Publisher's Synopsis
The closing phase of World War II and its aftermath saw millions of refugees and displaced persons wandering across Eastern Europe in one of the most brutal and chaotic migrations in world history.;The genocidal barbarism of the Nazi forces has been well documented. What hitherto has been little researched is the fate of the 15 million German civilians who found themselves at the mercy of the Soviet armies and on the wrong side of the new postwar borders. Settled by the Germans in the Middle Ages, the territories of East Prussia, Silesia, the Sudetenland, much of Pomerania and Brandenburg were emptied, the historic ethnic communities in Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia either expelled or killed. Over two million Germans did not survive their forced displacement.;Many of these people had supported Hitler and for the Czechs, Poles, Ukranians and surviving Jews, their fate must have seemed just. However, most of the East Prussian farmers, Silesian industrial workers, their wives and their children were guiltless and their fate, sentenced purely by race, remains a terrible legacy of the period.;This book describes this retribution. On the basis of extensive research in German and American archives, it sketches the history of the many German communities, scattered from the Baltic to the Danube, focusing not only on the suffering, but also on the pioneering achievements and the outstanding literature and art produced there over the centuries. It also includes interviews of many survivors from the catastrophic exodus that marked the terrible end to Nazi fantasies of Lebensraum. Alfred de Zayas is the author of "Nemesis at Potsdam" and "The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau".
