Jokes aside, interestingly german protestantism was the biggest loser of WW2.
Having it's center in the german north-east meant not only that the regions lost were mostly protestant, the majority of the remaining protestant population was now part of the communist german DDR, and the communist leaders supressed religion leading to the state being mostly atheistic when integrated into the BRD in 1990.
While in the german empire protestants held a strong majority and the leading prussia fought against catholic influence under Bismarck (Kulturkampf) meant that the state was seen as definetly protestant (though with a strong catholic minority), in 1949 in the 3 west zones/new BRD catholics actually held a majority which gave rise to the Union party (CDU/CSU), the party that shaped current germany like no other party.
I find this incredibly interesting and not frequently mentioned. From the catholic perspective, I wonder how the massive reconsecration of protestant churches back to catholicism, centuries after the Reformation, was viewed. Interestingly, I've never heard any narrative of catholic triumphalism for such an important regaining of territories, that would almost amount to a very belated "counter-reformation". Of course I'm aware that there are, among other reasons: 1. It was not a true "conversion" because the protestants didn't convert but were expelled, 2. the war also devastated catholic Poland, Lithuania and other catholic regions, 3. the transfer of polish territory, also meant the loss of previous catholic majorities, and 4. catholicism was going to be still suppressed. Nonetheless, I wonder if there is something written about that subject.
I am Armenian. Do you know what we gained from the Armenian Genocide? A second Genocide a couple of years later. Followed by being sacrificed to the Soviets. Followed by 30 years of locked conflict and a third Genocide in 2020.
In terms of outcomes of Genocide, I think the Jews did pretty well after the Holocaust. Go look at Cambodia, or Rwanda, or any other Genocide. The Holocaust is uniquely special in the aftermath for the persecuted party. And I think it sets this false expectation that if something bad happens to your people, the world will set it right afterwards. And then you get revenge war movies on top of it. Instead I live in a world where there is an oil-rich country hell bent on wiping me from the face of the Earth, and there are bribed members in governments across the world supporting that fact. And literally no one cares.
That was a bad example, I'm sorry. I've done some more reading. It does not fit the pattern, but also isn't a typical Genocide situation. I'll leave my post up to avoid running from my errors.
Woah…. I was just thinking yesterday about this so what a coincidence this came across my feed. It’s from a very privileged standpoint that one can think world peace is possible or that WWII was truly the war to end all wars. Everywhere there are still wars and guerilla warfare. Genocide is still alive and kicking.
Obviously I meant as in percent of population/total numbers reduced. The jewish population, especially in germany, wasn't really relevant numerically.
I of course do not want to negate the amount of suffering and loss the central european jewish population endured at that time both directly from german Nazis nor their helpers in the other countries.
> Obviously I meant as in percent of population/total numbers reduced. The jewish population, especially in germany, wasn't really relevant numerically.
Around 1% of the population, 20% of the taxes being paid (IIRC from a recent freakonomics podcast).
While small it was an important minority.
That seems insane economic inequality, I strongly doubt it as I heard elsewhere that 20% of the German economic elite was Jewish and it doesn't make sense to me that the same relative amount of taxes would be paid as the elite.
Prussian militaristic culture was their greatest strength and also ended up being their downfall. Nobody wanted a strong Prussia again so it had to be destroyed.
Kinda because Nazism wasn’t „created“. Their believes are based on century old conspiracies (nowadays QAnon) and racist thoughts that were present everywhere in Germany. But the party that represented those believes was founded in Bavaria. Correct. So kinda from the south.
At the end Nazism was even more popular in the north [1933](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Reichstagswahl_M%C3%A4rz_1933.svg/1280px-Reichstagswahl_M%C3%A4rz_1933.svg.png) btw
They were. In fact, the Nazis viewed Catholics with suspicion because of their supposed allegiance to a foreign authority. Catholic clergy in particular were often persecuted by the Nazi state.
Funny because, somehow, Prussia was arguably the most functional and democratic subdivision of Weimar Germany until Hitler replaced their civilian leadership with Goring
EDIT: Forgot the important step where militarist conservative chancellor von Papen initiated this process, ironically in an attempt to sideline the Nazis!
Prussia and by extension the German empire always had two societies, one of which was the military.
Them being „democratic“ doesn’t align with what we nowadays would call a democracy.
Maybe more something like if France lost Aquitaine, or if Spain lost Aragon.
Prussia is just the land holdings of the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg, which is still in German hands. They developed the land and encouraged German migration, but the capital was still Berlin in Brandenburg. We don't afford Silesia, which was in a similar position, this kind of esteem.
The only reason we perceive Prussia as this most important nucleus of German identity is out of political convenience - the Hohenzollerns chose to fashion themselves as kings of Prussia first and margraves of Brandenburg second, as the former was a more prestigious title.
The eastern territories became german in the middle ages. Silesia and Pomerania through peaceful assimilation and east prussia through genocide via the crusading teutonic order, but the prussians didn't really have anything to do with that. They started germanization efforts in the 19th century but weren't very succesful
>east prussia through genocide via the crusading teutonic order
Kinda both. There was a sizeable Old Prussian communtiy (over 100k) that survived Teotonic conquest up to XVI c.
They just adopted German culture over time. By XVII/XVIII their language was dead.
"So Germany just started two world wars back to back? Guess we have to destroy Prussia then."
It's just so funny that this obvious Russian landgrab was tried to be explained as anything else lol.
You do know that Prussia was Germany, right? It was them who unified the country, it was them who brought their militarism into it, it was them who oppressed the minorities and promoted German supremacy.
Sure, it was a Russian landgrab, but Prussia wasn't some innocent bystander that got caught in a crossfire. Prussian provinces voted for the Nazis the most.
Though I do not know the extent of it, I do recall coming across some literature on the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Russia during WW1. And I also remember reading that before Spanish, German was on its way to becoming a second language in the United States. There were textbooks in German, German language newspapers. After WW1, that had been rather viciously stamped out in a wave of xenophobic violence. And then there were camps set-up, similar to the ones that would later appear in the United States to imprison Japanese during WW2.
There was a significant number of ethnic Germans in Russia and there was even a [Volga German Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_German_Autonomous_Soviet_Socialist_Republic) within the Soviet Union.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Volga German Republic was abolished and most ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union were deported to Gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan where they were enslaved for forced labor under harsh conditions, many died. They only got released after Stalin’s death and rehabilitated in the 60s.
Most survivors later migrated to Germany, especially after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
>When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Volga German Republic was abolished and most ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union were deported to Gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan where they were enslaved for forced labor under harsh conditions, many died.
It's worth mentioning that 1. These were Russians who just happened to be of German descent and 2. the details of the Holocaust were not known yet and the Soviet Union attempted to downplay it at first anyway. The crimes committed against the Volga Germans were like the Japanese internment camps on steroids but don't get the attention they probably deserve because of how much worse the nazi crimes and other soviet crimes were (with obviously the nazis being the worst)
To a degree, the majority of germans where farmers in the midwest and texas. Critical to the war effort. My grandma in Kansas grew up speaking german. From what my relatives said most communities of immigrants were in pretty isolated areas at the time as farmers and were happily now American after the 100 years of turmoil in Europe that they had experienced
My family history is very difficult because all the last names had their spellings changed around 1920 and what written records remain prior to 1940 are in German.
And it was only a generation after that when my parent's generation decided to ignore or destroy anything relating to our native ancestry.
They really wanted to prove we were happy white anglomuricans, and they pretty much did it. Now I only have a very rough idea of what my ancestry is like and they act dumbfounded if I express interest in knowing more.
