4) Ethnic German Population Statistics in Former Eastern Territories and beyond before the Second World War:
Varied sources including: German Federal Statistical Office (Wiesbaden) 1958 & Gerhardt Reichling Die deutschen Vertribenen in Zahlen 1986
5) Timeline for Official Statistical Research on German Civilian Deaths as a Result of the Expulsions:
6) Additional information on the German figures:
It is impossible to arrive at exact figures for total German civilian losses due to the exceptionally poor record keeping of the Soviet authorities for those German civilians, both inside and outside the borders of the Reich, who were deported as slave labourers to the Siberian Gulags. The same is true of the precise effects of the punitive and inept occupation policies of the Allies, particularly in the first two years of the occupation, in which a combination of starvation rations, lack of heating fuel and medicines led to mass starvation and appalling child mortality rates.
German Federal Government figures show just under 17 million Germans living in the eastern territories and beyond (not including the 2.4 million ethnic Germans in Russia) before the war. Of these, Reichling and other sources show around 12.5 million survived to make it to West and East Germany or Austria, leaving a shortfall of around 4.5 million. Initially over 2 million ethnic and former Reich Germans remained in Eastern Europe (again not including the Germans in Russia), many of whom were retained as slave or enforced labourers (the largest group of 870,000 consisted of those who had taken the ‘Polish Option’ to remain in Silesia). This figure of those remaining, however, continued to decline as they died, were eventually ‘transferred’, or brought/bought out by the West German government. Overall the German Federal Ministry of Expellees listed 2.225 million as dead and missing in 1958, as a result of the process of ethnically cleansing the Germans from Central-Eastern Europe. Work undertaken by the German Protestant and Catholic churches in conjunction with the German Red Cross during the 1950s and 1960s and finalised in 1965 put the figure at 2.251 million. The German Red Cross and the German government continue to stick to this figure although it continues to be disputed, with both far higher and far lower numbers having been produced over the decades since the expulsions took place.
Figures for the number of ethnic Germans who were deported to the Gulags have varied enormously, as I have indicated in the book, from a disingenuous 200,000 to Reichling’s 1,010,000, of which only 300,000 are recorded as returning. Since the figures were issued by the German Federal Ministry back in 1958, the estimates of those deported and their death tolls has been revised upwards. In relation to those ‘kept’ in the East and/or transferred to the Soviet Gulags, assuming a death rate similar to German POWs of circa 59 per cent, although civilian death rates were generally higher, I have added a further 367,000 to the figures of the German Federal Ministry of Statistics. This figure is based on a median figure between the 800,000 recorded in the Gulags by the Red Cross and Reichling’s 1.010 million, giving a total of 905,000 as deported. Of these 300,000 are recorded as having returned, leaving 605,000 minus a death toll of 59 per cent which gives you the additional figure. This is a best estimate based on the available figures; the actual total could be higher still. Therefore 2.225 million dead and ‘missing’ victims of the expulsions + 367,000 additional victims of the deportations = a total of 2.592 million.
For the ethnic Germans in Russia, the best information available shows that in 1937–38 during Stalin’s murderous purges 122,237 death sentences were handed down to the German ‘Enemies within’. On 28th August 1941 the order was issued for the deportation of 1.2 million Crimean and Volga Germans, primarily to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Of these, best available estimates state 700,000 of them died. The overall German death toll therefore amounts to 822,000. The bulk of the surviving Russian Germans immigrated to West Germany once the opportunity afforded itself in the 1980s and 90s.(1) Add these 822,000 who died as a result of their being classified as Germans to the above figure of 2.592 million = a total of 3.414 million.
The total dead from the carpet-bombing of German cities and consequences of dehousing cost a further 700,000 civilian lives. Add this to the above figures and you arrive at a combined total of 4.114 million.
Totally accurate figures do not yet exist for the consequences of the combined Allied occupation. Starvation rations, the restrictions on trade, import of fertilisers, medicine, heating fuel, the ban on the German Red Cross and the extremely harsh winters of 1946 and 1947 took a further massive toll. Estimates of those in charge at the time from Robert Murphy to Lucius Clay assessed the losses in terms of very high child mortality rates, disease, malnutrition and exposure to be in the order of 2 million, and this is the figure I have used. One could add even higher figures if one were to calculate the fall in birth rates, but I have left this out as being too speculative. Therefore the total German civilian death toll as a result of the war, expulsions and the occupation comes to:
Total German civilian death toll: 6.114 million
Add this to the total German military deaths including all MIAs and POWs of 5.3 million and you have an overall German death toll for the Second World War and its immediate aftermath of:
Total German and military and civilian death toll: 11.414 million
7) Conclusions on the German civilian figures
The figures remain hotly disputed, ranging from a quite simply risible 400,000 (roughly 2% of the total number of people forcibly removed from their homelands) to 3+ million. There has never been a group in any conflict whose mortality statistics have been so cynically abused and used as a political football to try and excuse the illegal and immoral rationale that caused them. Those responsible made absolutely no distinction (unlike certain modern historians) as to who was ‘legally‘ German. Subsequently millions of ethnic Germans who were abused for belonging to the ‘wrong’ ethnic group and were in the wrong place at the wrong time have been left out of studies. Stalin, the Red Army, NKVD, Polish and Czech militias, Yugoslav partisans made no fine distinctions. It mattered not to them whether you and your family had been communist or fascist, Wehrmacht soldier or bitter opponent to the Nazi regime; if you spoke German, lived in what for centuries had been a German community, you were done for. Even today if you visit Romania, the tiny remnant of the German community which has been settled there since the start of the twelfth century are still referred to as ‘Germans’ (not Romanian Germans), even though their forbears have been in this region for more than thirty generations.
