Defeat, Expulsion and Division
Germany surrenders, millions of Germans are expelled from the east, and the occupied country splits into two states.
- Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt, Penguin (2005)
- Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War — R. M. Douglas, Yale University Press (2012)
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
- Speech in the Bundestag on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, 8 May 1985 — Richard von Weizsäcker, Office of the Federal President (1985)
- Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (English translation) — Federal Ministry of Justice
When Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, its cities lay in ruins. Millions of soldiers were prisoners, millions of civilians were homeless, and the country was divided into four zones occupied by the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, with Berlin likewise split. Germans later called it Stunde Null, “zero hour”.
- Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt, Penguin (2005)
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
The expulsions
At Potsdam in summer 1945 the Allies moved Poland’s border west to the Oder and Neisse rivers and approved the “transfer” of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Together with those who had already fled the advancing Red Army, between about 12 and 14 million Germans lost their homes, in the largest forced migration in modern European history. Many died of violence, hunger and cold on the way, though how many is fiercely disputed.
- Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War — R. M. Douglas, Yale University Press (2012)
- Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt, Penguin (2005)
- Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War — R. M. Douglas, Yale University Press (2012)
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
German women suffered mass rape, especially by Soviet soldiers in the east, a trauma long buried in silence.
- Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt, Penguin (2005)
Reckoning and rebuilding
The Allies tried leading Nazis at the Nuremberg trials of 1945–46 and set out to “denazify” German society, though in the West this was soon scaled back as the Cold War began. Women cleared the rubble by hand, and the Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) became a symbol of the time.
- Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt, Penguin (2005)
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
Two Germanys
As the wartime alliance broke down, the western zones and the Soviet zone went separate ways. When the Soviets blockaded West Berlin in 1948–49, the Western Allies supplied it by air for almost a year. In May 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in the West with its capital in Bonn and the Basic Law, a constitution written to make another Weimar impossible. In October 1949 the German Democratic Republic, a one-party communist state, was founded in the East.
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
- Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (English translation) — Federal Ministry of Justice
A long silence, then a debate
For decades the Germans’ own suffering, the bombing, the expulsions, the rapes, was a difficult subject: expellee associations kept it alive on the political right, while the left feared it would relativise German guilt. Since the 2000s, novels, documentaries and a federal Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation in Berlin (opened 2021) have tried to remember it within the context of the crimes that came first.
- Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War — R. M. Douglas, Yale University Press (2012)
- Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil — Susan Neiman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2019)
- Speech in the Bundestag on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, 8 May 1985 — Richard von Weizsäcker, Office of the Federal President (1985)
Many Germans long remembered 8 May 1945 as a day of defeat, collapse and suffering. In 1985 President Richard von Weizsäcker told the Bundestag that it was "a day of liberation" from Nazi tyranny, a view that has become the official consensus.
- Speech in the Bundestag on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, 8 May 1985 — Richard von Weizsäcker, Office of the Federal President (1985)
- Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil — Susan Neiman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2019)
Between about 12 and 14 million Germans fled or were expelled from eastern Europe. A West German government study in 1958 estimated over two million deaths; later research based on documented deaths, as summarised by R. M. Douglas, puts the figure closer to 500,000–600,000, though some official bodies still cite the higher range.
- Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War — R. M. Douglas, Yale University Press (2012)
For Poles and Czechs the expulsions followed years of brutal German occupation, and were agreed by the Allies at Potsdam. Expellee groups' demands for recognition or property have often been seen as an attempt to turn perpetrators into victims.
- Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War — R. M. Douglas, Yale University Press (2012)
- Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt, Penguin (2005)
Why it matters today
Almost every German family has a story from these years: a grandmother who clawed rubble, a grandfather who came home from Soviet captivity years late, a family that fled Silesia or East Prussia with a handcart. The division created in 1949 shaped two different societies whose differences are still visible, and the Basic Law of 1949 remains the constitution of united Germany.