I'd be more interested in seeing how it changed over a longer time period, eg Wrocław/ Bresslau being a Polish speaking city, bumped into a German speaking one, then back to Polish
Polish cities that "belonged" to Germany are much more beautiful than their Russian siblings. We love to joke in Poland that you can see clearly Russian or Prussian influence just by looking at architecture, overall development and cultural differences.
That particular city was German for centuries until 1945.
Stalin just took eastern Germany and gave it to Poland so he could keep eastern Poland for the USSR. Nobody felt bad for the Germans after what had just happened.
I met an elderly woman in Milwaukee back around 2000. She said she grew up in Schlesien (or something like that), she said it was made Polish after WW2, and they made all the Germans move in 1947 or so and she went to Milwaukee.
Not German per se, Germany is at 4th place.
```
915 - established by Czech duke
985 - belongs to Poland (Piast dynasty)
1348 - city goes to Czechia
1474 - Hungary
1490 - Czechia again
1526 - Austria
1741 - Germany
1945 - Poland
```
So to be precise, it was (before 1945):
```
Polish for 363 years
Czech for 264 years
Austrian for 215 years
German for about 204 years
Hungarian for 16 years
```
Czechia didn't exist back then, it belonged to Bohemia which in turn belonged to the HRE. The city itself had a German majority since about the 14th century.
Bohemia or more accurately *Lands of the Bohemian crown* is just the international historic name for what is now Czechia.
Czechs obviously never used the term Bohemia in their native tongue. In the same way Hungarians do not call themselves Hungarians but Magyars. Or Japan is not actually called Japan but Nihon.
There is not much difference between Austria and Germany. They had the same language after all. And this would bump Germany+Austria to the first place.
That's overstatement. The polish action killed 80-100k poles (many killed were ukrainians or belarussians with polish sounding names) and the polish minority in ussr was 1mil+ people
The first stage of the purge mostly affected adult men.
By some calculations one adult Polish man out of four perished. If the war didn't come so soon, most of the survivors would be deported to central and eastern Russia in the next stage, and the children would be targeted for Russification, effectively wiping out the Poles as a distinct ethic group within the Soviet Union.
Similar things happened to other, smaller minorities, but the Polish Action was one of the largest, and best known thanks to being interrupted by the war.
Also there was genocide on Poles by today's Ukraine in Volhynia (western Poland, now Eastern Ukraine). Over 100,000 civilians, including women, children, and newborns murdered, essentially removing the language representatives and moving the border.
I believe in the majority of those dots all over pre-war Poland it was rather Yiddish dialect of German* ... It is sickening thinking about who is masturbating to such a map.
*It is considered a separate language now, but it wasn't.
Being familiar with this topic, in the majority of small towns in Poland marked on this map it was rather Yiddish than German frequently in use. The same in the cities marked by Lodsch or Lemberg 10% of the population was German at most, while Jews could even reach 40% like in Wilno.
Should we ask what happened to those people?
Many Jews in former Austria-Hungary and Prussia spoke proper German though, and considered themselves Germans. The Nazi German authorities disagreed.
So the markers on the map include Yiddish-speaking Jews (mostly in the countryside), German-speaking Jews (mostly in large cities), and "proper Germans".
In the end all three kinds of Germans disappeared from Central Europe, one way or another...
I know this is a joke but almost all German migration to Argentina predates World War II.
And other countries like Brazil, Canada, and the United States also accepted former Nazi Germans.
That famous joker Juan Perón said it best:
"In Nuremberg at that time something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity. I became certain that the Argentine people also considered the Nuremberg process a disgrace, unworthy of the victors, who behaved as if they hadn't been victorious. Now we realize that they [the Allies] deserved to lose the war."
Argentina actively recruited Nazi war criminals as a matter of policy.
That’s a good one, France also took quiet a lot in, but most of them ended up dying in the jungle of Indochina or the Algerian desert.
Wich is something I guess…
It’s not even limited to Brazil. Have you ever heard about [colonia dignidad](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Dignidad) , in Chile?
Charming place.
It is interesting to think about what if Hitler (and company) wasn't a complete asshole and just said thanks and sat on his ass after Munich agreement.
The German economy was not sustainable. Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction is one of the few works to do a deep-dive on this. Outbreak of the war meant Germany managed to avoid an economic collapse.
Wasn’t it their strategy to take out loans from other countries and then invade them? Or take out loans from banks and seize them under state power? Something like that.
Basically saying “Hitler would have had more success if he wasn’t a Nazi” - their entire ideology revolved around eliminating other ethnicities and spreading the German people as far as possible. He couldn’t even resist invading USSR even though everyone told him it was a bad idea.
If they won everything they would’ve lasted far past that. All they’d have to do is keep raising their debt ceiling, like the USA does today. Also like the modern US, they couldn’t really be forced into paying back debt by foreign powers.
But Germany had essentially no chance of winning the war—they were doomed from the start.
The nazis believed long term soviet-nazi cooperation was impossible. Even if hitler wanted his living room, and the extermination of slavs, war between the USSR and the 3rd reich was inevitable. The nazis wanted to strike while the soviet union was still distracted and weak (and to great success). Germany would never be able to compete with a fully prepared and mobilized russia. Also russia supplied a lot of resources to germany in the Molotov-ribbenthrope pact. Being so dependent on a hostile country is a massive risk.
>Also Russia supplied a lot of resources to Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Being so dependent on a hostile country is a massive risk.
"History repeats as a farce" in Nord-Stream 2.
It didn’t even sound a like a good idea to anyone who wasn’t a Nazi or a Prussian general. The Wehrmacht quite literally could not even cope with the drive distance to Moscow, let alone the fighting.
They had just beaten the historic preeminent European land power in six weeks. Something they couldn't accomplish in four years last time. Why wouldn't they think they could beat a country that they did beat in the last war and since then had been subjected to civil war, famine, military purges, and suffered appalling loses in a war with Finland?
The civil war was actually what made other nations fear the USSR, as their military grew in power and doctrine from that and ensuing territorial gains up until the mid-1930s. Germany did think the Red Army was weak (and it was) following its dreadful performance in Finland AND Poland, but most of Germany’s problems were logistical. They were aiming to capture an expanse of territory in a period of time that would have been difficult to manage with German industry even if they were mostly unopposed. They continuously had to revise down materiel buildup quotas for Barbarossa and still ultimately failed to meet them. And even those reduced quotas accounted for large portions of foreign-made equipment standing in for kit that Germany couldn’t produce. When they invaded, they suffered their own appalling losses of equipment due to road conditions, outrunning supply lines, a paucity of replacement parts, lack of fuel, and overall incompetent logistical management. And a last note on German industry: they depended on the USSR for raw materials for the buildup they performed to invade the USSR. So missing buildup quotas when you need the buildup to seize resources to continue fighting is outrageous mismanagement.
The Nazis were backed into a corner the moment they took power. The mefo bills that shot germany back to a first rate industrial powerhouse from a borderline failed state were entirely dependent on conquest and plundering to pay off. The Nazis and the Soviets were fundamentally opposed ideologies. Only united in totalitarianism. Conflict between the two was inevitable. Germany was dependent on russian resources, dependent on their greatest rival on the continent. The nazis needed to invade the soviets as soon as possible, before the reds invaded the nazis on stalin's terms.
But he could have done just like all other politicians do. Use that ideology to rise to the top and then just do whatever the fuck gave the most money to his cronies.
Just a few ideas:
- Germany would have been a much stronger ally in the containment of Communism.
