Demographic estimates of the German exodus from Eastern Europe are still a controversial topic.

Estimates of the number of displaced Germans vary in the range of 13.5-16.5 million.

Estimates of total deaths of German civilians have ranged from as low as 500,000 to as high as 3 million. The "standard" figure given is 2 million which is based on a "population balance" computation based on data compiled by the Federal Statistics Office (Statistisches Bundesamt). In recent years, however, this figure has come under increasing criticism, as some studies by historians such as Overmans and Haar, who based their work on actual reported deaths, suggest that the number of victims can hardly have been higher than 500,000 persons, a revision which is only a fraction of the figure arrived at using the "population balance" methodology. Furthermore this includes some 420,000 people who had been listed as "missing" but in reality bought Polish surnames to avoid persecution.

Difficulty of developing accurate estimates

Some of these deaths were the result of direct, intentional actions of violent militias and senseless killings by opportunistic mobs and individuals. Other deaths were caused by the privations of a forced migration in a postwar environment characterized by crime, chaos, famine, disease, and cold winter conditions. It is almost impossible to attribute accurate proportions of deaths to specific causes.

Due to a lack of accurate records, many estimates of population transfers and associated deaths depend upon a "population balance" methodology.

Estimates of total populations expelled and deaths during the expulsions often include figures from the evacuation, because these people were not allowed to return, thus making it difficult to arrive at an accurate and undisputed estimate of population movements and deaths due solely to the expulsions.

The wide range of estimates stems from a number of factors. First, the chaos at the end of the war and immediately afterwards made it difficult to gather reliable statistics; hence there are few contemporary sources. Second, various studies used different methodologies, so that results varied by as much as an order of magnitude. There are also disputes over the definition of "expulsion", which may cover flight, evacuation, forcible expulsion, and population transfer count at various periods. Sometimes civilians killed during battles at the end of the war are counted, sometimes not. Some of the differences may arise from political bias, as the expulsion of Germans was widely utilized as political weapon on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Estimating methodology

The estimates can be classified by methodology into two main groups:

1. Method of population balance. Generally, this method tries to estimate the size German population before the process (be it expulsion in the narrow sense, or the German exodus from Eastern Europe in the broader sense) and after its end. The population deficit can than be interpreted as the number of deaths. The calculation usually starts with census data from the late 1930s, then accounts for other influences on the population size during the war, which may include military losses, civilian losses, population transfers and natural increase. The starting point for the postwar calculation is usually the expellee population in 1950 as determined by survey in West Germany and Austria, various estimates or official counts of expellees in East Germany, and the population of Germans remaining in East bloc countries.
2. Methods of detailed research. Studies of this kind try to count individual deaths, by various means. Sources may include registry death records, police and military records, church files of missing and killed persons, or reports of relatives.

Studies using the population balance methodology tend to yield higher estimates than those based on detailed research.

Demographic studies

Western cold war estimates of 1950s and 1960s

Allied American figures from 1957 placed the number of Germans subject to deportation at about 16.5 million. According to this figure, about 3 million Germans were "lost on the way". In 1958, U.S. Congressman B. Carroll Reece charged that 3 million German civilians had died during the expulsions.^[1]

In West Germany, several influential studies were produced. One of them is Die deutschen Vertreibungsverluste, 1939-50 (German losses from expulsion, 1939-50) by the German Federal Statistics Office. Using the population-balance method and census data for 1950, it determined the number of deaths (or in another interpretation, of persons unaccounted for) to be more than 2.1 million. ^[2] The three-volume Gesamterhebung zur Klärung des Schicksals der deutschen Bevölkerung in den Vertreibungsgebieten, (General compilation towards accounting for the fate of the German population in the areas of expulsion), Munich, 1965, confirms this figure.

* Eastern German territories comprise the following:

• East Prussia
  
• East Pomerania
• East Brandenburg
  
• Silesia
  
• Danzig

Those estimates became the standard numbers quoted in many subsequent studies and popular literature, and are still supported by some researchers.

