The Heimatvertriebene in general are aware and recognize the fact that, since 1945, Poles have been living in former eastern German homelands. The officially proposed policy is not to repeat the post-war expulsions with new persecutions and population transfers. Most Heimatvertriebene accept the territorial changes of 1945 and consider the Poles now living in former East Germany as friends and neighbors in the European Union.

The remaining German minority in Poland (152,897 people according to the 2002 census) is granted some minority rights and the German language can be used as what the Polish minority act calls a "subsidiary language" in several German-populated powiats/Gemeinden, mostly in the [[Opole voivodship]/Bezirk Oppeln].

The concentrated German minority of the Opole/Oppeln district is still awaiting for bilingual signs to be put up in municipalities with a German population of more than 20% as outlined in the 2005 minority act. In addition many representatives of expelees organizations support the erection of bilingual signs in all formerly German speaking territory as a visible sign of the bilingual linguistic and cultural heritage of the region.

Expulsion of Germans after World War II - Czechoslovakia

See also: Beneš decrees, Sudetenland

In Czech-German relations, the topic has been effectively closed by the Czech-German declaration of 1997. One principle of declaration is that parties will not burden their relations with political and legal issues which stem from the past.

However, some expelled Sudeten Germans or their descendants are demanding return of their former property, which was confiscated after the war. Several such cases have been taken to Czech courts. As confiscated estates usually have new inhabitants, some of whom have lived there for more than 50 years, attempts to return to a pre-war state may cause fear. The topic comes to life occasionally in Czech politics. Like in Poland, worries and restrictions concerning land purchases exist in the Czech Republic. According to a survey by the Allensbach Institut in November 2005, 38 % of Czechs believe Germans want to regain territory they lost or will demand compensation.

The remaining German minority in the Czech Republic is granted some rights on paper, however the actual use of the language in dealings with officials is usually not possible. There is no bilingual education system in Western and Northern Bohemia, where the German minority is most concentrated. The Czech authorities have enacted a unique hurdle in their minority act. WHile the erection of bilingual signs is technically permitted if a minority constitutes 10% of the population, the minority is also forced to sign a petition in favour of the signs in which 40% of the adult minority population must participate. According to the 2001 census there remain 13 municipalities and settlements in the Czech Republic with more than 10% Germans.

Many representatives of expelees organizations support the erection of bilingual signs in all formerly German speaking territory as a visible sign of the bilingual linguistic and cultural heritage of the region.

In 2005 Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek announced an initiative to publicise and formerly recognise the deeds of Sudeten German Anti-Nazis. Although the move was received positively by most Sudeten Germans and the German minority, there has been criticism that the initiative is limited to Anti-Nazis who actively fought for the Czechoslovak state, but not Anti-Nazis in general. The German minority in particular also expected some financial compensation for their mistreatment after the War.

The situation in Slovakia was different from that in Czechia, in that the number of Germans was considerably lower and that the Germans from Slovakia were almost completely evacuated to German states as the Soviet army was moving west through Slovakia, and only the fraction of them that returned to Slovakia after the end of the war was deported together with the Germans from Czechia.

Expulsion of Germans after World War II - Hungary

In Hungary the persecution of the German minority began in 22 December 1944 when the Soviet Commander-in-Chief ordered the deportations. Five percent of the German population (appr. 20 000 people) had been evacuated by the Volksbund before that. They went to Austria, but many of them returned to their home next spring. In January 1945 the Soviet Army collected 32 000 ethnic Germans and deported them to the Soviet Union to do slave labour (malenkiy robot). Many of them died there because of the hardships and cruelties. On 29 December 1945 the new Hungarian Government ordered the deportation of every people who declared him/herself German in the census of 1941 or was a member of the Volksbund, the SS and any other armed German organisation. According to this decree mass deportations began. The first wagon departed from Budaörs (Wudersch) on 19 January 1946 with 5788 people. 185-200 000 German-speaking Hungarian citizen was deprived from their rights and every possession, and deported to West-Germany. Until July 1948 a more 50 000 people went to the eastern zone of Germany. Most of the deported Germans found a new home in Baden-Württemberg, Bayern and Hessen. In 1947 and 1948 a forced population exchange happened between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Some 74 000 ethnic Hungarians were deported from Slovakia in exchange for about the same number of Slovaks from Hungary. They and the Székelys of Bukovina were settled in the former German villages of southeastern Transdanubia. In some parts of Tolna, Baranya and Somogy counties the original population was totally replaced by the new settlers. In 1949 only 22 455 people dared to declare him/herself German, but the real numbers were certainly higher. Propably half of the German community was able to survive in Hungary the dark years between 1944 and 1950. Today they have minority rights, organisations, schools and local councils but spontaneous assimilation is well under way. Many of the deportees visited their old homes after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990.

