"Migrations in the 20 th century and their consequences – ways forward for history lessons within a European context"

Appendix I
"Bavaria’s fourth tribe"
Main features of the integration of refugees and expellees
(Rudolf Endres)
The absorption and integration of more than 12 million refugees and expellees was the greatest 
challenge and test for the newly emerging German state and society after the defeat of 1945. 
During those same years, against this background of total collapse and widespread destruction 
and hardship, the foundations were laid for the equally far-reaching and successful new 
beginning of what later became the Federal Republic of Germany.
Only a few weeks after the total collapse in summer 1945, 734,000 German refugees from the 
Polish and Russian-occupied regions east of the Oder and the Neisse were already officially 
registered in Bavaria. Then, from January 1946 onwards, ethnic Germans from Hungary and 
above all from the Sudetenland began arriving en masse. The two million expellees from the 
Sudetenland swept over Bavaria like a tidal wave. Homeless, impoverished people poured into 
a land in which reconstruction work had hardly even got beyond the stage of clearing away the 
rubble and locals and exiles could no longer be supplied with food.
On 25 January 1946 the first trains carrying German refugees from Czech assembly camps 
crossed the border at Hof, Furth im Walde, Passau, Piding bei Salzburg, and trains operated by 
the Americans in Eger (now Cheb) took them on to Wiesau via Waldsassen. For a period after 
this there were up to seven trains a day each carrying between 1,000 and 1,500 people and the 
bare minimum of possessions that they could carry. They travelled on to destinations in Bavaria,
sometimes reaching as far as Würzburg and Aschaffenburg. In May 1946 the monthly figure for 
new arrivals jumped to 137,000 and in June 1946 it reached a peak of over 142,000. By 1 
November 1946, 725 trains carrying 754,464 German refugees had been counted and recorded 
as having arrived in Bavaria. Added to this were the many people who had gone uncounted, 
travelling by car or crossing the border by foot. A number of the transports contained the 
populations of entire villages who were concerned to stay together. These communities were 
usually led by German clerics who had also been expelled. The bishopric of Augsburg alone 
had to accommodate 136 expelled German priests.
The national census in summer 1950 recorded 1,929,000 refugees and displaced persons, over 
a million of whom came from Czechoslovakia. One in five of Bavaria’s inhabitants were 
refugees. The words refugees and expellees will be used in this report synonymously. 
However, many expellees had already left Bavaria and moved into other 
Länder
, particularly the 
Ruhr.
The refugees had fled the eastern front and the atrocities of the Russians, but what was it that 
had caused the mass expulsion of Germans outside the boundaries of pre-war Germany, 
thereby fundamentally altering the map of central and eastern Europe?
The background to the expulsion measures is well-known since the records of the conferences 
of world powers in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam are publicly available. The allies’ official post-war 
programme contained no plans for resettlement or expulsion until the preparation stage of the 
Potsdam Conference. The main aim was to prevent the revival of the German military and to 

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weaken Germany militarily, economically and politically to such an extent that it would never be 
able to wage a war of aggression again. This common allied goal gave rise to many individual 
plans which were the subject of heated debate within the countries from which they originated 
and between the allies. These specific questions included the division or dismemberment of 
Germany, the dissolution of Prussia, demilitarisation, denazification, the punishment of war 
criminals, reparations, restoring the sovereignty of the German 
Länder
, destroying the German 
arms industry, breaking up industrial monopolies, taking control of the German economy, 
military occupation for at least a generation and finally, the cession of territory in the east and 
the west. All of these specific questions were the subject of numerous conferences, 
memorandums - the Morgenthau Plan, to quote just one example - differences of opinion, 
directives, arrangements and agreements. In spite of all of this, the records never included the 
keywords “expulsion”, “resettlement”, or “deportation”. It was only in the Potsdam Agreement of 
2 August 1945 that this whole issue was first addressed. It provided for the “transfer to Germany 
of the German population and components thereof which have remained in Poland, 
Czechoslovakia and Hungary”.
The only relevant episode recounted in the memoirs of those involved is the time at the Tehran 
Conference of 28 November to 1 December 1943 when Churchill used matches to illustrate the 
westward shift of Poland. This led Stalin to retort that the Soviet Union wished to maintain the 
ethnographically correct borders of 1939. Nowhere in all of this was there any mention of the 
Germans in eastern Europe. And yet there must already have been some discussion of the 
expulsion of Germans by this time even if it was not mentioned in any of the formal agreements, 
as the expulsion of Germans from the provinces east of the Oder-Neisse line was an inevitable 
side-effect of the drawing of the new Polish border.
One of the earliest and strongest advocates of the expulsion of Germans from the eastern 
territories was undoubtedly the Czechoslovakian president, Edvard Benes, who resigned in 
October 1938 and went into exile as a private citizen. As the head of the exiled government in 
London he propagated the idea of expulsion. As early as June 1943 he asked Roosevelt to 
agree to the expulsion of Sudeten Germans on the false premise that Stalin had already given 
his consent. In fact, only a few weeks before, he had put Stalin under pressure by announcing 
that the Americans had agreed to their resettlement. Benes even deliberately deceived the 
British public.
Until the end of the Potsdam Conference the western allies evidently had no clear ideas about 
the Polish and Czech expulsion plans and were only very poorly informed about the “unofficial” 
expulsions which had already occurred. This led them to try to gain a more accurate picture but 
also explains the extremely vague wording of the Potsdam final communiqué on this subject. 
However, after this, it was possible to prepare and carry out these “resettlements”, 
“displacements” or “transfers" of population which were accompanied by all manner of arbitrary 
acts, pogroms and atrocities.
Nobody knew what should and would happen to the people who were forced to resettle in 
Germany in the long term. In March 1947 Countess Marion Dönhoff, who was a refugee herself, 
wrote the following in “