German occupation zones in 1946 after territorial annexations

Official German estimates

Official German estimates of the German population of German and Polish territories east of the Oder-Neisse Line in 1944, before the Soviet advance, amount to about 11.9 million, including nearly 9.8 million in the territories themselves (borders of 1937). Figures cited by Hans Roos total about 10.1 million. This total includes 8.4 million in the Oder-Neisse territories, 400,000 in the former Free City of Danzig and 1.3 million in Poland, but does not include northern East Prussia, annexed by the Soviet Union (now the Kaliningrad Oblast). The official German history estimates that about 7.5 million Germans fled from territories east of the Oder-Neisse in 1944-45, but says about 1.1 million later returned, and puts the number subsequently subject to expulsion at 5.6 million. The total expelled in 1945-50, according to the official history, was 3.5 million. This figure also is cited by Zoltan Szaz.

Germans remaining after 1950 in the Oder-Neisse territories and prewar Poland are put officially at 835,000 and 75,000 respectively, or 910,000 altogether. Roos, however, estimates 1,190,000 Germans remaining in the Oder-Neisse territories, 30,000 in Danzig and 430,000 in Poland. These do not include about 1 million "autochthons" ? Polish-speaking or bilingual German citizens ? in Upper Silesia, Masuria and West Prussia. Szaz says about 1.1 million Germans remained. Thus, it would appear that about 1 million, and possibly more, Germans remained after 1950. (Note: A significant proportion of Germans remaining in postwar Poland were allowed to emigrate in the 1970s and '80s as a result of Brandt's Ostpolitik and other factors.) The official history, using prewar population figures, wartime estimates and postwar figures from both German states and Poland, concludes that 2,167,000 people from the Oder-Neisse territories died as a result of the war and the subsequent expulsions, but estimates that about 500,000 of these were military casualties, reducing the number of civilian deaths to about 1.6 million. To this it adds the deaths of 100,000 Danzigers and 217,000 German residents of Poland, for a total of about 1.9 million civilian deaths.

No breakdown is given in the official history of the proportion who died in the flight from the Red Army, during the occupation or during the expulsions, but an analysis of the figures indicates that about a third of the casualties must have occurred among those who fled during the conquest; the balance apparently occurred during the period of expropriation and expulsion. Roos says approximately 7.2 million fled or were expelled from the Oder-Neisse territories put under Polish control, along with 380,000 Danzigers and 880,000 German-Poles. "Of these," he says, death claimed about 1.2 million from the territories, 90,000 Danzigers and 200,000 German-Poles, for a total of nearly 1.5 million civilian fatalities, not including those in northern East Prussia.

Walther Hubatsch says about 1.4 million Germans from the Oder-Neisse territories and 600,000 from other areas died, for total of about 2 million. Szaz mentions the 2.16 million cited by the official history, which includes military casualties, but elsewhere says "over 1 million" of the 3.5 million expelled from the territories lost their lives. From these estimates it is evident that 1.5 million to 2 million German civilians lost their lives in the Soviet conquest of eastern Germany and subsequent expulsions.

Contemporary research supporting the above estimates

The study by Dr. Gerhard Reichling "Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen" (the German expellees in figures) concludes that 2,020,000 Germans perished as a result of the expulsion and deportation to slave labour in the Soviet Union.^[3]

Alfred de Zayas has compiled a statistical balance table that takes into account then recent demographic studies and suggests a higher figure of 2,225,000, published 2005 in Die Nemesis von Potsdam. ^[4] An even higher estimate of 2.8 million is made by Dr. Heinz Nawratil in his Schwarzbuch der Vertreibung 1945 bis 1948 (the black book of the expulsions 1945 to 1948) ^[5] The Centre against Expulsions estimates that just under 2 million German civilians died.

All of these studies are susceptible to the general criticisms of the statistical-balance studies.

Finer-grained estimates

More detailed view on those estimates is provided by the following table, which was compiled by Centre Against Expulsions http://www.z-g-v.de/aktuelles?id=59 from various sources.

German Expellees 1939-50

This more detailed accounting is susceptible to specific objections and questions about the meaning of the numbers.

While the table is presented as estimates of the number of expelled, and column Expelled by suggests which government was responsible, these assertions have been questioned.

• Many Germans were evacuated by German authorities (e.g., in East Prussia, Silesia, Poland) and died during evacuation due to such things as Soviet attack, starvation and extreme cold.
• Within Eastern Europe, many of the expulsions, killing, or transportations of Germans were carried out by the Soviets rather than the nominal governments. For example, German POWs in Silesia, supposedly expelled by Poland., were transported by the Soviet Union to Siberia, where many died in slave labor, though later the survivors were transferred to East Germany.
• Poland was directly controlled by Soviet authorities in 1945 (until at least 1947). This was also true for - Hungary, Romania.
• The basis of great part of the expulsion was Potsdam Treaty agreed by the USA, UK and the USSR.