Expulsion of Germans after World War II - Russia

Ethnic Germans living in a small section of Russia were deported after the war. The Kaliningrad area of Russia, now a small exclave seperated by the rest of Russia by Lithuania and Belarus, was part of Germany for most of its history. Kaliningrad's former German name was Königsberg, and it was an important city in the history of Germany. Immanuel Kant, the famous German philosipher, was in fact born here, in present-day Russia. Along with a section of Poland, the Kaliningrad exclave was the German state of East Prussia, at that time also an exclave, but of Germany rather than Russia. After the war, Germans living here were expelled and replaced by ethnic Russian settlers. They mostly headed to Germany. Today, in Germany, especially former East Germany, many descendants of Germans who were expelled from Russia still remain.

Expulsion of Germans after World War II - Development

From the time that the policy was undertaken until the 1990s, there was little argument over the morality of the policy. Many of the propaganda themes of the Nazi regime against Czechoslovakia and Poland claimed that the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) in those territories were persecuted. Although expellees (in German Heimatvertriebene) and their descendants were active in West German politics, the prevailing political climate within West Germany was that of atonement for Nazi actions. However the CDU governments have shown large rhetorical support for the expellees, and the Oder-Neisse line was for decades officially considered completely unacceptable. The expellees are still highly active in German politics, and are one of the major political factions of the nation, with around 2 million members. The president of their organizations is as of 2004 still a member of the national parliament.

In 1946, Winston Churchill delivered a memorable speech in Fulton, Missouri in the presence of US President Truman. Churchill made the USA aware of the Iron Curtain coming down "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic". In this speech, Churchill also emphasised the wrongful Soviet-directed Polish incursions into Germany (that is, the land east of the Oder-Neisse line) and the plight of millions of refugees/expellees. However, taking into account his personal responsibility for the decisions made in Potsdam, the sentence would seem to have been motivated by the contemporary political agenda.

US Congressman B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee, in the House of Representatives on May 16, 1957, called it genocide.

In November and December, 1993, an exhibit on Ethnic Cleansing 1944-1948 was held at Stuart Center of De Paul University, in Chicago, where it was called an unknown holocaust.

In the early 1990s the Cold War ended and the occupying powers withdrew from Germany. The issue of the treatment of Germans after World War II began to be reexamined, having previously been in the shadow of German war crimes. The primary motivation for this change was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed previously marginalised issues such as crimes committed by Russians during World War II to be raised.

On 28 December 1989, Václav Havel, at that time a candidate for president of Czechoslovakia (he was elected one day later), suggested that Czechoslovakia should apologise for the expulsion of ethnic Germans after WWII. Most of other politicians of the country didn't agree, and there was also no reply from leaders of Sudeten German organizations. Later, the German President Richard von Weizsacker answered this by apologizing to Czechoslovakia during his visit to Prague on March 1990 after Václav Havel repeated his apology saying that the expulsion is "the mistakes and sins of our fathers".

The 1991 Polish-German border agreement finalized the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish-German border. The agreement gave to minority groups in both countries several rights, such as the right to use national surnames, speak their native languages, and attend schools and churches of their choice. These rights had been denied previously on the basis that the individual had already chosen the country in which they wanted to live.

Reports have surfaced of Soviet massacres of German civilians (see the book A Terrible Revenge). Also, some of the former German concentration camps were used as temporary camps for Germans.

Both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Lev Kopelev, during their Soviet military service, had objected to the brutal treatment of German civilians of East Prussia. Lev Kopelev wrote about the events in East Prussia in the autobiographic trilogy To Be Preserved Forever (Хранить вечно, Khranit' Venchno).

Since 1990, historical events have been examined by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. Its role is to investigate the crimes of the past without regard to the nationality of victims and perpetrators. In Poland, crimes motivated by the nationality of victims are not covered by a statute of limitations, therefore the criminals can be charged in perpetuity. In a few cases, the crimes against Germans were examined. One suspected perpetrator, Salomon Morel, fled the country to Israel, which has denied the Polish requests for his extradition.