment though. Italians faced similar treatment when expelled from Istria and Dalmatia, but it was on a much smaller scale.
My Grandma was one of those Germans that were kicked out of the Sudetenland. From what I remember of what she told me, she saw her mom and older sister be raped by red army soldiers, and her mom had to give birth on a table while escaping to Bavaria
Were they fans of Konrad Henlein? How many jews did they save?
@@marknieuweboer8099what?
@@marknieuweboer8099fuck off, the sudenteland germans lived in that place for an incredibly long time.A lot of them did not even speak german, and the absolutely idiotic expulsion destroyed that place economically to this day.
And how did she, and her family, feel when the Germans came into their country and murdered many tens of thousands and took others away as slave labor? Either indifferent, or in favor, most likely. While there were a few, everywhere, who didn’t agree with the German actions when they invaded, or what happened when they made treaties with several countries, the majority were happy about the events. I’m not excusing retaliation, as I believe that if you consider yourself more civilized, then it’s inexcusable. But the reality is that people don’t feel that way, even if they are intellectually aware of it.
@@melgross What do you even want me to say? Of course I realise how horrible the actions of the Nazi government and all those who followed them was, I am watching this series as well.
My grandma was maybe 3-4 years old, and her older sister was at most 13. Am I to condemn them for existing in the wrong place at the wrong time? I am trying to relay what I've been told by my own family, who witnessed all of this. Is it so hard to believe that what happened to them is a tragedy?
This is why it’s so important for governments to observe the Geneva Conventions during conflicts. As soon as one side purposefully commits atrocities then that changes the norms of the conflict.
I am disappointed with the film and the complete lack of context where it is de facto shown as Poland in the western territories was foreign. These territories were territories of the Kingdom of Poland since the Middle Ages, settled by Polish tribes which the Germans successively colonized, this was no different from colonization in other parts of the world and was related to the prohibition of the Polish language (decrees of Frederick the Great in Silesia in the eighteenth century, city ordinances of the 15th and 16th centuries in Poland as in Koszalin or in the Czech Republic as in Olomouc), the settlement of people from Germany or the Netherlands, mass murders (Glogow), deportations (Pomerania), forced degeneration (Lower Silesia in the 19th century or Greater Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries). These areas were settled by Poles and it is hard to talk about the polynization of the Polish population like the Silesians, Mazurians, Warmians, Kashubians but rather about repolonization, which is mentioned in science and documents from that period.
In the "Recovered Territories" lived about 2 million Poles who were indigenous there. Mainly in Upper Silesia, Pomerania, Warmia and Masuria, Greater Poland or the Lubusz land. The mentioned Swiebodzin reverted to its original name so the whole story is out of context. It was the Germans who germanized the Polish name and there were still Polish autochthons who stayed in the area, for example, the wrestler Leon Piniecki, a multiple European and world champion, came from that area.
The most important context is also missing.
Of the 740,000-strong German minority in pre-war Poland, about 100,000 were in the "Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz," a Nazi paramilitary organization that murdered the Polish population and in 1939-1940 alone murdered more than 100,000 Poles and before that, as the Selbstschutz and an organization of German nationalists, fought against the territorial integrity of the country in which they lived. In summary, the overwhelming majority of the male population of the German minority in Poland were active Nazis.
In the "Recovered Territories" in many areas for hundreds of years there was a national conflict between Poles and Germans, which resulted in the fact that, for example, in Lower Silesia or Prussia, the majority of Germans supported Hitler and the NSDAP, and earlier German nationalism reigned there in the most heinous forms that resulted in the murder of Poles in the interwar period (the crime in Potepa). Also in these areas there were the largest number of branches of concentration camps and the highest percentage of forced agricultural workers, i.e. slaves forced to work on farms. In these areas, forced Germanization of names and surnames was carried out, bans on the use of the language were carried out, and the names of over 1,000 places were changed under Hitler.
Should east Germany be part of Poland as it was also taken by the Germans since 1600
Brawo, this guy is ignorant well done
To nie były ziemie odzyskane ale dostane od Stalina 😢 Nazwisko które noszę obecnie jest nie moje Polacy mi je zmienili dekretem wojewody Śląsko Dąbrowskiego buraku 😅
@@michamajnusz1380Ciesz się że tylko nazwisko Ci zmienili
@@Miszorov ty chyba zza Buga z wielkiej Polski he he h
My Grandfather from Bulgaria lived with his family at around this time in Czechoslovakia with the rest of his family (my mother is in fact bulgarian but born in czechoslovakia) on the border to germany. When they began to expel the Germans there, he helped them to move their stuff out of Czechoslovakia to Germany, and got nearly a lot of trouble by the authorities. Following that my grandma convinced my grandfather to move back to bulgaria - which was now under communist rule as well...
Poor poor Germans. What did they ever do to deserve such cruel fate?
following the merchant people lead.. was their curse
@@antondavidoff150 they murdered 6 milions of people just in Poland.
Same could be said for the jews they got what was coming to em by that logic
@@phazayus4041 bullshit you mo ron . There is is difference betwen victim and vilian. German were the bigest murders and robers world ever saw.
Did the Jews have concentration camps? @@phazayus4041
In Europe we have terrible experiences with multiethnic countries. It usually leads to conflict.Just since the end of WWII we had:
Balkan wars
Chechen wars
Troubles in Northern Ireland
Basque separatist movent
Turkish invasion of Cyprus
All the Russian involvement: Transnistria, Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine.
In addition: Russia using Russian speakers in Baltics to incite discontent and instability,
Hungarian goverment still clamoring to "protect" Hungarians in neighbouring countries,
Serbian-Kosovar tensions.
And I am probably forgetting some others.
You're pointing out at ethnic diversity as the issue that caused those wars, but you're missing the fact that nany of those multi-ethnics empires and realms could have their origins traced back to the middle ages and the early modern period; times when the notion of "country" we have today didn't exist.
In fact, there were little to no etnicity-based conflicts until the second half of the 19th century, which coincides with the boom of nationalist movements across Europe.
So maybe the issue that caused so much war and suffering is not the etnic diversity within a nation-state... but the concept of nation-state itself. Just maybe.
OK… how about the very successful diverse societies like Germany? The UK? France?
The common denominator between your examples is not diversity, but opposition to diversity. Germany tried the same thing, really, really tried, but it failed, and she returned to diversity and renewed growth and prosperity.
The nation that Valium’s to be the most multicultural is the US, the nation that has commented the most atrocities and deaths of innocents since 1945 is the US
@@spartacus-olsson Scotts held referendum on independence and nearly left the UK not long ago.
Jews in France and Germany are facing increased antisemitism.
Western Europe as a whole was rocked by a wave of Islamic terrorism ten years ago.
What I would consider a success is the integration of Ukrainian refugees into other countries.
It is too soon to tell whether ethnic diversity will cause major problems in the future or not. Personnally I am pessimistic though I hope I am wrong and you are right. Cheers.
@@Physicaque I think you might have misunderstood me to some degree, at least regarding Germany and France… I didn’t mean minority diverse, I meant diverse on the foundational level. The difference between for instance someone who identifies Bavarian and someone who identifies as Rheinländer are as big as between a Serb and a Croat. They are separated to the same degree by Christian denomination, language, customs, perceived history, and tradition. To not mention centuries of conflict. France is the lesser foundational diverse of the three I mentioned, but still has huge differences between for instance a Breton and a Auvergnac.
I listened to the whole thing carefully and it is typical of a certain trend of Western "RUclips historians" to look for controversies and winking at revisionists. This is the quintessence of why I hate RUclips as a source of knowledge - that is, because we are racing for the biggest crap under the guise of "professionalism".
The guest brazenly chooses quotes from Western politicians that fit his vision of "civilized care for Germans", juxtaposing it with "bloodthirsty" Poles and Czechs.
Of course, German crimes were mentioned, but they are presented in such a way that they "took place", but... they were as terrible as "shaving the heads of civilians" and "disorganized repatriation".
The guy mentions that Poland received the lands regained as compensation for the loss of the eastern borderlands, but strangely enough he did not mention the fact that it was Churchill and Stalin's idea. The former also fully supported the expulsion of the German population, and the latter pressed for the creation of purely national states in Central Europe. Roosevelt was not even interested in how to feed the repatriates in the occupation zones - we will never find out.