Specific numbers by country are also open to dispute

• In the case of Czechoslovakia, there exists a report named Opinion of the Commission on the losses connected with the transfer, which was prepared by a joint Czech-German commission of historians. It suggests that, in the case of Czechoslovakia, the maximum number of deaths is 15,000 to 30,000 and that numbers such as the 220,000 estimated by the Centre Against Expulsions are not supported by the evidence. That Opinion has been rejected by other researchers, as the commission did not carry out any in-depth demographic studies of its own.

Criticism and revisions of statistical numbers

The principal weakness of statistical calculation is in uncertainty of input parameters, such as war losses. For example, the German researcher Rüdiger Overmans published a study, Deutsche Militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (German military losses in the Second World War), that revises war losses upwards from older estimates. As in the population-balance approach all these numbers are tightly interconnected, this means revision of deaths related to expulsion would be also necessary.

On this subject, Overmans wrote:

The deaths during flight and expulsion concerned the Germans in the immediate postwar period as much as the fate of the missing soldiers, and similar efforts were made to clarify the fate of the missing civilians or bring families together. A huge scientific project reconstructed the events historiographically, the Federal Statistics Office (Statistisches Bundesamt), the refugees? associations and the clerical search service did a lot with the financial support of the Federal Government to quantitatively assess the fate of those expelled as accurately as possible. The result can be summarized in the conclusion that about 2 million Germans had been killed during flight and expulsion - not including those from the respective territories who had died during military service.

These casualty figures, however, which for decades have been an integral part of the respective serious literature, are the result not of a counting of death records or similar concrete data, but of a population balance which concluded that the fate of about 2 million inhabitants of the expulsion territories could not be clarified and that it must therefore be assumed that they had lost their lives in the course of these events. In recent years, however, these statements have been increasingly questioned, as the studies about the sum of reported deaths showed that the number of victims can hardly have been higher than 500,000 persons - which is also an unimaginable number of victims, but nevertheless only a quarter of the previous data. In favor of the hitherto assumed numbers it could always be said, however, that the balance didn?t say that the death of these people had been proven, but only that their fate could not be clarified.http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=53471&highlight=#53471

Another example can be quoted from the Opinion of Czech-German commission of historians, explaining how recent changes in the estimated number of Sudeten Germans in East Germany would influence the result of balance calculations in case of Czechoslovakia

If the overall balance-sheet were to incorporate recently published data from the 1950 census in German Democratic Republic, which show only 612,000 former Sudeten Germans on East Territory instead of the figure of 914,000 used up till now, the number of cases unaccounted for would rise to over half a million [note: from 220-270 thousand]. This would lead to absurd results.

In November 2006, Deutschlandfunk published an interview with Ingo Haar, entitled "Historian: Federation of expellees names wrong numbers of victims". In the opinion of Ingo Haar, who works for the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin, around 500,000 to 600,000 victims were realistic. He put the number two million down to political motivation. http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/kulturheute/563831/ Christoph Bergner (CDU), State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, denied the number needed to be revised, saying the controversy potentially underlined a misunderstanding on the part of Haar. http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/kulturheute/569560/ This, in turn, has been criticised by Rüdiger Overmans, who emphasised the need for new research. Only proven deaths could be counted as deaths, he argued, not unclear cases, and so the real number was about 500,000.http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/kulturheute/571295/

Example methodology

One estimate of the number of ethnic Germans expelled is provided by the following table which is based on data culled from a number of sources. It can provide insight into the "methodology" behind some population deficit studies.

