WThe Brno death march is the traditional German term for the forced expulsion of the German inhabitants of Brno after World War II. The march began late on the night of 30 May 1945 when the ethnic German minority in Brno was expelled to nearby Austria. Only about half of expellees actually crossed the border. Thousands of people were held in the provisional camps in the border area. While some Germans were later allowed to return to Brno, hundreds of others fell victim to diseases and malnutrition in the following weeks. The number of fatalities caused by the march and imprisonment is disputed as it became part of propaganda: the estimates range between 500 and 8,000.
WThe expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II was part of a series of evacuations and deportations of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe during and after World War II.
WDemographic estimates of the flight and expulsion of Germans have been derived by either the compilation of registered dead and missing persons or by a comparison of pre-war and post-war population data. Estimates of the number of displaced Germans vary in the range of 12.0–16.5 million. The death toll attributable to the flight and expulsions was estimated at 2.2 million by the West German government in 1958 using the population balance method. German records which became public in 1987 have caused some historians in Germany to put the actual total at about 500,000 based on the listing of confirmed deaths. The German Historical Museum puts the figure at 600,000 victims, they maintain the official figure of 2 million cannot be supported. However, the German Red Cross still maintains that death toll in the expulsions is 2,251,500 persons.
WThe deportation of Germans from Romania after World War II, conducted on Soviet order early in 1945, uprooted 60,000 to 75,000 of Romania's Germans to the USSR; at least 3,000 of the deportees died before release. The deportation was part of the Soviet plan for German war reparations in the form of forced labor, according to the 1944 secret Soviet Order 7161. Most of the survivors returned to Romania between late 1945 and 1952, with a smaller part settling in different parts of Germany.
WThe East Prussian Regional Museum in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony in Germany, was established 1987 on the basis of the East Prussian Hunting Museum created by forester Hans Loeffke. It documents and commemorates the history, art and culture, but also the landscape and fauna of the former German province of East Prussia. Since spring 2009 the director of the museum is historian Dr. Joachim Mähnert.
WDuring the later stages of World War II and the post-war period, Germans and Volksdeutsche fled or were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries, including Czechoslovakia, and the former German provinces of Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia, which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union. In 1957, Walter Schlesinger discussed reasons for these actions, which reversed the effects of German eastward colonization and expansion: he concluded, "it was a devastating result of twelve years of National Socialist Eastern Policy." The idea to expel the Germans from the annexed territories was considered by Winston Churchill and by the Polish and Czechoslovak exile governments in London at least since 1942. In late 1944 the Czechoslovak exile government pressed the Allies to espouse the principle of German population transfers. On the other hand, Polish prime minister Tomasz Arciszewski, in an interview for The Sunday Times on 17 December 1944, supported the annexation of Warmia-Masuria, Opole Regency, north-east parts of Lower Silesia, and parts of Pomerania, but he opposed the idea of expulsion. He wanted to naturalize the Germans as Polish citizens and to assimilate them.
WThe flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland was the largest of a series of flights and expulsions of Germans in Europe during and after World War II. The German population fled or was expelled from all regions which are currently within the territorial boundaries of Poland, including the former eastern territories of Germany and parts of pre-war Poland.
WOperation Black Tulip was a plan proposed in 1945, just after the end of World War II, by Dutch minister of Justice Hans Kolfschoten to forcibly deport all Germans from the Netherlands. The operation lasted from 1946 to 1948 and in total 3,691 Germans were deported.
WPopulation transfer in the Soviet Union was the forced transfer of various groups from the 1930s up to the 1950s ordered by Joseph Stalin. It may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of the Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the first instance of an ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.
WThe term Russia Germans means "Germans of Russia," that is to say, Germans and/or their native descendants living in Russia or in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not to be confused with the total number of Germans in Russia. A majority of Russia Germans, including many mixed Russian-German families, have immigrated to German-speaking countries, especially Germany. The term Russlanddeutsche is often mistranslated as "Russian-Germans."
WThe South Tyrol Option Agreement was an agreement in effect between 1939 and 1943, when the native German speaking people in South Tyrol and three communes in the province of Belluno were given the option of either emigrating to neighboring Nazi Germany or remaining in Fascist Italy and being forcibly integrated into the mainstream Italian culture, losing their language and cultural heritage. Over 80% opted to move to Germany.
WThe Ústí massacre was a lynching of ethnic Germans in Ústí nad Labem, a largely ethnic German city in northern Bohemia ("Sudetenland"), shortly after the end of World War II, on 31 July 1945. During the incident, at least 43 Germans were killed but the estimated numbers range from 80 to thousands of victims.