I am a fierce opponent of the inhumane treatment of civilians, regardless of whether we are talking about Nazi Germany. But there is no concern for civilians in this movie. This pretending to be a "civilized world" is a complete joke.
For example, there was no mention of how the Nazi authorities treated their citizens in the winter of 1945, for example by ordering them to evacuate from Breslau/Wrocław. Instead, there is regret over the expropriation of Germans and the taking away of their property that they stole from the original owners in Greater Poland or Silesia.
Citing Polish communists like Gomułka and Świerczewski as an example that Poles as a nation wanted revenge on German civilians and the Soviets had to defend them against the Poles?
Amateur lack of knowledge.
As Czech - I am curious about the term "perceived Germans"... As far as I know it was the Nazis who were being "expelled" - those who supported Hitler. Sudeten Germans were known to be ardent nazis. But still I know many German families - not perceived german but German - who were not expelled from Czechoslovakia and remain living here to this day... So - I don't think it was all about "Germans" as much as it was about the German Nazis who in 6 years of occupation made the people very angry so much so some mob lynchings took place once the Nazis lost power. It's not like the Nazis were innocent victims here...
Czechs, as more or less atheists, were generally more bloodthirsty against Germans than Poles, and also a lot more hypocritical about it (.. all that classical Czech guise of always being humanist and an example of democracy for all, etc.).
In German-inhabited areas of post-war Poland, the church and the cemetery were always sacred to Polish newcomers. In Bohemia and Moravia, not so much.. so many destroyed churches and desecrated graveyards in the Sudeten areas. 😢
Best comment so far, there were brutal and slaughtering Russians, Polish and Germans, but in the same way also harmless civilians who had to suffer.. all these decisions on the civilians were based on emotions, my Grandma who doesnt even have a German name got kicked out from poland during the great removal, all the massacres done on Civilians by Eastern were forgotten, they just wanted a black sheep and this was sadly the civilians. And Stalin just got his expansion plans a little further where he wanted them.
Blaming Churchill and Stalin is beside the point. Stalin was being pressed hard by Polish communists to be as hard as possible on the border and push it as far west as possible. Churchill actually only favoured Polish annexation of East Prussia, Danzig and Upper Silesia - nothing more. This was the policy of the western powers. It was Stalin, under Polish pressure, who insisted on the Oder-Neisse line, and when Churchill suggested the eastern Neisse, Stalin rejected it.
@@okshadowbannedjet7981 PL 🤝 CZ Love you, brothers. Despite all the unnecessary and dumb mutual animosity in the past.
This subject is very difficult. Essentially what occurred following WW2 with the Benes decrees, with the expulsion of Germans past the Oder Neisse line, but more so, the wholesale deportation of other German communities across Eastern Europe, would nowadays be called what it is: ethnic cleansing.
But it followed what the Nazi Regime practiced across all of its occupied territories. It followed the wholesale destruction of all Eastern European Jewish communities... and every other attempt to demographically alter the map in favour of Germans in these same places.
I can't say I don't understand these countries, that had hosted Germans more or less peacefully, after everything that had just happened and said: not just for revenge, you people being here is a long term threat. We'll solve the question of German minorities this way. (particularly pointing to Benes, whose Czech government was very concilliatory to the German minority pre-war, even he just gave up).
Every country leaves WW2 poorer and worse off. I am glad these days are over.
It's a tragedy, but a tragedy of the germans own making.
It's not a matter of relocating the german populations, that was done with all sorts of different ethnicities after WW2, the largest was by far the german ones though.
The way in which it was done was the genocidal aspect and while all eastern european countries like to avoid that ugly part of their history, it was a horrendous act of violence through and through.
Which is in the end the part that goes to show that the brutality of the Nazis, while not being met by its equal, is by no means unique or anything special.
@@DerLoladin Truly, a mere expulsion of "Nazi affiliated people" whom took part in literal blood and fire *cleansings* of their neighbors is totally comparable. Disgusting take, Germany and Germans barely suffered any consequences for their crimes against humanity.
I can guarantee to you that no German was expelled from Poland or Czechoslovakia because of the Jewish suffering. Occasionally, there were people hanged or lynched because they participated in the massacres or anti-Jewish politics, but that had to be massive enough for anyone to even care (like Hans Frank etc.). It was never deemed 'serious enough' reason to expel a whole ethnic group.
The Germans were expelled because of their purported 'crimes against the state', as a collective danger to the Polish and Czech national interests; on the other hand, the Jewish grievances were largely ignored and downplayed, not really taking them into consideration when deciding upon the Germans' fate.
@@l33tnobody1337 oh yeah have you heard of Stalin? The "peace treaty" of the first world war? lol another guy missing history class
Thank you for covering the events in Czechoslovakia, to this day, we can still see the scars...
And thank you for watching, never forget.
However, we don´t see a new border 30 km from Prague, 3 km from Pilsen...like it was after annexion of Sudeten 1938 .
There are unfortunately many people who try to excuse these atrocities, and honestly, they're hardly any better than your average communist (or Nazi) since they all fundamentally believe in collective guilt and collective punishment. This is literally the same exact thinking that justified the Holocaust.
On a related note, I find it curious how the same people who scream for "Palestine" completely ignore the events discussed in this video. I thought they viewed Israel as an evil coloniser, but I guess Russians, Poles, and Czechs get a pass since Germans are seen as evil cockroaches or something.
Yeah. Talk about double standards. This comment section was quite depressing to read.
SDP (nazi party in Czechoslovakia) had in the last elections something between 81 and 90% of german votes. All that "collective guild is terrible" but we KNOW that almost all of them supported nazis (and many of those who didn´t had to escape). We also know that exodus of non-germans from Sudetenland was higher than nazi officials expected, so after they took over there were workforce shortages, because those "innocent germans" were attacking and killing non-germans more radically than nazis expected. Also Sudetenland has been ours for 1000 years, germans were just immigrants who got too many rights. They tried to take it in 1919, then in 1938 (together with planned end of our whole nation) and damn us if we risked it for the 3rd time. Those killings were terrible thing, expulsion not so much.
Well this probably wouldn’t happen if a guy with specific moustache got democratically elected by them and then conquered Poland because they were some Germans living there
A correction about Świebodzin (and similar towns): it was not a German town Polonized into Świebodzin. It was a Polish town (slavic settlements since early Middle Ages) that was Germanized, and now being reclaimed.
However cruel it might sound, Stalin's ideas brought more stability in the region. Just look at post-Yugoslavian states in the 90s. This could've happened in Central Europe as well...
It was not just Stalin. All Big 3 knew and gave tacit acceptance.
The biggest concern is the use of ethnic concern as cause for war had been used too many times by German. Big 3 made sure it wouldn't happen again. The ethnic line would be drawn as countries
The region of Lower Silesia was inhabited by Germans only, it doesn't really matter who lived there in the Middle Ages. BTW the rulers back then, Piasts in Silesia and Griffins in Pomerania, both of slavic orgin, choosed to switch their language, culture and politcal orientation to German states
@@michahalama17
They didn't really care through.
All they wanted a neat border based on ethnic mostly.
And Germany as the one started all these madness had to pay with its territories.
That is way way more lenient than what the Nazi had in store for the occupied territories.
Not really. It is weird that this comes from a Pole. Stalin's policy had a net negative impact. People could live together for centuries. WWII was a unique case. Hungarians live in many countries and still there was no war.
The Abodrites and early Polish tribes left there but wooden-earthen huts and smoking cottages in the middle of unknown marshlands - when the Poles arrived in 1945, they received areas with historical, well-developed and civilised cities offering university education, electricity and running water. Truly ABSOLUTELY THE SAME level of development than what Swiebodzin had been like before it was civilised by the Germans. 😂
No one is interested who was where first (probably the East Germanic Burgundians and Vandals at that), but rather who brought the highest known/possible level of civilisation to that particular area. This the Poles were NOT, rest assured.