Notes:
Germany-The pre-war eastern German provinces that became Polish in 1945 and Kaliningrad region that became Soviet
Eastern Europe- Includes ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Danzig, the Baltic nations, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. Does not include the USSR.
Population in 1939- Includes bilinguals who were listed as Germans.
Military losses 1939-45 Research by R. Overmans has increased this total by 360,000 thus reducing civilian losses.
Wartime transfers in -Wartime evacuation of persons from western Germany.
Civilian losses -Losses primarily during military campaign in 1945, also includes 270,000 dead in the USSR after being deported as laborers. This table reflects the research of Reichling and Overmans that has adjusted the estimate of civilian deaths downward from the 1958 German government estimate of 2.1 million dead.
Remaining in East Europe-Primarily bilinguals except in the case of Romania. Research by G. Reichling has increased this total by 230,000 thus reducing civilian losses

Sources for the above table:
Gerhard Reichling. Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen. Bonn 1986 ISBN 3-88557-046-7.
R?diger Overmans. Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Oldenbourg 2000. ISBN 3-486-56531-1
Fritz Peter Habel Dokumente zur Sudetenfrage Langen Müller, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7844-2691-3.
Alfred de Zayas Die Nemesis von Potsdam Herbig, Munich 2005. ISBN 3-7766-2454-X. Newest statistical survey pp. 32-34. Heinz Navratil, Schwarzbuch der Vertreibung 1945 bis 1948 Universitas Verlag, Muenchen, 2001, p. 75.

Czechoslovakia

Conditions in postwar Czechoslovakia

Developing a clear picture of the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia is difficult because of the chaotic conditions that existed at the end of the war. There was no stable central government and record-keeping was non-existent. Many of the events that occurred during that period were spontaneous and local rather than being the result of coordinated policy directives from a central government. Among these spontaneous events was the removal and detention of the Sudeten Germans which was triggered by the strong anti-German sentiment at the grass-roots level and organized by local officials.

Records of food rationing coupons show approximately 3,325,000 inhabitants of occupied Sudetenland in May 1945. Of these, about 500,000 were Czechs or other non-Germans. Thus, there were approximately 2,725,000 Germans in occupied Sudetenland in May 1945.

On the initiative of the joint Czech-German Commission of Historians, a statistical and demographic investigation was conducted, resulting in the publication of the "Opinion of the Commission on the losses connected with the transfer". The number that the commission arrived at has since been accepted by a large section of the historians, press and media in other countries.

The opinion states:

1. Figures for the victims of the transfer vary enormously and are thus extremely controversial. The values given in German statistical calculations [for deaths resulting from expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia] vary between 220,000 and 270,000 cases that are unaccounted for, which are in many cases interpreted as deaths; the figures given in research carried out so far varies between 15,000 and 30,000 deaths.
2. The discrepancey is due to differing notions of the term "victims of the transfer".
3. In the Commission's view, a particular problem with the "balance-sheet" approach is that most of the data it works with are based on model calculations and estimates that are derived from quantities that cannot be compared with one another.

Poland

Number of Germans expelled from Poland

2,612,000 Germans left Poland in 02.1946 - 12.1949 according to S. Jankowiak ^[6], as cited by B. Nitschke.

During the pre-Potsdam expulsions, many Germans were forced to march over 100 and sometimes even 200 kilometres^[7]. Different estimates of the number of Germans expelled by Polish army alone during pre-Potsdam deportations (all numbers after Jankowiak)^[8]:

• 1200 thousand, according to K.Kersten, 1964
• 300 thousand, according to S.Banasiak
• 400 thousand, K.Skubiszewski
• 500 thousand, A.Ogrodowczyk
• 300-400 thousand, S.Chojnecki, 1980
• 350-450 thousand, A.Magierska, 1978
• 200-250 thousand, T.Bia?ecki, 1970
• 620-630 thousand, S.Zwoni?ski, 1983
• 230-250 thousand, Cz. Os?kowski
• 500-550 thousand, Z. Romanow
• 400 thousand, B.Nitschke
• 400 thousand, M.Wille, 1996
• 600-700 thousand ^[9]

On top of that, 365,000 - 1,200,000 Germans were deported by Polish administration^[10].

Estimates of deaths during the flight, evacuation and expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe

Sources

• Hubatsch, Walther, ed.: The German Question, New York: Herder Book Center, 1967.
• Roos, Hans: A History of Modern Poland, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966, pp. 213, 215-16.
• Schieder, Theodor, ed.: Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe, Bonn (no date).pp. 62, 120, 122-23,.
• Szaz, Zoltan Michael: Germany's Eastern Frontiers: The Problem of the Oder-Neisse Line, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1960, pp. 96, 126, 130.

References