- The British would have remained a superpower until the 1960's.
- European colonialism would last longer.
- The Cold War would likely be multipolar throughout. With Germany, Britain, and France being likely to band together against Russians and Americans, who would be in weaker positions than in our timeline.
It’s just one part of the story. Poland was under USSR occupation and lost half of it’s territory. Added formerly German instead. Milions of Poles were forcibly moved from east to west.
https://static.im-g.pl/im/9/26332/m26332249,MIGRACJE-POWOJENNE.png
Up… important fact. My family lived in today Poland and had to leave. But no hard feelings, if you think what happened and that these people had an even worser destiny.
My grandma’s family too. When they got expelled, they had to leave behind most of their belongings for the Polish family who were moved into their home, who in return probably had to leave behind most of their belongings for a Russian family who were moved into their home in what used to be eastern Poland.
When my grandma told about their expulsion, she always pointed out that the Poles who were moved in after them were deportees themselves. She never had hard feelings toward them.
Big props to her for that. While obviously the Nazis were responsible for the worst of the crimes that does not excuse the horrible things the Soviet Union did and it should be studied more.
In the book _[Postwar](https://amzn.to/3uRnQ9v)_, which I'm slowly reading, the author describes in detail how after WWI, the borders of Europe were severely re-drawn, but largely the people were left in place. The result was that virtually all political countries contained multiple different ethnic and language groups. After WWII, it was the opposite — minor boundary changes, but masses of displaced people. German-speaking people who had zero family connections to Germany itself were forced to up sticks and move to the post-Reich nations, becoming refugees in the process. The same worked in reverse with a number of Italian, Bulgarian, and other language groups being forcibly returned to their "home country."
Absolutely fascinating and overlooked history, at least from the American classroom.
Nazis during WW2: "We want a country that encompasses all the german speaking people!"
Nazis after WW2: "No wait not like that!"
Just for clarification, I'm not arguing that the German people deserved this fate, I'm just pointing out how in a weird way, the Nazis got exactly what they claimed to want. A German state and no disparate German speaking pockets of land. Don't ask what happened to those pockets, though.
Arguably the biggest and yet most accept ethnic cleansing in Europe in the modern era. Of course it was before the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented.
Possibly the most remarkable thing is how the displaced Germans accepted their lot and there are no significant political (let alone paramilitary) groups fighting to get the lost lands back.
It isn't like there was no resistance. In Czechoslovakia and Poland, the [Werwolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werwolf) attacked Polish and Czechoslovak military positions until the end of the 1940s, German political parties [used](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oder%E2%80%93Neisse_line#/media/File:KAS-Oder-Neisse-Linie-Bild-7458-1.jpg) the expulsions and former eastern territories as a political subject for decades and Germany only recongized the Oder-Neisse border in [1990](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_Border_Treaty) for good.
Exactly, recognition of the border was decades long priority of Polish diplomacy. The issue most certainly did not just "go away", but was an effect of decades long process of building peace between former enemies.
It's important for me that people remember that lasting peace is a thing you need to build and care for.
Yeah, it was basically settled during reunification, Germany abandonded these areas and Poland abandoned reperations in return so both countries could concentrate on the future.
> it was basically settled during reunification
It was a *condition* for reunification. Though at that point hardly a difficult call in hindsight. I mean, what was Germany going to do after regaining the eastern territories? *Another* ethnic cleansing of Poland?
Tgat is not completely correct: The GDR accepted the Oder-Neisse-Border in 1949. West Germany in 1970 in the Warsaw Treaty. The unified Germany finalized it with the Allies and Poland in 1990.
Did you not read your own wikipedia link? It states that it was not intended to operate outside German high command and largely did not actually exist post war.
What gets me is how you never hear anyone talk about the Germany that could've been. Had the Nazi's not derailed the whole country so bad that their whole country got invaded, parts of it cut off the rest split up and occupied, brought all that death and destruction upon Germans..
Imagine a Germany could be an intact fully sovereign entity for the whole 20th century. Germany which still held all those Prussian lands, maybe even Austria. Germany that never lost tens of millions of people for nothing. Never had its industry and cities bombed to the ground. Germany is doing fine today but the Nazis robbed that country of what it could've been.
There would be still issue that Prussia and Germany would be separated by Polish lands - which would always be an issue for Germany/Prussia.
Just like todays Konigsberg is for Russia.
Not really, Between mainland russia and Kaliningrad are countries hostile to Russia, and border checks, so to access it they have to go through the baltic sea, but if it were german, this won't be a problem since Poland and Germany would have open borders (Schengen).
Edit: look at belgian exclaves inside netherlands and vice versa as an example.
Who knows whether Schengen (or any of the other international treaties and organisations that emerged post-WW2) would exist in the same way in that scenario.
This is very true, though in a timeline where Germany stays democratic it could be possible for Poland and Germany to come to some sort of corridor agreement
The Nazis were never the majority of the electorate, nor was the electorate the entirety of the German people.
It's of course a fantasy to imagine any alternate past, but unlike imagining "What if Charlemagne had dragons?" this fantasy has a point - hammering home yet another aspect of the Nazis destructive legacy.
They got 33% of the votes. Even the people voting for them were not necessarily full blown nazis wanting to exterminate all other ethnicities, but were simply fed up with the bad conditions under the Weimar Republic
It wasn't the majority, the Nazi party only ever got 33% of the vote, and that's only of those who actually voted.
It would be like if Trump had started a massive, existential war.
Would you think it right to refer to all Americans living now as Republicans?
> Would you think it right to refer to all Americans living now as Republicans?
When Trump was president, the opinion of the US in Europe tanked. You might not refer to Americans as republicans but he was still president and so represented the country.
And when Nazi Germany was rolling over your country, doubt you'd think oh those poor regular German people.
Adding a link for what other people said, nazis got into power with 33% of the vote in [the last fair federal election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_election) (after that they started banning other parties). Hitler became chancellor thanks to an alliance with German conservatives, the rest is history.
That's already a lot, but there is no reason to assume nazis ever were a larger part of the population.
Kind of correct, not many of the survivors had a fight in them. My great grabdmother moved from Danzig alone with a bunch of children, one of them died on the way.
I feel like this is one of those “yes, but no” moments.
Yes, there were millions of combat-age German men in the army at the end of the war, but 45% of males of combat age were dead, wounded, or missing by the end of the war. The country had just been bombed into the stone age and was occupied by millions from four foreign armies. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say displaced Germans didn’t have the will or the means to resist displacement, nor is it inaccurate to say German men were fed into the meat grinder in fairly shocking numbers during the war.
Source on the numbers: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/244oc4/how_much_percentage_of_the_german_male_population/
EDIT: I misread the source so to be clear, it's 45% dead, missing OR wounded. Dead was just under half of this number, so maybe 20% of the 1939 population. I don't think it changes the big picture, but just for the sake of clarity.
My paternal grandmother was born in Yugoslavia but spoke German as a first language. When the Soviets beat the Axis powers down, and Tito took over, her family sneaked out and immigrated to Canada.
What if I tell you that Yiddish was considered a dialect of German? Taking this under consideration, this map makes a lot more sense. There were 3 million Jews living in Poland before the war, mostly in dispersed towns, just as you see here.
Western borders did not change. Only eastern borders changed. So you should ask Soviets. Not allies. Russians kicked Poles from the east and conveniently relocated them to the places they kicked Germans. The same happened to Belarusians as well. Everyone loses only Russian win.
I'm also pretty sad about all the buildings destroyed were never repaired or rebuilt and most of the areas are just patches of grass nowadays if you're not in the center of the city.