It's hard to put any good comment when you realize how many atrocities happened during or after WW2. Some can say: “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” But that is not true - many innocent Germans suffered while the Nazi Germans survived the war and lived in prosperity until their death (check what happened to the butcher of the Warsaw Uprising - SS commander Heinz Reinefarth).
One more information about post-war Poland and Czechoslovakia: these countries suffered a lot during WW2, Germans murdered a lot of good and educated people, and then NKVD with the Red Army came and murdered or arrested a lot of others who could have been the opposition of communists. Poland and Czechoslovakia were not able to choose their representatives, government, police, etc. - everything was done under NKVD orders. There were indeed Poles, Chechs, or Slovaks who were responsible for these atrocities, but who knows what would happen if these countries were independent? War makes bad people criminals just because there is no punishment for them. Who could believe in 1933 that Germans, the nation of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven would be responsible for the 'factory-like' murders of millions?
Czechoslovakia was quite independent between 1945 -1948
Piłsudzki. He knew Hitler was bad and insane. He offered France to Invade Germany in 33 but Frabce refused.
Please, do not get the case of Poles and of Czechs mixed up. The Czechs were treated much better, like the cultural 'Austrians' of old, even receiving social benefits under the Protectorate regime - although being largely atheist and a culturally hussite factor through and through, shunned also by the Poles themselves. In fact, there was not a single neighbouring nation who could get along with the Czechs, especially during the First Czechoslovak Republic era.
As for the Poles, they were just considered an old-time enemy and competing power of the Germans; on the other hand, Czechs were perceived either as more or less loyal 'Austrians' (working class), but also as a commonly dangerous element of left-liberal cultural decadence (intellectual classes).
Let me begin with saying I have absolutely nothing against modern Germans either as individuals or as a nation, and on modern human level can "even" sympathise with tragic fate of wartime civilian Germans as individuals. The modern anti-german ramblings of some Polish politicians annoy me.
However the Germans of WW2 time, as a nation, still got off very easy compared to what they were trying to do in the East. Bah, the worst that happened to them was still mild compared to what they actually DID. Did they really expect to actually murder 20% of neighbouring country and then go on living without any consequences, putting it all on some "evil nazis"?
In Poland they murdered most of intellectuals: teachers, doctors, university professors, lawyers and thus opened up space for degenerate Soviet-imposed "new man" pseudo-elites, basically setting back the nation civilisationally for generations to come, we still see the results.
In Warsaw alone more civilians were murdered during the occupation than all the US human losses in entire war.
They destroyed hundreds of villages murdering all inhabitants. Those two villages in Czechoslovakia became a big deal and a symbol to Czechs and Europe- but things like that were almost everyday in occupied Poland.
And let's not forget that it is those eastern provinces of Germany where the NSDAP got the biggest support, getting absolute majority of votes in 1933 elections.
Even the German anti-nazi "heroes" had a lot on their heads. The modern German darlings of the July 1944 plot?
Stauffenberg called Poles vermin fit only to live under German whip. Schulenburg in his dreamed negotiated peace with Allies "after Hitler is dead" still insisted that entire Poland should be annexed by Germany and Germans can replace the population.
And still so many of the Germans (in the West Germany) could freely whine for decades after the war of the injustices that happened to them and how they lost homeland for no reason - while all they did in Poland was just handwaived as things that happen in war. "Somehow" I suspect that, had they've won, few of them would shed a tear over eastern "subhumans" being completely wiped out as planned.
I think genocidal ethnic cleansing is just must much more than an injustice which can be excused as an emotional revenge. Moreover, I doubt, that all 6 Mio. killed people in Poland were ethnic Poles. In interwar Poland, 3.5 Mio. Jews were counted as a proper ethnicity, but since 1945 they were counted as polish victims, all killed by Germans. Well, hundredthousands of them fled 1939 into Sovjetunion to escape antisemitism and went missing. And there were almost 7 Mio. Ukrainians, Belarussians in interwar Poland, of whom also Mios did not survive the war, killed or starved to death as civilians or soldiers. If one argues within the national framing, these circumstances have to be considered.
The overall issue is if one recognizes a collective guilt of the enemy or not, often connected with whitewashing of ones own nation by patriots without much historical knowledge but filled with white and black nationalism.
As a german, I agree with you and in fact I support the Beneš-decrees in Czechoslovakia and Karl Kreibich, an etchnic german from Prague who defended the Beneš-decrees saying: "Even though some of these measures are cruel and will affect innocent germans, even the most innocent german has to understand, that as long as the sentiment that germans are in any way superior to all other peoples is ingrained into the german psyche, at least a tenth of what the germans have done to the slavic nations has to be paid back to them."
>"what they were trying to do in the east"
They were just trying to reach Moscow and topple Stalin, that's all there is to it. The arguments of "war of extermination" are Soviet Propaganda designed to press gang and force civilians into fighting to the death. Many cities were forbidden from being evacuated (like Stalingrad) leading to civilian casualties to no end, to the delight of Stalin, as a furious confused population would only blame Germans.
Also, Germany invaded the Soviet Union out of fear the huge Soviet Bear and its military might was preparing to invade Europe, and the only weapon a much smaller, weaker country had was the element of surprise. Which they used. It's like a huge school bully, threatening the small quiet kid: The small one can only act by surprise violently, because if he announces himself, he'll be beaten up.
@@rudolfkraffzick642those Jews were Polish citizens. That makes them Polish you dolt
Today, it is common sense, that the crimes, murders and ethnic cleansings of the Nazis are to condemn.
However, how that should somehow justify equally severe crimes, rapes, murders, ethnic cleansing etc. - it boggles the mind. So many people here defending it.
I mean the irony here - taking over a concentration camp and then putting a different ethnicity of victims in the same circumstances. And then defending it as somehow just.
Czechs / Poles and those other nations certainly lost any sort of moral high ground due to their crimes and clearly showed that WW2 wasn't a fight of good vs evil, but evil vs evil.
21:58 again the Atlantic Charter bla, bla, bla....but he was not kind enough to tell that Germans and its allies during almost 6 years massmurdered or worked to death between 5,3 and 6 MILLION Polish citizens. 1/4 of them were children. So genocide that carried out by Germans in occupied Poland is incomparable to atrocities that sadly experienced Germans after the end of war. Just keep in mind that by the end of 1939, so since 1st September 1939 German neighbours together with Einsatzgruppen killed in North, West Poland (Pomerania, Greater Poland and Upper Silesia) up.to 100 000 people -Poles and Jews. And that was only the bloody beginning.....
So save yourself bull*** about Atlantic Charter
This guy literally spent the last 6 years talking about German Atrocities on this channel.
Not to mention he also said that these atrocities are a lesser evil compared to what the Germans did 5 second before talking about the Atlantic Charter
Nobody is denying that the Nazi atrocities were horrific, but the extreme brutality of the revenge carried out on civilians can NEVER be justified.
It was still a blatant violation of the Atlantic Charter. To claim "bUt tHeY dId iT first!" is at best disingenuous due to how irrelevant it is to the central point, but at worst some of the most vile shit I've witnessed come out of a person's head, rivalling the delusional ramblings of a communist.
@@randomclownguy6do you think these people hear that? They’re deaf to anything that isn’t hatred, and they still view themselves as superior to any other group of people that’s filled with hate.
As Czech myself I see this as sad and not right thing, but I totaly understand people that did it. And considerint that many Czech families had to move at first place in 1938. One of those families was family of my grandma that need to leave their house and move when war started. And also she told me that when war ended there was allready living family in their house. Actualy there was some time when both families live in the house until the German family moved away.
I’ll be happy when this senseless murder comes to an end, but I am gonna miss “WaH” in general. I hope to see Spartacus hosting a series in Korea, or just continuing with this channel and the new series on Hitler’s rise to power. Either way, you all clearly put a massive amount of work into this series, and it shows. Thank you for all of your efforts. I know this couldn’t have been easy information to wade through. I commend you for doing it.
Thank you! ❤️
@@spartacus-olsson You might want to consider passing the job on to someone else - this has to be taking a toll on you ... !
