ABSTRACT
The extent of the involvement of the German Democratic Republic’s armed forces in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 is a matter of dispute. By recognizing and accepting that fact, it is possible to better understand the long-term consequences of each occupation regime as one among several factors that shape contemporary German–Polish and German–Czech relations. In the early years of the Cold War, the dramatic way in which lessons had been drawn from the failure to solve the German question in 1919 was the expulsion of more than 10 million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. The forced migration of more than 10 million Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia to occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War added a new dimension to the German question. The attempts at a constructive Ostpolitik thus began to run into the sand, and what sealed their fate was the series of developments in Czechoslovakia, known as the Prague Spring.