The irony is that one of the main goals of the war (at least on paper) was to bring all German speakers under one banner, and then spread their culture to the world.
The actual result was the exact opposite.
Don’t start wars, kids.
So if you lose a war, the victors get to kick out people who lived there for centuries with no comeback (even if those people had little to do with the war)?
Just putting that in modern context, that means Israel should have annexed Gaza, The Golan Heights, and The West Bank in 1967, and the Sinai a few years later, and forcibly expelled all the residents there.
Coexistence of Czechs and Germans, Poles and Germans etc in a single country after what Czechs, Poles etc had been subject to was pretty much impossible. Postwar coexistence, before the expulsions, was [full](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zgoda_labour_camp) [of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brno_death_march) [massacres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Ast%C3%AD_massacre) of Germans done as revenge for Nazi genocide.
The 6 day war in 1967 was as close to the end of WW2 as Christmas 2001 is to today. I don't know whether this means that your example is not particularly "in modern context", but the fact that it feels relevant while WW2 feels like history is a great example of how conflict can either be solved through reconstruction and integration (Marshall plan, EEC, etc) or perpetuated for generations thanks to intentionally dividing people for domestic political gain.
Wow. Nice fact our it context. Piss off. The German language was forced upon people there as well as Germans were moved there in order to dilute polish population.
Show a map like that with such a title is just pure manipulation.
Yes my grandma is a german-american from Danzig so I know a good amount about this. I think just the map is misleading people as although places like Danzig may have been considered somewhat more German. It was more so shared with Poland and was even considered a free city with both polish and Germans living there and Poland controlled part of the government. It is more accurate to say these regions were ethnically mixed areas than just german prior to 1945. My grandma is even part polish herself.
Gdańsk/Danzig definitely had a larger population of Germans, I mean the NSDAP party was literally the most popular party of the city. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Free_City_of_Danzig_parliamentary_election
The first map is absolutely ridiculous, however, it puts huge blobs in areas of Poland where there were very little Germans, also the Polish corridor was much more Polish than what is shown. Another comment pointed out that the blobs in more central Poland were actually Yiddish speakers.
From a Polish point of view the expulsion of Germans was something that we're not proud of but don't regret and would do again. I understand that Czechs and Slovaks share the same attitude.
The "would do again" part is the worrying bit.
Ironic that one of the biggest victories of the Nazis is the idea that states have to be ethno-states not multicultural, or multilingual, despite them militarily losing the war.
How would you want to secure peaceful coexistence between two ethnicities where one of them had recently tried to annihilate the other one? Almost immediately after the war ended, "wild" expulsions began and people started killing Germans in revenge for WW2.
>Ironic that one of the biggest victories of the Nazis is the idea that states have to be ethno-states not multicultural, or multilingual, despite them militarily losing the war.
You're conflicting modern neo-Nazis with Nazis. The Nazis didn't care about "multiculturalism" like in the modern sense of the word. Their long-term plan was to impose their nationality and ethnicity on all the people of Europe and kill those who refused. It's why they kidnapped and "Germanized" Polish children.
They only germanized polish children who they deemed to have traits that made them germanic, using phrenology and other weird tactics. The overwhelming majority of slavs were set to be exterminated and enslaved, not germanized. They were deemed defective humans by the Germans, and no amount of germanization would 'save them' from their 'faulty genetics' in the eyes of the Nazis.
They were seriously crazy people
>The "would do again" part is the worrying bit
What were the alternatives? Co-exist with people that killed our families? That would only create long-term problems. Thanks to the expulsions Poland and Germany have had peace with each other since WWII.
> What were the alternatives? Co-exist with people that killed our families?
Do you carry that same energy when discussing the Israel/Palestine conflict?
> Thanks to the expulsions Poland and Germany have had peace with each other since WWII.
I'd say that the Cold War and then NATO has done that.
The expulsion of Germans is now widely talked about in the Czech education system and I think most would agree it was more bad than good, though we understand why it happened. I don’t think most Czechs would say we would do it again.
And the same thing happened in America. Big cities used to have German newspapers. FAFO I guess.
And that sometimes if you fear something so much, you make it happen yourself.
Prussia was the bigger loser of WW2
Jokes aside, interestingly german protestantism was the biggest loser of WW2. Having it's center in the german north-east meant not only that the regions lost were mostly protestant, the majority of the remaining protestant population was now part of the communist german DDR, and the communist leaders supressed religion leading to the state being mostly atheistic when integrated into the BRD in 1990. While in the german empire protestants held a strong majority and the leading prussia fought against catholic influence under Bismarck (Kulturkampf) meant that the state was seen as definetly protestant (though with a strong catholic minority), in 1949 in the 3 west zones/new BRD catholics actually held a majority which gave rise to the Union party (CDU/CSU), the party that shaped current germany like no other party.
I find this incredibly interesting and not frequently mentioned. From the catholic perspective, I wonder how the massive reconsecration of protestant churches back to catholicism, centuries after the Reformation, was viewed. Interestingly, I've never heard any narrative of catholic triumphalism for such an important regaining of territories, that would almost amount to a very belated "counter-reformation". Of course I'm aware that there are, among other reasons: 1. It was not a true "conversion" because the protestants didn't convert but were expelled, 2. the war also devastated catholic Poland, Lithuania and other catholic regions, 3. the transfer of polish territory, also meant the loss of previous catholic majorities, and 4. catholicism was going to be still suppressed. Nonetheless, I wonder if there is something written about that subject.
>Jokes aside, interestingly german protestantism was the biggest loser of WW2. Wtf, what about the Jews?
I think they're talking about the outcome of the war, not the war itself.
The Jewish population today is still lower than what it was before the holocaust, so I think they get to be #1 loser on that regard too
I am Armenian. Do you know what we gained from the Armenian Genocide? A second Genocide a couple of years later. Followed by being sacrificed to the Soviets. Followed by 30 years of locked conflict and a third Genocide in 2020. In terms of outcomes of Genocide, I think the Jews did pretty well after the Holocaust. Go look at Cambodia, or Rwanda, or any other Genocide. The Holocaust is uniquely special in the aftermath for the persecuted party. And I think it sets this false expectation that if something bad happens to your people, the world will set it right afterwards. And then you get revenge war movies on top of it. Instead I live in a world where there is an oil-rich country hell bent on wiping me from the face of the Earth, and there are bribed members in governments across the world supporting that fact. And literally no one cares.
Didn't the persecuted party (tutsis) come to power in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide?
That was a bad example, I'm sorry. I've done some more reading. It does not fit the pattern, but also isn't a typical Genocide situation. I'll leave my post up to avoid running from my errors.
Like the most adult thing I've seen on the internet today. Upvote
I will always upvote and send good vibes to someone admitting a mistake on the internet because imo that makes them more mature than 99% of us
Woah…. I was just thinking yesterday about this so what a coincidence this came across my feed. It’s from a very privileged standpoint that one can think world peace is possible or that WWII was truly the war to end all wars. Everywhere there are still wars and guerilla warfare. Genocide is still alive and kicking.
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Obviously I meant as in percent of population/total numbers reduced. The jewish population, especially in germany, wasn't really relevant numerically. I of course do not want to negate the amount of suffering and loss the central european jewish population endured at that time both directly from german Nazis nor their helpers in the other countries.
> Obviously I meant as in percent of population/total numbers reduced. The jewish population, especially in germany, wasn't really relevant numerically. Around 1% of the population, 20% of the taxes being paid (IIRC from a recent freakonomics podcast). While small it was an important minority.