"War's tragedy is that it uses man's best to do man's worst." - Harry Emerson Fosdick
*Thousands of Germans were left behind.* I read a couple of years ago about Wolf children in Lithuania, German kids who had nobody left or were simply abandoned. One man was 15-years old and was only saved because a sympathetic Lithuanian mayor convinced the Soviets that he was Lithuanian. He stayed and even served in the Soviet Army in the Caucasus in a mountain artillery unit. Another woman was a 9-year old girl who survived starvation because Russian soldiers took pity on her and gave her food when she snuck into their base, and was later adopted by a Russian family who moved into the area. Few ever saw their parents again, with one man who later reunited with his family being rejected by his own mother who refused to believe he had survived and was an impostor.
Revenge only breeds revenge. Hate only breeds more hate.
Understanding this can help us break the cycle, thank you for watching.
Really sad to see that other commenters have still not realized this after 80+ years…
Seems like the Germans just took it and moved out though, they didn't try and move back in. Smart.
Thanks!
Thank you for the superchat!
“Will this war really end all wars? Can a war really end all war? Will this war bring another war? It's the war that will end all wars”
I try to look at the first and the second half of the 20th century to assess that. Which half, that before, and that after WW2, was there relatively more peace and prosperity? When you talk world war, you’re forced to assess worldwide results, not local.
Despite all the conflicts in the second half of the 20th, I don’t believe any of them became globally active compared to the first half. If the option are more death camps or a decades long Cold War (read: political), I’ll take the latter.
Well, look at it this way:
Before the two World Wars there had been many wars in Europe. After World War 2 there was a long stretch of peace (with the exception of the cold war), at least between the western european countries.
More than 80 years of peace were unheard of before WW2!
@@olivermalter2673 the arguments I commonly hear against that way of assessing are “well, America in Korea and Vietnam”, “Soviets in Afghanistan”, “blah in blah”. Back to, those were smaller, almost local conflicts, the entire world wasn’t engaged in those unlike 2 WORLD wars. 80 years of “relative” WORLD peace.
@@olivermalter2673 'a long stretch' being less than 5 years before Korea.
@@c1ph3rpunk when has the US not been at war?
Thanks for shedding light unto this neglected part of history.
Just an anecdote: Back in 1998 I attended a science meeting at Kudowa in Poland, and went out to a café with some friends. We were concerned about how we would communicate. One of my friends used German, and there was no problem. Then it knocked me this was Silesia, I should have remembered... Afterwards I was confident to use German at the train station on the border with the Czeck Republic.
I hope that next week you will also have some time to tell the tale of the events in Yugoslavia, both regarding the Danube Germans in Slavonia and Vojvodina and the Italians in Istria, Rijeka and Zadar. That's a very dark chapter that rarely gets mentioned outside of ex-Yugoslavia and Italy.
Great idea but the tale should not start in 1945
they have several videos covering the yugoslav front already, so no, they would not be starting in 1945
1939 is also late. Even between 2 wars is late for this topic
Exactly!
Two of my great grandparents, ethnic Germans, were among those who died after being expelled from Romania after World War II.
Actually really like The content that you produce It's interesting and it's kind of fun to me mid-thirties and I still think to myself I wish school would have been a little more fun or a little more engaging, like your content is. This doesn't just go for this video It goes for all of your content keep up the good work man
Thank you for the very lovely comment, if you like what we do we also have another channel covering the Korean War: www.youtube.com/@TheKoreanWarbyIndyNeidell
So sad. The war is over but the hate and suffering continues
Remembering these stories helps us strive for a more understanding and compassionate world. Thanks for watching.
@@WorldWarTwo thanks for the reply and the positive message. It is so depressing when you read comments that are gleeful or justify the horror. We need more positivity and understanding in the world.
@@alexandermalinowski4277 no. The ethnic cleansing of German speakers only happened after Germany surrendered . The war was officially over but the violence continued.
@@theirishshane womp womp I don't see you crying for the millions of victims left by Germany.. win next time maybe you'll stop crying then.
@@A1Kirazz #notaargument it is not a competition. You can still show sympathy and compassion to German civilians being killed and persecuted as well as victims of Hitlers government.
The end of WWII is almost as terrible as the war itself for both the civilian population and returning POWs. Human hatred is truly a terrible thing. My paternal grandparents were first generation German born in the US. My grandfather said his parents emigrated to the US to escape constant war in Europe.
For many Poles ww2 ended in 1963 when the last Doomed Soldiers (members of anti-communist resistance forces) died.
Hatred can have devastating effects. The end of WWII did bring immense hardship for many, never forget.
I had many German relatives who left Germany after WW1 also to escape European wars. A great uncle used to say “you put a band behind any group of Germans and they think they are soldiers.
The author of the above film is not honest, because he talks about German crimes in Poland in the years 1939-1945 superficially, without going into details, and about the suffering of "ordinary Germans" a lot and colorfully, illustrating with individual stories to enhance the effect. Not much about the displacement of Poles from the territories incorporated into the Third Reich, nothing about mass executions, or about the forced deportations of Poles to work in Germany (at the age of 12, my father, along with his grandmother, was sent to work on a farm somewhere near the Swiss border, along with my great-grandmother, his 16-year-old brother was taken to a factory somewhere in eastern Germany earlier).
The author of the film talks about humanism and the Atlantic Charter, but Poles under German occupation were quite officially subhumans (untermenschen) and had no rights (e.g. in 1939, secondary education for Poles was closed - only 6 grades of primary school and that's it), in contrast to their neighbors, who declared themselves Germans and these Germans somehow did not mind it much, on the contrary - too many accepted it and assumed that they belonged to the "master race" (Herrenvolk). After 1945, it turned out that the crimes were always committed by the mythical Nazis, and "ordinary Germans" never had anything to do with them, at most they "carried out orders", but without inner conviction. Certainly.
In most historical situations I would agree. But in this case it can be assumed we all know what Germany did in WWII. Every other documentary tells us about their crimes. You have to be living under a rock to not know about the holocaust or some of the nazi transgressions in Poland.
Therefore I don't think a documentary on the suffering Germans went through at the end needs to repeat all that content in detail. We already know it, so it can just briefly mention it and move on.
For lesser known conflicts this would be disingenuous though.
You know that's only one part of whole series about atrocities of WW2? there are other "episodes" where Sparty is talking about details during the war
And yet Neo Nazism movement is quite strong in Poland,and I see many Europeans calling Hitler as saviour of white race
@thomasturski2837
As I'm sure you can tell from the title of this video, it's number 138 in a series of War against Humanity. It is a series about the many many crimes that happened in WW2 to go along with a general world war 2 series that focused more on the military side. This was done because the vast amount of things done to civilians in this war obviously actually really mattered as well. As such the reason that many parts of what happened to the Polish in 1939-1945 are only mentioned briefly here, is because they are mentioned in far greater detail in many of the other videos. The Polish deportations, mass executions and far more yet are laid out in far more detail then you'll probably find near anywhere else in video format. Of course it also covers many other quite unpleasant things in other countries as well though. Like the Soviets and Japanese.
As such, this isn't some kind of slanted reporting, but just a continuation of noting all the terrible things that happened to everyone through out the war. With the current reporting now increasingly reaching the happenings at the very end of the war and beyond now. Thus it's talking about the deportations because that is where they now are in the timeline. And they are discussing how the war made everyone act ever more brutally against each other at the end. It's not a pleasant image to look at for anyone really, to see how nations that started with principles saying they wouldn't do such things eventually due to the countless suffering turned blind eyes or did some terrible things of their own for various reasons.
If you want to argue that Germany was far worse in this then anything Poland did in retribution though, well in the previous episodes you would find quite enormous amounts of evidence for such a position. Even in this video they after all say that in comparison it's clearly less bad after all. It's the kind of obvious conclusion if one wanted to make such a comparison.
But even so, it is still yet another painful thing that happened to many people, and as they noted in this video, the Germans didn't give much choice to anyone they decided to call German. You either agreed you were German up or got sent to the concentration camp. So it's unfortunate probably many a person who were just trying to survive got forced in to this position of getting caught up in yet one more retribution.
I hope this clarifies more where the author of this video was actually coming from.
Stop whining. The fate of Polish civilians was already covered extensively in previous videos, but perhaps you're too stupid to check.
