Book Review: Orderly and Humane by R.M. Douglas
Full
disclosure, Ray Douglas was one of my history professors at Colgate
University.
That
said, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion
of the Germans After the Second World War delves into a history many people
have forgotten, even those who lived it.
After World War II ended, millions of German-speakers remained in
Eastern Europe. Some of them were settlers
sent East by the Nazis, to Germanize the conquered territories, but most of
them came from families that had been there since the Middle Ages. The governments of the newly liberated
countries, especially Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia, considered the
“ethnic Germans,” called Volksdeutsche
in the book, as guilty as the Nazis for the war and all the suffering visited
upon the peoples of Europe. Furthermore,
the continued presence of Volksdeutsche
outside of Germany would be a threat to Europe’s future peace. Eastern Europe, with support from the Western
Allies and the Soviet Union, began forcing the Volksdeutsche to leave for Germany in mass expulsions that lasted from
the end of the war to the early fifties.