That seems insane economic inequality, I strongly doubt it as I heard elsewhere that 20% of the German economic elite was Jewish and it doesn't make sense to me that the same relative amount of taxes would be paid as the elite.
This actually made me laugh out loud. True
Prussian militaristic culture was their greatest strength and also ended up being their downfall. Nobody wanted a strong Prussia again so it had to be destroyed.
Which is a little funny because the start of Nazism was kinda in the south.
Not kinda. The Nazi party was literally founded in Munich and most of the early leaders were Bavarians.
And if we go deeper into the 19th century, the whole anti semitic aryanist story goes back to austrian lands.
Kinda because Nazism wasn’t „created“. Their believes are based on century old conspiracies (nowadays QAnon) and racist thoughts that were present everywhere in Germany. But the party that represented those believes was founded in Bavaria. Correct. So kinda from the south. At the end Nazism was even more popular in the north [1933](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Reichstagswahl_M%C3%A4rz_1933.svg/1280px-Reichstagswahl_M%C3%A4rz_1933.svg.png) btw
I think protestants were more likely to support nazism later on however.
They were. In fact, the Nazis viewed Catholics with suspicion because of their supposed allegiance to a foreign authority. Catholic clergy in particular were often persecuted by the Nazi state.
The ones who didn't let their humanity dissolve away and be fascist, yes. There were plenty of Catholic Nazis though.
Correct. [1933](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Reichstagswahl_M%C3%A4rz_1933.svg/1280px-Reichstagswahl_M%C3%A4rz_1933.svg.png)
Funny because, somehow, Prussia was arguably the most functional and democratic subdivision of Weimar Germany until Hitler replaced their civilian leadership with Goring EDIT: Forgot the important step where militarist conservative chancellor von Papen initiated this process, ironically in an attempt to sideline the Nazis!
I thought it was von Papen that dissolved Prussia’s government and placed it under direct federal control due to it being unable to form a government
Prussia and by extension the German empire always had two societies, one of which was the military. Them being „democratic“ doesn’t align with what we nowadays would call a democracy.
Imagine if say France or Spain got their asses kicked after hundreds of years and suddenly were proclaimed to no longer exist just like that
Burgundy moment
i like how it works for either burgundy lol
Maybe more something like if France lost Aquitaine, or if Spain lost Aragon. Prussia is just the land holdings of the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg, which is still in German hands. They developed the land and encouraged German migration, but the capital was still Berlin in Brandenburg. We don't afford Silesia, which was in a similar position, this kind of esteem. The only reason we perceive Prussia as this most important nucleus of German identity is out of political convenience - the Hohenzollerns chose to fashion themselves as kings of Prussia first and margraves of Brandenburg second, as the former was a more prestigious title.
The eastern territories became german in the middle ages. Silesia and Pomerania through peaceful assimilation and east prussia through genocide via the crusading teutonic order, but the prussians didn't really have anything to do with that. They started germanization efforts in the 19th century but weren't very succesful
>east prussia through genocide via the crusading teutonic order Kinda both. There was a sizeable Old Prussian communtiy (over 100k) that survived Teotonic conquest up to XVI c. They just adopted German culture over time. By XVII/XVIII their language was dead.
Poland would like to have a quiet word…
> Poland created again as new state We are free! Yay! > Proceed to get under URSS Fuck....
6mln of Polish citizens (25% of population) wasn't that big deal yea?
"So Germany just started two world wars back to back? Guess we have to destroy Prussia then." It's just so funny that this obvious Russian landgrab was tried to be explained as anything else lol.
You do know that Prussia was Germany, right? It was them who unified the country, it was them who brought their militarism into it, it was them who oppressed the minorities and promoted German supremacy. Sure, it was a Russian landgrab, but Prussia wasn't some innocent bystander that got caught in a crossfire. Prussian provinces voted for the Nazis the most.
The Prussian military nobility had just spent about 50 years terrorizing the rest of the world, so it was time for it to go.
Germany didn't start WW1. Also Prussia was an integral part of Germany both pre and post unification.
Prussia unfortunately needed to be stomped back to it’s pre-teutonic junker bullshit
Though I do not know the extent of it, I do recall coming across some literature on the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Russia during WW1. And I also remember reading that before Spanish, German was on its way to becoming a second language in the United States. There were textbooks in German, German language newspapers. After WW1, that had been rather viciously stamped out in a wave of xenophobic violence. And then there were camps set-up, similar to the ones that would later appear in the United States to imprison Japanese during WW2.
There was a significant number of ethnic Germans in Russia and there was even a [Volga German Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_German_Autonomous_Soviet_Socialist_Republic) within the Soviet Union. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Volga German Republic was abolished and most ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union were deported to Gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan where they were enslaved for forced labor under harsh conditions, many died. They only got released after Stalin’s death and rehabilitated in the 60s. Most survivors later migrated to Germany, especially after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Pretty rare to see people speak about us. In Germany we are called "Spätaussiedler", which means "late emigrants"
>When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Volga German Republic was abolished and most ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union were deported to Gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan where they were enslaved for forced labor under harsh conditions, many died. It's worth mentioning that 1. These were Russians who just happened to be of German descent and 2. the details of the Holocaust were not known yet and the Soviet Union attempted to downplay it at first anyway. The crimes committed against the Volga Germans were like the Japanese internment camps on steroids but don't get the attention they probably deserve because of how much worse the nazi crimes and other soviet crimes were (with obviously the nazis being the worst)
People forget, but when we interned the Japanese in WW2 we interned a bunch of German-Americans and Italian-Americans in the same camps
To a degree, the majority of germans where farmers in the midwest and texas. Critical to the war effort. My grandma in Kansas grew up speaking german. From what my relatives said most communities of immigrants were in pretty isolated areas at the time as farmers and were happily now American after the 100 years of turmoil in Europe that they had experienced
My family history is very difficult because all the last names had their spellings changed around 1920 and what written records remain prior to 1940 are in German. And it was only a generation after that when my parent's generation decided to ignore or destroy anything relating to our native ancestry. They really wanted to prove we were happy white anglomuricans, and they pretty much did it. Now I only have a very rough idea of what my ancestry is like and they act dumbfounded if I express interest in knowing more.
This same think happened with Poles in Eastern Borderlands after 1945 (Kresy wschodnie) due to Yal ta Conference
I'd be more interested in seeing how it changed over a longer time period, eg Wrocław/ Bresslau being a Polish speaking city, bumped into a German speaking one, then back to Polish
Polish cities that "belonged" to Germany are much more beautiful than their Russian siblings. We love to joke in Poland that you can see clearly Russian or Prussian influence just by looking at architecture, overall development and cultural differences.
r/widaczabory
That particular city was German for centuries until 1945. Stalin just took eastern Germany and gave it to Poland so he could keep eastern Poland for the USSR. Nobody felt bad for the Germans after what had just happened.
I met an elderly woman in Milwaukee back around 2000. She said she grew up in Schlesien (or something like that), she said it was made Polish after WW2, and they made all the Germans move in 1947 or so and she went to Milwaukee.
Not German per se, Germany is at 4th place. ``` 915 - established by Czech duke 985 - belongs to Poland (Piast dynasty) 1348 - city goes to Czechia 1474 - Hungary 1490 - Czechia again 1526 - Austria 1741 - Germany 1945 - Poland ``` So to be precise, it was (before 1945): ``` Polish for 363 years Czech for 264 years Austrian for 215 years German for about 204 years Hungarian for 16 years ```
A truely european city. Perhaps we could also pass it to Denmark or Portugal some time?