Those who try and play down the numbers and use multiple ruses to reduce the figures play around with legal technicalities for who was German when and where, which are and were irrelevant, and more often than not they only include Germans in the statistics who were in Germany as per her 1937 borders, rather than Germans in Germany and Austria before their borders were manipulated and changed around from 1918 onwards. It is erroneous to put people on the wrong side of a border and then blame them for being there, not least when they were put there against their will, without the right to self determination, and then expected to be loyal to the states in which they were made second-class citizens at best and abused minorities at worst.
Those playing down both the suffering and the enormity of the genocide committed against German civilians across central and eastern Europe never make a full account and, beyond manipulating the above said legal technicalities, always leave out the ethnic Germans in the USSR, who were perhaps one of the communities to suffer the most and for the longest. They also invariably leave out ethnic Germans in Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, yet again ignoring that it was the inept Allied border changes after the First World War that made them minorities in the first place.
As this book has demonstrated, to gain an understanding of the greatest demographic shift in German and European history since the fall of the Roman Empire and to have some understanding of the enormity of the casualties inflicted upon German civilians, you have to include all those killed in the on
slaught by the Red Army from January 1945 onwards; including ALL those who were massacred during the fighting and its immediate aftermath, those who died or were killed attempting to flee, those on fleeing refugee ships torpedoed in the Baltic, those strafed on the ice and the long treks west, those bombed at the disembarkation ports, those who froze to death in sub zero temperatures, those too old, sick or young to survive the journey, those dragged off as slave labourers to Siberia, those interned as slave labourers in the territories occupied and then annexed, those transported in sub-human conditions on long journeys in cattle trucks both west and east, those raped, gang-raped and either murdered or left to die from their injuries, and those who committed suicide rather than be left to the mercy of the occupiers. And, not least, those who were starved and worked to death as a result of both deliberate and inept policies of the Allied occupation. Include all those, for all territories in question, which must include East Prussians and Silesians fleeing through Bohemia (some accounts only count those Germans killed in Czechoslovakia who lived there, as if the world around this outcrop was not in flames, collapsing, and the ancient territory of Bohemia and Moravia were not filled to overflowing with refugees from every quarter). Then and only then will you come to anything like a real appreciation of the unimaginable slaughter that marked the collapse of the Third Reich.
And finally, the idea that you will find anyone, other than a pure saint (and there are a few) from the Czech Republic or Poland who would ever have any interest in arriving at a true figure is naïve in the extreme. None of the states, or their representatives that benefited from the territorial gains and the vast wealth in land, property, infrastructure, industry, businesses and cultural artefacts, is ever going to do anything other than attempt to play down the size of the gains, the true cost of inflicting them or the means by which they were achieved. That, by and large, still remains a perspective too far even 70 years on. One that successive German governments and the leading political class have also been far too cowed, weak and all too often too ignorant to challenge. There is, after all, no other nation that has educated its own people against its own historical interests more effectively, more consistently, or which has gone to such lengths to demonstrate that it no longer has any legitimate historical interests. Not least when it comes to standing up for its own citizens who were born in territories that were illegally annexed by its neighbours. A long and cynical game has been played by many governments and historians to try and present Germans from these territories as having no legitimate interests and of their abused citizens not possessing an equal right to have their cases heard. And there unfortunately continues to be no shortage of professional historians both inside and outside Germany for whom the only good Germans are either dead or self loathing ones.
8) Census data:
Further evidence of the overall German death toll can be extrapolated from the pre- and post-war census data:
German Census Data:
1910 – 65 million
1939 – 79.3 million*
1946 – 65 million
*The 1939 census included Austrian and the Sudeten Germans.
To arrive at a figure for the other Germans living outside the Reich, who also became victims at the end of the war and post-war period, you need to add the following to arrive at a total figure:
1.371 million in Poland (in territories ceded after the First World War e.g. West Prussia/Polish Corridor, Upper Silesia)
786,000 in Romania (Siebenburgen)
623,000 in Hungary (Burgenland etc.)
536,000 in Yugoslavia (Banat etc.)