This is a part of WWII history that receives very little notice. My grandfather was originally from Breslau. He married my grandmother (an American citizen) in the 1920s and settled in Berlin. A few years later he emigrated from Germany to America. In 1937 they returned to Germany with my father, who was eight years old at the time. Their purpose was to meet with and advise the rest of his extended family to leave Germany as soon as possible, regardless of what had to be left behind. This idea was met with some resistance, but eventually all but one did so (thus sealing her fate). Granddaddy helped coordinate their immigration into the USA, some barely making it out of Germany with their lives. Had they remained in Berlin or Breslau, I doubt any would have survived the war. Had they survived the war, I can't imagine what would have become of those from Breslau after the Soviets and Poles took over in 1945. There but for the grace of God . . .
Look for photos of "Festung Breslau" and what Germands did there to Germans. When Poles took over city ruins only corps eating rats and bugs left there.
Ilu polaków zgineło przez niemców ty kurwo
To wy zaczeliście wojne chcieliście wojny totalnej to ją dostaliście
@@vesemirbozy1593 Not my family. They were Jewish.
@@vesemirbozy1593They were Jewish, I mean if it was total war, the poles get remmed the hardest after the war. Basically became a Russian political bitch for 40 years, one of the worst polish nightmares came true
My high school German teacher survived the Czech camps for Germans after the war, he was very young. Thankfully, they had American relatives who were able to send some money to get them safe food, and then to get them to America.
Germans: We have to secure eastern Europe for us!
Slavs: Uno reverse card
Still Lidl is everywhere...
Overall it was all awful. However we are talking about German soldiers, who rifle butted kids for fun. At the very least, Slavs allowed them to leave.
Funny comment about making fun of the crimes of Socialism and Collectivism. You are insanely funny.
And look at you now. Your countries are absolutely poor.
@@radicalesotericcentrist
Because we didn't suck america's d* to send us money after the war))). We had to rebuild alone. Even better the Soviet Union was stealing money from all satellite countries the whole time. But now we are growing slowly but surely every year. Btw how are your immigrants from 3rd world?
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
In many cases, it was rather 'a ripped eye for a piece of sugar' - such as in Bohemia, where the Czech working class experienced any kind of social system whatsoever for the first time in their history during the Protectorate era, not knowing this kind of 'Prussian/Bismarckian innovation' under the Austrian Empire nor under the First Czechoslovak Republic.
Sadly it seems like a lot of today’s Eastern Europeans have still not realized this, judging from the comments section…
Don’t tell that to someone who’s upset, they might prove you right and hurt you for disagreeing with them
No mention of the Soviet annexation of Trans-Carpathia? Unlike Poland, Czechoslovakia got no compensation for territory it lost.
Hey when your a Russian political bitch basically, you gotta do what daddy says in a nutshell
Did you won or lost the war?
It got a few villages from Hungary, and it effectively colonised areas inhabited by Germans and Hungarians before the war.
Because it was completely worthless piece of land, i dont even know why soviets took it in first place.
A war crime is a war crime no matter what flag you fly under.
A moralist with an Enclave flag?
@@tefky7964 history is messy
While my direct ancestors from Bohemia left for Vienna already late in the 19th century, their relatives who stayed behind were forced to move. As far as I know, they were all from villages and towns close to the border, but that is the reason I have distant relatives in Germany today.
While the Nazis started this war and many of the "Volksdeutsche" saw it positive for their status, so many were just ordinary people who did fight - but not because they were Nazis, but because they were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. And then they lost everything, which makes me even more angry, that so many real war criminals could escape or got light sentences and many could live a peaceful life at their homes after the 1950s, eg. Albert Kesselring.
And while I acknowledge, that the towns and villages, where my ancestors lived, have been ethnically cleaned, I don't have hard feelings about it. Yes, another crime happened after the war, but it was a direct reaction to it. And I am glad, that after the war and especially after 1989 there were no hard feelings between the governments anymore, they mostly decided to accept what had happened. West-Germany never really accepted the new Polish border, but Helmut Kohl finally did in writing and this was the possibility to have good relations in Europe. I am glad, that I can visit the places, where my ancestors lived and that I can see with my own eyes where they lived. And have no hard feelings that I do not find relatives there anymore.
It was more complicated in the areas of mixed identity. Gunter Grass - German Kashubian great writer who admitted that he had joint SS... Another Kashubian was Józef Tusk who is the grandfather of the current Polish prime minister Donald Tusk. Józef Tusk was Polish activist in the Free City of Gdansk in the inter-war period , perecuted by Germans during WW2 and forced to fight in Whermacht, then escaped and joint Polish Army in the West..
tries to plead not guildy while quoting nazi. Good job. now face the deportation train.
All this ethnic turmoil and the clash with national borders still goes on in Europe. Just think about Spain with the Basques and Catalonia. Then there is the recurrence, periodically, in Belgium between French speakers and the Dutch speakers. Of course, you have the UK with its four "ethnicities" always in turmoil. Just recently Orban of Hungary was in Ukraine and brought up the issue of the Hungarian speaking minority in that country.
This is a large part of the reason that Europe has been one of the most blood-soaked places on earth for centuries.
The Swiss seem to be able to deal with the situation, but they are an outlier.
Initially, the leaders of Czechoslovakia wanted their country to be like Switerzland. The other country they were trying to emulate was the USA.
@@motherlesschild102 That would have been good. They could have been a beacon to other countries in Europe. Now they are two countries.
@@motherlesschild102 actually for a long time even after the initial set up of czechoslovakia the central government upheld their strict rules of equality among ethnicities tensions still rose due to outer region officials being dick heads
Pretty much the fate of my maternal grandparents. My Grandpa and his family were expulsed from Hungary while my Grandmother and her family were expulsed from Silesia. And as traumatic as that event may have been it's kinda strange when you realize that whithout it my mother and by extension I myself likely wouldn't exist.
Thank you for everything you do! Also, thank you for pronouncing Roosevelt's name correctly- it blows my mind how many Europeans don't.
I heard that during fall/winter of 1945, millions of Germans were moved out of Greater Germany and occupied territories. Not sure how many died… like to know the answer.
Around half a million died
@ I heard 5 million died but that was somebody screaming that nobody cared about Germans just after the War.
@@LegIIAVGCA Definitely not true, out of 7-8 million Germans that got expelled from Poland, around half a million died
■ APRIL 1945, not only Lusatian Neisse have POLISH 2nd Army reached but furthermore Spree/Spréva river as well.
■ MOST mighty rulers of 13th century POLAND:
* Henry the Bearded
* Henry the Pious
* Henry Probus
They all ruled Polish territories, living in Southwest of current Poland in the land that they never imagined would be conquered by the Prussian kingdom 400-something years later and renamed "Germany" 100 years later. When these Henrys walked the earth, their Piast dynasty held Polish regions including Lower and Upper Silesia in their Piast hands for about 300 years, plus they ruled the Duchy of Legnica until 1675.
I'm not sure about relocation though. I can't possibly imagine how it would be to live as a Pole in same town with people who elected individuals who sent your family to concentration camps...
Did they all do that though? Or did many of “them” also end up in concentration camps until they accepted the “gift” of German citizenship?
@@spartacus-olssonyes gross majority of Germans were Nazi supporters. Only when front started to collapse, some sought to think it over…
@@spartacus-olsson….. dude this is just a fact though not every german voted for the nazis they were democratically elected
In 1950's International Red Cross was still trying to locate over 30.000 volksdeutsche children that were stolen by Yugoslav authorities
@Mergor_X Tako je brate zato je I prosla Kako narod ( U Srbiji) Kaze " U tri lepe picke materine" ...I Neka je otisla...Steta sto se nije mogla reformirat ili rasturit bez krvi jerbo je opet nevin narod platio svaki ceh.
@Mergor_X Banditi..zakrvili su narod bez veze a da sakriju svoj kriminal
@Mergor_X very sick commie bastards
In the war against humanity, there is no hierarchy of human suffering, only countries and nations seeing who can go lower themselves the lowest in the barrel to the level of their adversaries by doing the same actions, making the wheel of hate already spinning so fast before turning some more.