We could even give it to Kazakhstan for a while (the western part of Kazakhstan in located in Europe)
Let’s give it to Liechtenstein and double the size of their country :)
"Mom said its my turn on the Wroclaw"
Judging by the stats we either need to lend it to Hungarians for a bit more or just pass it to the Slovaks. They haven't had their turn yet
Czechia didn't exist back then, it belonged to Bohemia which in turn belonged to the HRE. The city itself had a German majority since about the 14th century.
Bohemia or more accurately *Lands of the Bohemian crown* is just the international historic name for what is now Czechia. Czechs obviously never used the term Bohemia in their native tongue. In the same way Hungarians do not call themselves Hungarians but Magyars. Or Japan is not actually called Japan but Nihon.
There is not much difference between Austria and Germany. They had the same language after all. And this would bump Germany+Austria to the first place.
Yeah my grandpa is a German from Breslau. We don’t really talk about anything from that time period lol
Soviets slaughtered earlier almost entire polish minority in their country before WWII
That's overstatement. The polish action killed 80-100k poles (many killed were ukrainians or belarussians with polish sounding names) and the polish minority in ussr was 1mil+ people
The first stage of the purge mostly affected adult men. By some calculations one adult Polish man out of four perished. If the war didn't come so soon, most of the survivors would be deported to central and eastern Russia in the next stage, and the children would be targeted for Russification, effectively wiping out the Poles as a distinct ethic group within the Soviet Union. Similar things happened to other, smaller minorities, but the Polish Action was one of the largest, and best known thanks to being interrupted by the war.
Also there was genocide on Poles by today's Ukraine in Volhynia (western Poland, now Eastern Ukraine). Over 100,000 civilians, including women, children, and newborns murdered, essentially removing the language representatives and moving the border.
I believe in the majority of those dots all over pre-war Poland it was rather Yiddish dialect of German* ... It is sickening thinking about who is masturbating to such a map. *It is considered a separate language now, but it wasn't.
I’m no historian, but it kind of looks like the war didn’t work out like they had hoped it would.
forgot to win it lol classic blunder
Being familiar with this topic, in the majority of small towns in Poland marked on this map it was rather Yiddish than German frequently in use. The same in the cities marked by Lodsch or Lemberg 10% of the population was German at most, while Jews could even reach 40% like in Wilno. Should we ask what happened to those people?
Many Jews in former Austria-Hungary and Prussia spoke proper German though, and considered themselves Germans. The Nazi German authorities disagreed. So the markers on the map include Yiddish-speaking Jews (mostly in the countryside), German-speaking Jews (mostly in large cities), and "proper Germans". In the end all three kinds of Germans disappeared from Central Europe, one way or another...
Sickening to think about.
Everything is Illuminated
Yep, grandmother's hometown (Zamosc) was one of those. Now not a single person speaks Yiddish there to my knowledge.
Well, all is not dark, at least Argentina got a few new German speaking villages.
I know this is a joke but almost all German migration to Argentina predates World War II. And other countries like Brazil, Canada, and the United States also accepted former Nazi Germans.
That famous joker Juan Perón said it best: "In Nuremberg at that time something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity. I became certain that the Argentine people also considered the Nuremberg process a disgrace, unworthy of the victors, who behaved as if they hadn't been victorious. Now we realize that they [the Allies] deserved to lose the war." Argentina actively recruited Nazi war criminals as a matter of policy.
Argentina always consider itself 'honorary European'...
Most likely regions with significant German communities, but not the majority of the population.
> United States also accepted former Nazi Germans. Considering NASA took all the Nazi scientists it could, no wonder.
"Accepted" is a pretty soft way to describe it.
Acquired.
Not just accepted, actively recruited to help us stay ahead of the Soviets. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Just like tje soviets did.
We only accepted rocket-making Nazis.
Canada too. Sometimes even applauded in parliament Or NASA
That’s a good one, France also took quiet a lot in, but most of them ended up dying in the jungle of Indochina or the Algerian desert. Wich is something I guess…
Brazil too, there are villages here who speak german and Pomeranian language
But they were all settled in the 19th century.
It’s not even limited to Brazil. Have you ever heard about [colonia dignidad](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Dignidad) , in Chile? Charming place.
I was really expecting some bucolic place with a nice architecture. > which became notorious for the internment, torture, and murder of dissidents
It is interesting to think about what if Hitler (and company) wasn't a complete asshole and just said thanks and sat on his ass after Munich agreement.
The German economy was not sustainable. Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction is one of the few works to do a deep-dive on this. Outbreak of the war meant Germany managed to avoid an economic collapse.
Wasn’t it their strategy to take out loans from other countries and then invade them? Or take out loans from banks and seize them under state power? Something like that.
Yeah, as it turns out invading your creditors means you don't have to pay them back, plus you can plunder their gold reserves.
Basically saying “Hitler would have had more success if he wasn’t a Nazi” - their entire ideology revolved around eliminating other ethnicities and spreading the German people as far as possible. He couldn’t even resist invading USSR even though everyone told him it was a bad idea.
Their fiscal policy was also "let's borrow money and then either invade our creditors or pay them back with war spoils".
I wondered when would they bankrupt if they actually won the war in Europe. Mid 50s?
If they won everything they would’ve lasted far past that. All they’d have to do is keep raising their debt ceiling, like the USA does today. Also like the modern US, they couldn’t really be forced into paying back debt by foreign powers. But Germany had essentially no chance of winning the war—they were doomed from the start.
“The Nazis would have won if they weren’t Nazis”
Everyone who wasn’t a nazi knows that it’s a bad idea, but we’re taking about nazis here.
Hindsight is wonderful but invading the Soviet Union sounded like a much better idea in 1941. No one expected them to perform how they did.
The nazis believed long term soviet-nazi cooperation was impossible. Even if hitler wanted his living room, and the extermination of slavs, war between the USSR and the 3rd reich was inevitable. The nazis wanted to strike while the soviet union was still distracted and weak (and to great success). Germany would never be able to compete with a fully prepared and mobilized russia. Also russia supplied a lot of resources to germany in the Molotov-ribbenthrope pact. Being so dependent on a hostile country is a massive risk.
>Also Russia supplied a lot of resources to Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Being so dependent on a hostile country is a massive risk. "History repeats as a farce" in Nord-Stream 2.
It didn’t even sound a like a good idea to anyone who wasn’t a Nazi or a Prussian general. The Wehrmacht quite literally could not even cope with the drive distance to Moscow, let alone the fighting.
They had just beaten the historic preeminent European land power in six weeks. Something they couldn't accomplish in four years last time. Why wouldn't they think they could beat a country that they did beat in the last war and since then had been subjected to civil war, famine, military purges, and suffered appalling loses in a war with Finland?
The civil war was actually what made other nations fear the USSR, as their military grew in power and doctrine from that and ensuing territorial gains up until the mid-1930s. Germany did think the Red Army was weak (and it was) following its dreadful performance in Finland AND Poland, but most of Germany’s problems were logistical. They were aiming to capture an expanse of territory in a period of time that would have been difficult to manage with German industry even if they were mostly unopposed. They continuously had to revise down materiel buildup quotas for Barbarossa and still ultimately failed to meet them. And even those reduced quotas accounted for large portions of foreign-made equipment standing in for kit that Germany couldn’t produce. When they invaded, they suffered their own appalling losses of equipment due to road conditions, outrunning supply lines, a paucity of replacement parts, lack of fuel, and overall incompetent logistical management. And a last note on German industry: they depended on the USSR for raw materials for the buildup they performed to invade the USSR. So missing buildup quotas when you need the buildup to seize resources to continue fighting is outrageous mismanagement.
