 战后德国人流放和逃亡 Towards the end and in the aftermath of World War II, most of the German population fled or was expelled from areas outside the territory of post-war Germany and post-war Austria, including:
* pre-war German provinces transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union after the war (East Brandenburg, East Prussia and most of Pomerania and Silesia);
* Czechoslovakia, re-created from pre-war Czechoslovak areas occupied during the war and the Sudetenland, annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938;
* pre-war Polish areas annexed or occupied by Nazi Germany during the war;
* Hungary, Romania, northern Yugoslavia (predominantly in the Vojvodina region), and other states of Central and Eastern Europe.
The majority of the flights and expulsions occurred from the former eastern territories of Germany transferred to post-war Poland and the Soviet Union (~7 million), and from Czechoslovakia (~3 million). The expellees were taken in by the Allied occupation zones in Germany and in Austria.
With at least 12 million Germans directly involved, it was the largest movement of any European people in modern history, the largest transfer of a single ethnic population in history, and the largest of several post-war expulsions in Central and Eastern Europe which displaced a total of about twenty million people. The events have been usually classified as population transfer, or as ethnic cleansing. R. J. Rummel has classified these events as democide, and few go as far as calling it a genocide.
The policy was part of the geopolitical and ethnic reconfiguration of postwar Europe, and in part retribution for the Nazi Germany initiation of the war and subsequent atrocities and ethnic cleansings in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Allied leaders of the US, UK, and the USSR had agreed in general before the end of the war that Poland's border would be shifted west and the remaining German population expelled, and assured the leaders of the emigre governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia, both occupied by Nazi Germany, accordingly.
The displacements occurred in three somewhat overlapping phases, the first of which was the spontaneous flight and evacuation of Germans in face of the advancing Red Army, from mid-1944 to early 1945. The second phase was the disorganized expulsion of Germans immediately following the Wehrmacht's defeat. The third phase was a more organized expulsion following the Allied leaders' Potsdam Agreement, which redefined the Central European administrative borders and legitimized "orderly" and "humane" expulsions of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Many German civilians were also sent to internment and labor camps. The major expulsions were complete in 1950. Census figures of this year placed the total number of ethnic Germans still living in Eastern Europe at approximately 2.6 million, about 12 percent of the pre-war total. The exact number of casualties is still unknown and is difficult to establish due to the chaotic nature of the last months of the war.
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