I just watched a BBC documentary entitled "1945: The Savage Peace" (which can be found on youtube) about " the treatment of German civilians in former occupied countries after World War II, with eyewitnesses and victims recalling the horrors with searing clarity."
Despite being a fan of the BBC i try to be cautious with the documentary as a media for transmission of knowledge (the constraint of the format, target audience, power of images, et cetera). So i am coming here in the hope of getting a clearer and sourced view of this period/those events (who knows, there might be an expert here)
More precisely i would like to know in which country it happened (Poland and Czechoslovakia were mainly mentionned in the documentary), who perpetrated what (how involved was the random civilian?), the implication of the allieds forces and of the russians, the situation/context/reasons, the scope of the killings and how long it lasted.
Please AskHistorians, give me a big (sourced) picture ! (feel free to get broader than what i listed, anything that you feel is important is worth mentionning).
The expulsions of Germans following WWII are generally considered to be the largest migration of refugees in history.
The deportations occurred in almost every country where there had been Germans before the war; from the faraway Volga Germans to those who lived in East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia - regions where Germans had lived for centuries. The principle nations are Poland and Czechoslovakia, however there were also expellees from the USSR, Yugoslavia, Romania, and even the Netherlands - the so-called "Operation Black Tulip".
The perpetrators varied. The Czechslovakian government introduced a far-reaching program of discrimination and deprivation of citizenship - the Benes decrees. The Polish and Romanian governments - backed to varying degrees by Soviet authorities - undertook similar policies. However, especially in Poland, there was also a good deal of intercommunal violence from civilians. Reprisal attacks against Germans were very common.
The Russians and the Allies had signed off on this process and endorsed it via the Potsdam Agreement, which stated that Germans were to be removed "in an orderly and humane manner" from their former territories.
The context is that Germany had visited enormous cruelties upon these nations in an attempt to create an ethnic empire in Europe. These German populations had often been complicit in that - for instance, the Sudeten Nazi party was very active with provocations etc prior to the Munich Agreement.
Compared to other democides during WWII, the death toll was relatively low. The German government maintains a figure of 2.2 million dead based on demographic estimates; however more recent research suggests a significantly smaller figure of around 500,000.
The process lasted until the 1950s in many areas; however the collapse of the USSR saw a large number of Volga Germans, who had been forced into exile in Kazakhstan, return to Germany. It's not a dead issue in European politics either; there is a German Federation of Expellees, which is highly controversial, and in 2008 the Czech Republic requested and received a protocol to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union that would let them opt out, as they feared Czech Charter ratification would let expelled Germans sue the Czech government under EU human rights law.