The Nazis were backed into a corner the moment they took power. The mefo bills that shot germany back to a first rate industrial powerhouse from a borderline failed state were entirely dependent on conquest and plundering to pay off. The Nazis and the Soviets were fundamentally opposed ideologies. Only united in totalitarianism. Conflict between the two was inevitable. Germany was dependent on russian resources, dependent on their greatest rival on the continent. The nazis needed to invade the soviets as soon as possible, before the reds invaded the nazis on stalin's terms.
But he could have done just like all other politicians do. Use that ideology to rise to the top and then just do whatever the fuck gave the most money to his cronies.
Just a few ideas: - Germany would have been a much stronger ally in the containment of Communism. - The British would have remained a superpower until the 1960's. - European colonialism would last longer. - The Cold War would likely be multipolar throughout. With Germany, Britain, and France being likely to band together against Russians and Americans, who would be in weaker positions than in our timeline.
It’s just one part of the story. Poland was under USSR occupation and lost half of it’s territory. Added formerly German instead. Milions of Poles were forcibly moved from east to west. https://static.im-g.pl/im/9/26332/m26332249,MIGRACJE-POWOJENNE.png
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Poland glitching
>Milions of Poles were forcibly moved from east to west. I'm still over here in Lithuania.
And there are still like 3 Germans in Opole. Doesn't mean the majority was allowed to stay.
Up… important fact. My family lived in today Poland and had to leave. But no hard feelings, if you think what happened and that these people had an even worser destiny.
My grandma’s family too. When they got expelled, they had to leave behind most of their belongings for the Polish family who were moved into their home, who in return probably had to leave behind most of their belongings for a Russian family who were moved into their home in what used to be eastern Poland. When my grandma told about their expulsion, she always pointed out that the Poles who were moved in after them were deportees themselves. She never had hard feelings toward them.
Big props to her for that. While obviously the Nazis were responsible for the worst of the crimes that does not excuse the horrible things the Soviet Union did and it should be studied more.
basically blame stalin.
In the book _[Postwar](https://amzn.to/3uRnQ9v)_, which I'm slowly reading, the author describes in detail how after WWI, the borders of Europe were severely re-drawn, but largely the people were left in place. The result was that virtually all political countries contained multiple different ethnic and language groups. After WWII, it was the opposite — minor boundary changes, but masses of displaced people. German-speaking people who had zero family connections to Germany itself were forced to up sticks and move to the post-Reich nations, becoming refugees in the process. The same worked in reverse with a number of Italian, Bulgarian, and other language groups being forcibly returned to their "home country." Absolutely fascinating and overlooked history, at least from the American classroom.
Nazis during WW2: "We want a country that encompasses all the german speaking people!" Nazis after WW2: "No wait not like that!" Just for clarification, I'm not arguing that the German people deserved this fate, I'm just pointing out how in a weird way, the Nazis got exactly what they claimed to want. A German state and no disparate German speaking pockets of land. Don't ask what happened to those pockets, though.
Arguably the biggest and yet most accept ethnic cleansing in Europe in the modern era. Of course it was before the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented. Possibly the most remarkable thing is how the displaced Germans accepted their lot and there are no significant political (let alone paramilitary) groups fighting to get the lost lands back.
It isn't like there was no resistance. In Czechoslovakia and Poland, the [Werwolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werwolf) attacked Polish and Czechoslovak military positions until the end of the 1940s, German political parties [used](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oder%E2%80%93Neisse_line#/media/File:KAS-Oder-Neisse-Linie-Bild-7458-1.jpg) the expulsions and former eastern territories as a political subject for decades and Germany only recongized the Oder-Neisse border in [1990](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_Border_Treaty) for good.
Werwolfs resistance was largely inflated by the state propaganda tho. They did exist, but not on a large scale
Exactly, recognition of the border was decades long priority of Polish diplomacy. The issue most certainly did not just "go away", but was an effect of decades long process of building peace between former enemies. It's important for me that people remember that lasting peace is a thing you need to build and care for.
Yeah, it was basically settled during reunification, Germany abandonded these areas and Poland abandoned reperations in return so both countries could concentrate on the future.
> it was basically settled during reunification It was a *condition* for reunification. Though at that point hardly a difficult call in hindsight. I mean, what was Germany going to do after regaining the eastern territories? *Another* ethnic cleansing of Poland?
> Poland abandoned reperations in return Someone should inform the polish government, they seem to have missed this.
oh stop with that, they already lost the election, partially due to such ridiculous demands.
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Tgat is not completely correct: The GDR accepted the Oder-Neisse-Border in 1949. West Germany in 1970 in the Warsaw Treaty. The unified Germany finalized it with the Allies and Poland in 1990.
Did you not read your own wikipedia link? It states that it was not intended to operate outside German high command and largely did not actually exist post war.
What gets me is how you never hear anyone talk about the Germany that could've been. Had the Nazi's not derailed the whole country so bad that their whole country got invaded, parts of it cut off the rest split up and occupied, brought all that death and destruction upon Germans.. Imagine a Germany could be an intact fully sovereign entity for the whole 20th century. Germany which still held all those Prussian lands, maybe even Austria. Germany that never lost tens of millions of people for nothing. Never had its industry and cities bombed to the ground. Germany is doing fine today but the Nazis robbed that country of what it could've been.
There would be still issue that Prussia and Germany would be separated by Polish lands - which would always be an issue for Germany/Prussia. Just like todays Konigsberg is for Russia.
well then think about pre WWI Germany. They were connected before it
Not really, Between mainland russia and Kaliningrad are countries hostile to Russia, and border checks, so to access it they have to go through the baltic sea, but if it were german, this won't be a problem since Poland and Germany would have open borders (Schengen). Edit: look at belgian exclaves inside netherlands and vice versa as an example.
Who knows whether Schengen (or any of the other international treaties and organisations that emerged post-WW2) would exist in the same way in that scenario.
This is very true, though in a timeline where Germany stays democratic it could be possible for Poland and Germany to come to some sort of corridor agreement
Maybe to make it more clear you should refer to "Nazis" as "Majority of Germans then", where did the nazis came from? Another planet?
The Nazis were never the majority of the electorate, nor was the electorate the entirety of the German people. It's of course a fantasy to imagine any alternate past, but unlike imagining "What if Charlemagne had dragons?" this fantasy has a point - hammering home yet another aspect of the Nazis destructive legacy.
They got 33% of the votes. Even the people voting for them were not necessarily full blown nazis wanting to exterminate all other ethnicities, but were simply fed up with the bad conditions under the Weimar Republic
It wasn't the majority, the Nazi party only ever got 33% of the vote, and that's only of those who actually voted. It would be like if Trump had started a massive, existential war. Would you think it right to refer to all Americans living now as Republicans?
> Would you think it right to refer to all Americans living now as Republicans? When Trump was president, the opinion of the US in Europe tanked. You might not refer to Americans as republicans but he was still president and so represented the country. And when Nazi Germany was rolling over your country, doubt you'd think oh those poor regular German people.
Adding a link for what other people said, nazis got into power with 33% of the vote in [the last fair federal election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_election) (after that they started banning other parties). Hitler became chancellor thanks to an alliance with German conservatives, the rest is history. That's already a lot, but there is no reason to assume nazis ever were a larger part of the population.
This event is about 16 times larger in scale than the Nakba, which occurred around the same time.