Skill issue
My grandauntie Hildegarda was a Moravian German but she never complained about being expelled from CZ. She realised what Germans did to Czechs not only.during the WW2.
We have a small memorial of the camp where the Germans were held and executed often without even a trial. When I was like maybe 9 or 10 we went past it with my dad. He told me that if someone does something horrible to you. And you do something horrible to them in return you're no better than the one who harmed you.
Of course as an child I was rather confused by that. But recently I came across by that memorial by chance... Forgiveness is the most powerful thing anyone can do. And as an Hultschiner. I forgive the Czechs and Poles.
What a beautiful message from your father, thank you for sharing.
You have nothing to forgive Poles... You should beg them for forgiveness
In Czechoslovakia,the expulsion was somehwat brought upon by the state. The Benes decrets declared the Germans' property seized and them to be expelled. Also,the expulsion was not carried out by normal people. It was carried out by the armed forces,which are a state organisation. Without doubt,the Germans'atrocities were bigger and on a greater level. But their expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia was not done individually,it was organized and carried out by mostly state organs.
@@heermannmorrerNo the Czech expulsion was carried by civilians. Thats why even Jews were deported. And if the Bohemians were deported why not the slovaks? Which were the greater evil of the three?
@@fabianauer1986 Uhh,again,the Benes decrets. He was the literal leader of the country. Also, police and military were present,as being confirmed by eyewitnesses. For example,the Usti nad Labem massacre. Regarding the role of Slovaks,i cannot and will not say anything.
Germans literally choose nazism, started terrible war, committed terrible attrocities. And at the end they payed the price. I really would like to feel compasion towards expelled, but then i think about Austchwitz and I simply can't.
I mean most Germans didn’t have a lot of choices, you got economic turmoil, you got three choices, moderates, communists, and right wingers. Moderates have no confidence from the people and failed them countless times. Communists are hated by a lot of people. Basically so many factors went to them being voted
That's a massive oversimplification of rhe political climate leading up to ww2.
"A minority of germans operated brutal slave camps, so that means they all deserve to be killed, raped, or death marched". It doesn't make it.
Most Germans didn't even know about the concentration camps until after the war
@@chadwick8193 Of course, they had no idea of anything wrong. Vanishing neighbouring Jews and G. antinacists - nothing, assault of other countries - nothing, presence of quite a lot wehrmacht soldiers by mass murdering - nothing. Such a bad luck....
Germans chose whichever national, anti-Versailles movement was around at that time; the Braunau guy and his particular brand of national anti-Communism was just the most popular and well funded. That's the end of the story, basically.
@@petrcervenka3148 Atheist pan-slavic deranged ramblings.. at least, the Sudeten Germans were still a proper Catholic ethnic group at that time, like the Austrians, while Czechs were rabid atheists or revolutionary hussite sectarian fanatics even in the 1920s. The First Czechoslovak Republic was a den of left-liberal cultural destruction in Central Europe.
As a Czech, I'd like to point out several things:
The expulsions, especially their "wild" part right after the end of the war, were in many cases criminal and totally deserve condemnation. I'd just like to put it in some context: during 1938, the Sudetengerman Freikorps basically started an armed insurrection in the border regions with ambushing of police stations, border guards, post offices etc. 90% or so of Sudeten Germans voted for Henlein in elections that took place in 38. Completely free elections might I add. After the Munich conference, Germans likewise expulsed approximately 750 thousand Czechs from Sudetenland into wha was left from Czechoslovakia. So eventhough I don't like the idea of collective responsibility, it's not that hard to see why a lot of people saw it that way at that time and after all that happened between 1938 and 1945.
Again, the violence and killing that happened was criminal and I do not want to say that it didn't happen or find some excuses for it. There are non. But it has to be said that in the end this solved the centuries-long conflict that plagued this country and Czech-German relations are now possibly at the very best they ever were (basically we don't give a shit about each other except trading and economic ties).
Plus one thing (and don't get me too serious on this one, I know it was brutal and those people lost everything etc): most of Sudeten Germans ended up living their lives in West Germany and Austria. Free prosperous countries. Unlike the communist shithole we turned into. I don't think many would want to settle back being asked in e.g. 1975...
Czechoslovakia had such massive potential to be a successful multiethnic nation unfortunately people are stupid and gullible
Voting for SDP in 1938 is not that relevant. It has autonomy in its agenda (nothing criminal). 170 thousand people Left Sudetenland in 1938 an this number includes German SDP opponents and Jews and of course many of those were government employees and their families
They most likely wanted autonomy, any sizable minority would want what’s within their interests. Wanting some rights guaranteed is bare minimum, or you become the Kurds lol.
Rather, it was the Czechs who started an insurrection in autumn 1918; even forcing their 'national revolution' to the populations like Sudeten Germans, Hungarians and also many Slovaks, who did not give a damn about their hussite fanatic sectarianism.
Btw why were the Slovaks 'allowed' to take up arms against their own state in 1944, whilst the Sudeten Germans were not allowed to do the same against the state they hated and never wanted to be part of in the first place?
Many Czech people fled in 1968 over the same roads in direction west and north. Because they arrived when the economy was doing well, such early arrivals did well and are better off today than those who left after 1990.
The level of tribalism that continues to plague Humanity to this day disgusts me, ethnic tribalism, religious tribalism, political tribalism, often on a daily basis. Will the majority of us ever see ourselves first as what we really are, a vast extended family, a planet-wide community? I used to think so, but I don't anymore.
Humans are animals not some damm angels, so of course we act as animals and build everything upon animal basics.
Even in your utopia there still would be wars and crimes.
Only way for peace would be turning humans into ants like beings without free will and opinion, obeying orders of single person
😂😂, this is one of the biggest lie people tell themselves I ever encountered
The only allowed tribalism is jewish tribalism, the other tribalism are banned.
@@piotrkozaczewski9511 Spoken like a racist.
@@captainyossarian388 Don't terrorize white people with this pejorative, culturally jewish nonsense, he said truth.
I would like to make some remarks to the intro to this video, to put itinto context.
Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia was inhumane, and in many cases clearly criminal, no doubt about that.
But in May 1938, shortly before Munich crisis, during municipal elections Sudetendeutche Partei aligned with Nazis (and later merged into NSDAP) got 89,87% German votes (rest voted for social democrats). When the Hitler´s star was rising they were eager to scream "Heim ins Reich" and "Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer". And it was after Kristalnacht, after Night of the Long Knives and many other Nazi political crimes when they certainly should and could know better. But they still turned against the liberal-democratic state whichguaranteed them civil rights, ability to study in their own language, right to establish their own clubs, civil associations, businesses, political parties etc. And I do not claim that Czechoslovakia was paradise on the Earth, and there certainly was some petty discrimination against Germans especially if they wanted to make career as a public officials, but no doubt they had more rights than in the Nazis regime (Mann stated it precisely when he wrote after Anschluss, that Czechoslovakia is last state in Central Europe where German can live freely).
But after the war they actively helped to start, after the rationing, conscriptions to the Wehrmacht, after Holocaust they suddenly discovered that many of them were in fact anti Nazi from the start? And 90% voted pro Nazi by accident, no big deal, nothing to see here, carry on... Reminds me of East Germany - of course none of East Germans did anything bad to the Jews or served in Wehrmacht. No, no all Nazis were in the West. Sorry but this story is not completely true.
And sad truth is that despite great suffering and many criminal acts during expulsion nowadays the relationship between Czech republic and Poland on one side and Germany on the other is not bothered by minority rights issues at all.
In the contrast originally there was also plan to expel Hungarians from Czechoslovakia, but that never happened (there was only small scale voluntary population exchange) And nowadays 80 years later Hungarian politician casually provoke its neighbours like when Viktor Orban publicly says that 5th generation after Trianon will change everything, or when Jozsef Antall back in 1990 declared that he wants to be prime minister of 15 million Hungarians.
In conclusion that expulsion was criminal, barbaric and inhumane, but in the end solved a lot. And under no circumstances, should not be repeated anywhere else...
Antall said in spirit, it's Orbán who is ambiguous.
