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Expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia

1945–1947 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

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What happened

After Czechoslovakia's restoration in 1945, its government moved to expel the roughly 3-million-strong ethnic German minority concentrated in the Sudetenland, first through unregulated 'wild' expulsions accompanied by violence and internment, and then through an organized transfer authorized by the Potsdam Agreement and carried out under presidential decrees issued by Edvard Beneš. The decrees also stripped expelled Germans (and, initially, ethnic Hungarians) of citizenship and property. Death toll estimates from a joint Czech-German historical commission range from roughly 15,000 to 30,000, far below earlier German estimates that ran into the hundreds of thousands. The expulsion permanently ended the centuries-old German presence in Bohemia and Moravia.

Parties

The restored Czechoslovak state expelled its ethnic German minority under the Beneš decrees, following an initial wave of chaotic 'wild expulsions' and violence in the summer of 1945.

Disputed

The denominator

The Czechoslovak census of 1930 counted 3,231,688 Germans in Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia, about 22% of the state's population. By the 1950 census fewer than 160,000 remained.

Where the baseline comes from

• Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakiaopen-edited
• Sudeten Germansopen-edited

On the death toll

The German–Czech Joint Commission of Historians (1995–96) concluded that between 15,000 and 30,000 Germans died in connection with the expulsion from Czechoslovakia, finding the earlier West German figure to rest on faulty data. That earlier figure — roughly 270,000–273,000 — came from the West German government's 1958 demographic study Die deutschen Vertreibungsverluste and was a residual derived from population balances rather than a count of bodies; Czech historians argue the German baseline wrongly counted around 300,000 ethnic Czechs as Sudeten Germans. German expellee organisations favour the higher figure; Czech scholarship and the binational commission the lower one.

Documented forms of violence

The German–Czech Joint Commission of Historians and Czech scholarship on the 1945 'wild expulsions' document summary killings at Ústí nad Labem, Postoloprty and on the Brno death march, internment and compulsory labour in camps, and the blanket stripping of citizenship and confiscation of property under the Beneš decrees.

Formal findings

• German–Czech Joint Commission of Historians (established by the two governments) (1996) — Revised the death toll of the expulsion from Czechoslovakia to 15,000–30,000, finding the 1958 West German government estimate of c. 270,000 to be based on faulty demographic data — source

Movements mapped

• Sudetenland → occupied Bavaria/Germany3 million

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Czechia, Germany

Sources

• Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia - Wikipediaopen-edited
• Demographic estimates of the flight and expulsion of Germans - Wikipediaopen-edited