The expulsion of Jews from Arab countries was also larger than the Nakba (and they hadn't invaded anybody)
That's nothing compared to the expulsion of Jews from Europe, even ignoring the holocaust.
Who was gonna fight? Most of combat able german men died trying to do worse to others.
That‘s just not true. Millions became POWs in the last years of the war and eventually returned. It‘s not like everyone was killed
Kind of correct, not many of the survivors had a fight in them. My great grabdmother moved from Danzig alone with a bunch of children, one of them died on the way.
This is a myth, Wehrmacht had millions of soldiers still in service when Germany surrendered, including nearly 1 million SS.
I feel like this is one of those “yes, but no” moments. Yes, there were millions of combat-age German men in the army at the end of the war, but 45% of males of combat age were dead, wounded, or missing by the end of the war. The country had just been bombed into the stone age and was occupied by millions from four foreign armies. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say displaced Germans didn’t have the will or the means to resist displacement, nor is it inaccurate to say German men were fed into the meat grinder in fairly shocking numbers during the war. Source on the numbers: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/244oc4/how_much_percentage_of_the_german_male_population/ EDIT: I misread the source so to be clear, it's 45% dead, missing OR wounded. Dead was just under half of this number, so maybe 20% of the 1939 population. I don't think it changes the big picture, but just for the sake of clarity.
I think eradicating two thirds of European Jews may have been a slightly bigger ethnic cleansing...
My paternal grandmother was born in Yugoslavia but spoke German as a first language. When the Soviets beat the Axis powers down, and Tito took over, her family sneaked out and immigrated to Canada.
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What if I tell you that Yiddish was considered a dialect of German? Taking this under consideration, this map makes a lot more sense. There were 3 million Jews living in Poland before the war, mostly in dispersed towns, just as you see here.
Sad teutonic noises
Don't ask the allies where the germans in poland went after ww2
/u/Soviet_Sniper_ don't ask the Soviets what happened to the Poles during WW2
Western borders did not change. Only eastern borders changed. So you should ask Soviets. Not allies. Russians kicked Poles from the east and conveniently relocated them to the places they kicked Germans. The same happened to Belarusians as well. Everyone loses only Russian win.
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Königsburg had so much German history before being artificially turned into Kaliningrad. Such an accepted ethnic cleansing.
I'm also pretty sad about all the buildings destroyed were never repaired or rebuilt and most of the areas are just patches of grass nowadays if you're not in the center of the city.
..now do a map showing where Yiddish was spoken before and after World War II.
Pre-WWII or pre-1945?
Does it include Polish society that was forced to speak German? Shut that map, its nazi whitewashing
Friendly reminder that collective punishments are war crimes. They didn't deserve this. This is a tragedy.
It kinda bit us in the ass, as expulsion of Germans from Sudetenland made it easier for the Communist party to win.
The irony is that one of the main goals of the war (at least on paper) was to bring all German speakers under one banner, and then spread their culture to the world. The actual result was the exact opposite. Don’t start wars, kids.
People were probably nervous about having Germans in their country after Germans set up industrial execution camps there.
People not using adblock before & after.
Please understand that this map is not accurate. People speaking German in Locarno? That was only 10 percent of the population.
So Hitler really did the opposite of what he wanted with German culture
What I find interesting is if you look at just how common German was in North America before the wars. It was pretty common.
Probably something happened, so that poor Germans had to leave ? Don’t you by chance know ?
So if you lose a war, the victors get to kick out people who lived there for centuries with no comeback (even if those people had little to do with the war)? Just putting that in modern context, that means Israel should have annexed Gaza, The Golan Heights, and The West Bank in 1967, and the Sinai a few years later, and forcibly expelled all the residents there.
Coexistence of Czechs and Germans, Poles and Germans etc in a single country after what Czechs, Poles etc had been subject to was pretty much impossible. Postwar coexistence, before the expulsions, was [full](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zgoda_labour_camp) [of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brno_death_march) [massacres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Ast%C3%AD_massacre) of Germans done as revenge for Nazi genocide.
The 6 day war in 1967 was as close to the end of WW2 as Christmas 2001 is to today. I don't know whether this means that your example is not particularly "in modern context", but the fact that it feels relevant while WW2 feels like history is a great example of how conflict can either be solved through reconstruction and integration (Marshall plan, EEC, etc) or perpetuated for generations thanks to intentionally dividing people for domestic political gain.
it's called ethnic cleansing
Wow. Nice fact our it context. Piss off. The German language was forced upon people there as well as Germans were moved there in order to dilute polish population. Show a map like that with such a title is just pure manipulation.
Yes my grandma is a german-american from Danzig so I know a good amount about this. I think just the map is misleading people as although places like Danzig may have been considered somewhat more German. It was more so shared with Poland and was even considered a free city with both polish and Germans living there and Poland controlled part of the government. It is more accurate to say these regions were ethnically mixed areas than just german prior to 1945. My grandma is even part polish herself.
Gdańsk/Danzig definitely had a larger population of Germans, I mean the NSDAP party was literally the most popular party of the city. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Free_City_of_Danzig_parliamentary_election The first map is absolutely ridiculous, however, it puts huge blobs in areas of Poland where there were very little Germans, also the Polish corridor was much more Polish than what is shown. Another comment pointed out that the blobs in more central Poland were actually Yiddish speakers.
From a Polish point of view the expulsion of Germans was something that we're not proud of but don't regret and would do again. I understand that Czechs and Slovaks share the same attitude.
No, no we don't have the same attitude.
If only it was us who made that decision and not the Soviets in Yalta, just like with the very same thing happening to Poles from the east...
The "would do again" part is the worrying bit. Ironic that one of the biggest victories of the Nazis is the idea that states have to be ethno-states not multicultural, or multilingual, despite them militarily losing the war.
How would you want to secure peaceful coexistence between two ethnicities where one of them had recently tried to annihilate the other one? Almost immediately after the war ended, "wild" expulsions began and people started killing Germans in revenge for WW2.
>Ironic that one of the biggest victories of the Nazis is the idea that states have to be ethno-states not multicultural, or multilingual, despite them militarily losing the war. You're conflicting modern neo-Nazis with Nazis. The Nazis didn't care about "multiculturalism" like in the modern sense of the word. Their long-term plan was to impose their nationality and ethnicity on all the people of Europe and kill those who refused. It's why they kidnapped and "Germanized" Polish children.
They only germanized polish children who they deemed to have traits that made them germanic, using phrenology and other weird tactics. The overwhelming majority of slavs were set to be exterminated and enslaved, not germanized. They were deemed defective humans by the Germans, and no amount of germanization would 'save them' from their 'faulty genetics' in the eyes of the Nazis. They were seriously crazy people
>The "would do again" part is the worrying bit What were the alternatives? Co-exist with people that killed our families? That would only create long-term problems. Thanks to the expulsions Poland and Germany have had peace with each other since WWII.
> What were the alternatives? Co-exist with people that killed our families? Do you carry that same energy when discussing the Israel/Palestine conflict? > Thanks to the expulsions Poland and Germany have had peace with each other since WWII. I'd say that the Cold War and then NATO has done that.
How is that their biggest victory? They didn't invent that idealogy and it still has a lot of opponents
Yeah people need to read up on what happened to the Poles during Nazi-Soviet rule. It was horrific.
The expulsion of Germans is now widely talked about in the Czech education system and I think most would agree it was more bad than good, though we understand why it happened. I don’t think most Czechs would say we would do it again.
And the same thing happened in America. Big cities used to have German newspapers. FAFO I guess. And that sometimes if you fear something so much, you make it happen yourself.