Even Putin is waging war because Russian minorities are "threatened" but it's plain lie in order to pursuit an imperialistic agenda. The resolution of conflicts in Europe didn't come through erasing minorities but changing foreign politics among the states. Inception of EU, shared guarantees and Rights has cooled the tension in public that nurtured that kind of muscular approach to ethnic questions.
Not really. Votes for the SDP for municipal election did not really mean much. It was not a time of mass media a you cannot blame people for wanting autonomy/independence. German could stay the same way they stayed in France, Holland, Italy...Hungarian issue in Slovakia is now practically nonexistent. The issue with Hungary is specifically tied to the current Hungarian government and it relates to the Trianonif anything
@@pepenp At that time there already were international news agencies, international press, radio and something you could call international public opinion. Sorry to break it to you, but mass media did not start with the internet. They are more like 150 years old.
And what do you mean that voting in the municipal election did not mean much? In the time of international crisis when dictator of the neighbouring country makes claim on your territory voting for the local party which supports his position is a strong signal internally and also internationally. Especially if that party gets almost 90% of german votes.
I do not blame them for wanting autonomy and independence. I blame them for trading functional democracy (that does not mean ideal) for well proven dictaroship. And when comes time to bear consequences of past decisions suddenly everyone was anti Nazi...
And to the last point "issue with Hungary is specifically tied to the current Hungarian government and it relates to the Trianonif anything". Same was true in 2013 in relations between Russia and Ukraine. Minority issues in Donbass were non-existent and locat got along well and transfer of administration of Crimea under Ukraine was long forgotten thing from 1950s. And you are probably aware where are we now in 2024... To be tied to the current government and some long gone treaty is plenty enough...
@@pepenp It showed how many Sudeten Germans supported the Nazis. In 1938 almost every household had a radio. They could have been informed very well about what is going on they just chose not to. They all listened to Hitler and closed their ears to anything else.
I come from a settler nation. Everybody’s ancestors come from somewhere else. Europe was settled too… but it happened far enough in the past for food to forget about it
Tam gdzie Niemiec postawo nogę, to już jest jego. Co za mentalność. Polskie ziemie zachodnie, to ziemie odzyskane. Całe Niemcy wschodnie są położone na ziemiach słowiańskich. Nazwa Berlin, Lipsk, Lubeka, Drezno i tysiące innych to nazwy słowiańskie a nie germańskie.
@@dusansuhajda6273 Those territories were originally inhabited by Celts, then invaded by Germanic tribes from Denmark but too dumb and primitive to establish any towns, over time after domestication and christianization throughout history copying Jews, Romans and Greeks you managed to stabilize some civilization lol
Polish nobility was never of Asiatic origin, it was a myth. Chaos and barbarism are what characterize German society today, your cultural legacy.
@@dusansuhajda6273 well, the russians certainly knew how to kick the shit out of the germans
and you must be mentally retarded if you think concentration camps are a sign of a superior culture
germans are huns, and they were mongols last time i checked
Polish people would never try to conquer their neighbors or believed themselves to have a right to territory that wasn’t theirs, nope it’s never happened. Poles are perfect and Germans bad, right? Go back to your goblin cave in Łódź
I don't support these kinds of atrocities but in this case, we need to remember the context of why they happened. The Nazis had a plan to mass murder and enslave the people of Eastern Europe. Many of these Germans were there as part of the Nazi's colonial and genocidal project and supported it.
This situation very much reminds me of the Haitian slave rebellion or violence by native peoples against colonialism. Obviously, violence, particularly against civilians, is wrong and should be avoided even if the group committing this violence were previously oppressed. However, the burden is ultimately upon the colonisers to end the violence. They are the ones who started it and have the power to end it at any time. Whatever cycle of violence that occurs or hatred is ultimately their fault.
I say this because certain people are going to use this event to try and minimise the evil of the Nazis. Just like how some people will use violence by colonised people and rebelling slaves as a means to minimise the the evils of slavery and colonialism by framing it as a "both sides" issue. However, whether it is the French in Haiti, the British in India, the US against Native Americans or in this case the Nazis in Eastern Europe, it is ultimately they that bare responsibility of the blood shed and destruction that happens.
"colonizers" is such a loaded word. Africans in Haiti are just as much colonizers these days as the Europeans were. Stop trying to frame everything as oppressed vs oppressor.
In these instances "responsibility" is not a binary "all or nothing thing". Real life so complex and messy that humans are always trying to simplify it. Tragedy ensues.
@@motherlesschild102 in most cases both the responsible and victims are all long gone so assigning blame is a fruitless effort. Understanding so that another cycle can't start is a much better use of our time.
@@matt291 Not true. Those africans were brought there, did not organize migration and settlement on their own.
@@matt291Yeah they all willingly hopped on the slave ships for back breaking sugar plantation work with sky high mortality rates!
These crimes committed toward Germans were terrible but not surprising. Even though some might see it as evil done in the name of historical injustices or previous relations build on ethnic roots i kinda see stronger and more of the basic human instinct getting loose. These peoples were tortured, killed and victimized by Nazis for years. Living in constant fear for wellbeing of your loved ones and they lived like that minute after minute, day after day for years. Fear building up. Once they've lost that fear they've lost what we consider humanity and rage overcame them. Crimes were committed and even though evil is evil and we shouldn't look for lesser or greater evil, these people were pushed far beyond their limits and their basic instinct came to surface. Lesson here is that even though most of these Germans were innocent as far as Nazis crimes goes they did nothing to fight or to stop them. After the war world saw them as one and same. If we let our corrupted or evil governments to build up hate and prepare for wrongdoings, when time for retribution comes, we might end up like these Germans. Even if we don't support our representatives.Never forget.
underrated comment
Regardless of morality of such undertaking, they were right that national unity does bring harmony. There are plenty examples of that.
We had relatives from East prussia in the 80`s I found always extremely conservative, a bit bitter and grumpy.
When I visited grandma(mother´s side) in the "Ostpreußenverein" and found a newspaper which headlines read
"Hitlers Präventivkrieg im Osten" (Hitlers preventive war) that confirmed my prejudices.
At school we were vigorously reminded of the crimes of the 3rd Reich every year
and and I knew the Nazis had no small support in former Eastern Prussia back in the day.
In these circumstances I began to loathe my relatives from the east prussian side
and embraced those ones from the other(from my father´s side from Bremen).
Today I don´t condone their actions or election choices, but I begin to undestand (partially through this series)
how much they probably have suffered in return and wonder if I would´t be depressed or bitter after all what happened.
It would have taken super-human moral courage for the countries of eastern Europe to allow their German minorities to remain after what the non-Germans had gone through. It really was a case of the Nazis sowing the whirlwind, hell, a hurricane of years duration, and the ethnic German minorities to reap a bitter, but qualitatively different wind. As it was, the 'Slavic' people were vastly more forgiving than the German peoples had been and they should get one hell of a lot of credit for that. Getting on one's high horse when one is asking people to be saints is rankest self-righteousness. BTW, the title of "Slavic Revenge" makes it seem like revenge flowed out of their nature as Slavs. Anti-Slavism much?
Czechoslovakia was one of the countries that were the least affected by the war. Comparable;e to western occupied countries witheven less war damage..
@@pepenpWe weren't affected that much by the war itself, but we got under occupation mostly thanks to local german traitors, who were also more than happy to kick out or kill all non-germans from Sudetenland. When those people got the chance to return to Sudetenland after the war they also remembered why they had to leave in the first place ...
Many of those countries, prior to post-WWI independence, had been part of German speaking empires. Poland mostly the German Empire (and bits of Russia though to my understanding it was more of a nice-to-have asset to Russia than an integral part of the country the way Silesia and eastern Prussia was to Germany) and Czechoslovakia the Austro Hungarian Empire (confusingly for an outsider Czechia was held by the Austrians and Slovakia by the Hungarians). So in particular Czechia and Poland contained large German speaking minorities who had lived there for many many years and it was a sensitive thing to suddenly be on the other end of the table and now be ruled by Polish and Czech governments speaking their own language. Especially if those German minorities saw Versailles which caused this as purely victor's justice aimed at suppressing the countries they had been part of until recently. The existence of the Soviets gave some motivation to band together especially in the beginning but that didn't last. Czechoslovakia especially tried to walk the tricky balancing of respecting the German minority, but this was then exploited by both the Sudeten locals and by the Nazis in Germany.
