1945

Summary

This is the first of two snapshots – of Germany in 1945, when it became the hub of the largest migration movement of modern European times. The short snapshots consist of direct quotations from representatives of the key transmigrant, migrant, and immigrant groups and set the tone for the chapters that follow. In 1945 these were nearly 3 million soldiers of the Allied armies (Britain, France, United States, USSR); demobilized Wehrmacht soldiers; millions of ethnic German expellees from Eastern Europe who fled the advancing Red Army; 10 million Displaced Persons, especially liberated Allied POWs and forced laborers, mainly from Eastern Europe or the USSR, as well as survivors of the Nazi extermination and concentration camps; and 9 million German civilian evacuees who returned from the countryside to the urban centers. The snapshot highlights the conflicts between these groups, which brought perpetrators and victims in close contact; the fight for limited resources like food and housing in a largely destroyed Germany; and the pervasive sense of a devastated continent on the move.