Nazi-Soviet population transfers

The Nazi-Soviet population transfers were a series of population transfers between 1939 and 1941 of tens of thousands of ethnic Germans and ethnic Russians in an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Conception

One of Hitler's main goals during his rule was to unite all German-speaking peoples into one territory. For many centuries there were always hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans living outside the borders of Germany, mostly in central and eastern Europe with the largest numbers being the Germans from Russia. Most of these Germans had been living outside of Germany for hundreds of years having moved eastwards between the 12th to 17th centuries.

Despite this Hitler planned to move these people westwards (away from their homes and from the areas they had been living in for centuries) over to Nazi Germany. However, Hitler also believed that the borders and territories of Nazi Germany as they stood in 1937 (before the "Anschluss" (annexation) of Austria and the Sudetenland) were vastly insufficient to accommodate this large increase in population. This is when the propaganda for more Lebensraum or "living space" started reaching its peak.

Legal basis

With the greatest number of ethnic Germans living in Russia, Hitler knew that he could not resettle all these people without the full cooperation of Stalin and the Soviet Union. In late August 1939 (a week before the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II) Hitler sent his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to Moscow to arrange a pact of friendship and "non aggression" with the Soviet Union. This became known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In reality Hitler's aim was to avoid Germany fighting on two fronts when the second world war was about to begin a week later.

The real issues agreed upon in the pact was the partition of territories in central and eastern Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence" and the reciprocal transfer of ethnic German and Russian people's to each other's countries. These secret agreements were not made public at the time.

Hitler's plan was to invade the western part of Poland (having assigned the eastern part to the soviet union in the pact) and then throw all non German peoples (mostly Polish citizens) out of their homes and either use them for forced labour or expel them further east to the General Government. Once these territories were "free" of non Germans the population transfers could begin and ethinc Germans would be settled in the same homes that until a few weeks earlier had Polish citizens living in them.

Population transfers 1939-1941

These "Germans from outside Germany", known as Volksdeutsche, after spending some time in refugee camps in Germany, were eventually resettled in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany and in Zamosc County, as decided by Generalplan Ost.

The planned transfers were announced to the ethnic Germans only in October 1939. Families were transferred by ships from the Baltics and by train from other territories. The German government arranged the transfer of their furniture and personal belongings but all immovable property had to be given up. This was an intentional act designed to destroy all links with the areas these people had been living in. The value of the real estate left behind was to be compensated in cash and a "new" property in Germany.

Germans were evacuated from territories which were occupied by Soviet Union in 1940 notably Bessarabia and the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, all of which traditionally had large German minorities. Notably, the majority of the Baltic Germans had already been resettled in late 1939, prior to the occupation of Estonia and Latvia by Soviet Union in June 1940. In most cases they were given farms that were taken away from 110,000 Poles who were expelled from the area [1].

"Second transfer" 1945

The Soviet advance into Poland in 1945 resulted in the ethnic German settlers being evacuated or fleeing from their "new homes" (in which Hitler had resettled them in 1939) to areas even further in the west to escape reprisals from the advancing Red Army. Considering that they had only been living in these homes for only about 5 years at most, this was almost seen as a second forced resettlement for them (after the first in 1939) albeit under different circumstances. This time around practically all of them had to leave their belongings behind.

Later, with their original ancestral homes falling under communist and/or Soviet rule after 1945, these Germans never came to live in the areas of their origin ever again.

Sources

• Eestist saksamaale ümberasunute nimestik : Verzeichnis der aus Estland nach Deutschland Umgesiedelten, Oskar Angelus, Tallinn 1939

See also

• Flight and expulsion of Germans during and after WWII

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