350,000 in Italy (South Tirol)
250,000 in Baltic States
2.400 million in Soviet Union (Volga and Crimea)
_______________
+ 6.316 million
= 85.613 million total German population figures in Europe before the war
To arrive at an overall German death toll you need to start with the overall number of Germans counted by the Allies in all four occupation zones in October 1946, which came to 65 million. To this, we need to add 6.5 million German Austrians + around 2 million Germans remaining in Eastern Europe + 1.7 million surviving German Russians.
= 75.200 million total German population figures in Europe after the war
= 10.413 million dead*
*However, the German civilian death toll would continue to rise after the census figures compiled in October 1946, for the reasons indicated on the previous pages.
9) Emigration possibilities:
The Allies forbade German emigration until July 1950, as they wanted to prevent leading Nazi war criminals escaping through the net and because they needed labour to rebuild the shattered country. Some certainly did evade the ban and headed primarily to South America during the late 1940s, but the figures for Brazil, for example, show these to be only a handful, in the tens of thousands. Today Brazil has the largest number of ethnic Germans outside of Germany, but contrary to popular perceptions the bulk of German immigration to Brazil and other parts of South America occurred in the nineteenth century.
10) The total cost of the Second World War:
The Second World War was the most destructive conflict in world history, and by far the most costly in terms of civilian deaths. In an era of ‘Total War’, civilians became part of the front line. Figures for the total death toll have been revised upwards in recent years, particularly for the major combatants: namely Russia, Germany and the Asian Pacific region. The total figure is now estimated to stand between 50 and 65 million.1
AXIS POWERS
Countries Population Military Deaths Wounded Civilian Deaths Total Dead
Germany 79 million 5,300,000 6,035,000 6,114,000 *11,414,000
Japan 71 million 2,041,000 85,600 350,000 2,391,000
Italy 45 million **330,000 — 145,000 475,000
Hungary 9 million 300,000 250,000 80,000 380,000
Romania 20 million 300,000 300,000 64,000 364,000
*German figures include Austria and Sudetenland, i.e. territories incorporated into the Third Reich. German military death figures range from 3.5 million to 5.3 million, with figures having been revised upwards in recent years as for decades proper account was not taken of the missing. German civilian losses are still hotly disputed and sources vary enormously. This number consists of the German government’s own figures compiled in the 1950s (supported by the research of the German churches and Red Cross) for the 2.225 million dead, missing and assumed dead victims of the ethnic cleansing and deportations from all across Eastern Europe. They did not, however, include the death tolls for the Crimean and Volga Germans, who were deported and/or interned in the Gulags and died in their hundreds of thousands for being ‘German’. I have included their death toll at a further 822,000. Nor were the death tolls of Germans deported from all over Eastern Europe to the Soviet Gulags fully taken into account in the 1950s, which more recent research has revised upwards; I have concluded a median additional death toll of 367,000. There are anywhere between 600,000 and 800,000 civilian deaths attributable to the bombing of German cities, both in terms of the immediate death toll, and those who died of their injuries and the consequences of being ‘dehoused’ (for which I have taken a median figure of 700,000). Finally, for the death toll through starvation rations, disease and child mortality rates during the Allied occupation of Germany, for which they held legal responsibility, I have included a figure of 2 million. (See also the Appendix section ‘Additional Information on German figures’ for more detailed information on the German stats.)
**Italy had circa 200,000 military deaths on the Axis side and a further 130,000 on the Allied side including partisans. There are no reliable figures for the Italian wounded.
ALLIED POWERS
Countries Population Military Deaths Wounded Civilian Deaths Total Dead
Russia 175 million *11,400,000 14,700,000 15,000,000 **26,400,000
Poland 27 million 320,000 200,000 ***2,400,000 2,720,000
G.
Britain 47.7 million ****580,000 475,000 67,000 647,000
France 41.7 million 212,000 350,000 260,000 472,000
USA 131 million 295,000 300,000 1,700 296,700
Yugoslavia 15 million 446,000 — 514,000 960,000
*This figure includes the 3.1 million Soviet POWs killed in captivity, starved or worked to death.
** There is a vast discrepancy in Soviet casualty figures, with military deaths ranging from 8.7–13.6 million and civilian deaths from 7–19 million. Most combined figures arrive at a staggering circa 26 million.
*** Polish civilian dead figure does not include Poland’s Jews, who are listed as victims of the Holocaust separately below.
**** These figures are for the British Commonwealth as a whole. UK military deaths were 382,600 in Europe and the Far East. Civilian deaths were mostly down to German bombing and V weapons.
N.B. Chinese overall casualty figures and the suffering of China, as a result of the civil war and at the hands of the Japanese, would justify another book in itself. The colossal death toll suffered by China may well exceed that suffered by the Soviet Union at the hands of Nazi Germany. Estimates range from a minimum total of 20 million to a staggering 35 million Chinese dead, with the vast majority of these being Chinese civilians.
JEWISH HOLOCAUST
6,000,000*
Death of a Nation Page 86