Then on top of being invaded with the collaboration of the local Germans, you the Czechoslovak or Pole are treated worse under this new Nazi occupation than you ever were under German rule in the old days before independence--being a second class citizen vs being rounded up and shot summarily. The well was quite poisoned after all of that, and the Soviets were happy to have more homogenized satellites so they didn't object.
Apart from the Poles and Serbs, no non-Jewish and non-Romani ethnic group or nation in the non-Soviet areas of Eastern Europe could claim to be hated or targeted by the Germans as a whole. Compared to the Netherlands, the 'loyal', Austrian-minded Czechs (esp. the working class) were actually pretty well off during the Protectorate era, as far as the social security system went..
The biggest bluff was how the Czechs managed to convince the world how 'greatly' they supposedly suffered throughout the centuries.
@@dusansuhajda6273 We don't claim that we suffered throughout centuries.
The result of WW2 for Poland was that it became the most ethnically homogenous it has been since the early High Middle Ages. A lot of Poles were also forcefully resetteled from the Eastern Borderlands to the Western Borderlands. There is quite a lot of posters from early communist era that reference the Piast rule over Western Pomerania or Silesia & the Polishness of the so called Regained Lands. There were actually concentration camps for the Germans (often repourpused N*zi camps) as well as non-communist Poles during the Stalinist era in Poland which is often ommited in Polish history lessons.
@@arturart2480 Me and my people? I'm Polish from Podlasie, born and bred. 💀
I did not learn about the post-war concentration camps at school or about people like Salomon Morel. I also never claimed that those were as bad as the German death camps. I was just descrribing what happened in relation to the borders changing and forced resetelmemt.
@@TheGeneralGrievous19 Morel, the double standard
Thank you for the lesson.
Thank you for watching.
This is one of those times when I need something to "restore my faith in humanity" .............
Benes wasn't againts just germans, he deported like 40 000 hungarians too.
So he was merely just racist, got it.
The time when Benes was based
After some time they returned. So what's the problem? Check out modern Slovakia. 450,000 Hungarians still live there. By your logic, there will be not a single Hungarian in former Czechoslovakia (Slovakia).
@@fixative2866 I didn't suggest what you wrote to be fair. I just wrote a historical data from that era. Carpathian Basin was and always will be a home for many etnicities like slovaks, swabians, hungarians etc. etc. which is nice and should always stay it like this.
@@rafakrzentowski9549 Beneš was based in a land called Bloody Freemasonia, at that.
My mother in law was originally from Silesia. She met my father in law in Berlin right after the war. While he'd walked ahead of the Russians and was caught by them soon after meeting lizbette, she was forced from her home in Poland and wound up in East Berlin.
At least I think that's the order of events. Somethin like that anyway
I read a book about the agreement of the Allies at Yalta to return all citizens to their "home countries." and how soviet prisoners in Britain were shipped to russia, where they were all machine gunned immediately. The sailors said this went on for days.
"where they were all machine gunned immediately."
Let Me Guess Nikolay Tolstoy " Victims Of Yalta" AKA "Uncritical Regurgitation of Nazi Collaborators Anti Communist Ramblings"
@@konstantinkelekhsaev302Okay comrade, we get it, everybody who isn't a communist is a Nazi to you.
Just 46 years and the other half of Europe can be free
and then another 25-30 years from that point until fascism rears its ugly head in europe once more.
Thanks for telling us about this history, so many years later things don't seem to be improving in the world.❤
It was easy for British and Americans to judge on these deportations when there were not Geman boots on their soil.
Also those Germans outside Germany could be used for anti soviet politic matters.
@@alexandermalinowski4277 you have population on certain teritory that is more aligned with the west than the east. From voting machine to the instability creator.
So you're basically saying that the mass murder of civilians is justifiable as legitimate revenge?
@@tancreddehauteville764 eye for an eye.
Its hard to understand when you are not directly affected
@@siux94 An eye for an eye leaves the world blind. It’s about stopping the cycle of violence and learning to live together.
And I say that as part of an ethnic group which has mostly been on the receiving end of history. As someone who has indeed been directly affected.
@@kkang2828 Its easy to be nice and wise after 80 years of peace.
The atrocities are made by bad people and every country has them. It the good people that we all should be keep giving support for because they make the difference, not race, color, nationality or prejudgement.
No, atrocities are done by good people who have been mistreated long enough. Besides, there are no really any good or bad people. There's just people. Everyone has a good and a bad side.
@@jancyraniakhow small minded. You actually think that the only atrocities are the ones committed by victims who lash out? Your half assed sense of morals is just a justification for bad behavior
The term "Recovered Territories" (Polish: "Ziemie Odzyskane"), how postwar Poland called the former East German (Prussian) areas ("ehemalige deutsche Ostgebiete") that were annexed to Poland after WW II, was unknown to me until 2 weeks ago, when I checked Polish stamps in a catalogue. Neither did I understand "Marriage to the Sea", which meant the access of Poland to the Baltic Sea (which they had between the wars as "Polish Corridor") after WW II.
While many families had many relatives that were expelled, there were others who were lucky enough not to live that far in the German East (Prussia). In my family there is only one member who was on the "trek" as a child. I heard about her story only one time, and only some few snippets.
The reception of the German refugees in the remaining Western parts of Germany was "mixed". Some people helped, but there are many stories how ice-cold and merciless these refugees were treated by their "fellow countrymen" - especially when they had "the wrong religion" (Prussian Protestants clashing with West German Catholics). On top of this, psychological effects like trauma etc were literally unknown as concepts to common people. Those who lamented were told "You survived, so what more do You want?!". Only some 50 years later people started discovering that topic ...
I wonder if this channel will spend some time on post-WW II time until 1945, it would depict the general chaos. The economic miracle (in the West) came only after 1950 with the Korea boom - which might be a good link between this gigantic series with the new one that Indy started already.
the term recovered may work for Silesia and Pomerania but it most certainly does not work for East Prussia that was never Polish but in fact had belonged to the Baltic Prussian people - the actual original Prussians .
@@Lukejb2ButterworthPoland used Teutonic Order to show Germans as colonizers in that area as well(ignoring fact that Ducy of Mazovia fought against prussian natives too xD)
@@Lukejb2Butterworth I know the term is kinda bizarre, but that is history as well all along. Today Poland calls them "regained" and Germany calls them "lost" - cough... - "former German territories". At least, politically, there is no more will for any revanchism anymore, because the people who were refugees had by large died by now. And _nobody_ wants to have Kaliningrad back.
@@alexandermalinowski4277 what was most astonishing to me about this term was how "poetic" or "romantic" it was. I was completely clueless when I read it the first time in the Polish wikipedia.
@@funtecstudiovideos4102 but its not native Polish territory , the times they ruled were only as colonizers like the Germans so no East Prussia is not recovered land
Cruelty is an integral part of human nature and it just requires a spark to unleash it. The spark can be in form of a person or à situation
Just spent some time in northern Poland and Germany and you can still see so many consequences of the war and what happened afterwards.
such as?
Terrible, just terrible. No crime equals out another one. But does anyone really believe that something different would happen? Germany did treat the Slaves like absolut dogshit and murdered millions of them. Could anyone just move back to life before the war? Could anyone live next to the people who just yesterday wanted you to be exterminated in the name of living space? Don´t get me wrong, that´s in no way a defense. I just don´t see any way a prewar situation would come without deportations. Some of my family was expelled from Königsberg, modern day Kaliningrad and I feel with them. They were children at that time and yeah they might be more or less be pro Nazi, but again they were children. They didn´t murder anyone. They did nothing besides fleeing from Soviet tanks. It´s a horrible story.
Skill issue
Britain: This is going to be the largest population transfer ... :(
Also, Britain: The largest population transfer ever... so far :)
Indians: :(
Yeees, we Humans have a long tradition of looking a the world from our nostril. Some of us even more than others 😞
The one in India is ranked at #2. The German one still comes out on top, especially since it was even more so a FORCED migration, and it only went in one direction (to Germany only), as opposed to both ways (Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan, Muslims fled India).