ABSTRACT
The twentieth century is a new era of mass migrations. Vast nations have been displaced. Millions of refugees have perished. Of all these involuntary population movements by far the most momentous from the point of view of historical consequences — and also the best documented — was the flight and expulsion of the Germans from Eastern and Central Europe at the end of the Second World War. Had there been no Hitler and no war, 15 million German men and women would still live in their 700-year-old homelands of East Prussia, Pomerania, Eastern Brandenburg and Silesia, in the former Teutonic Order cities of Danzig and Memel, in the Bohemian Sudetenland and in hundreds of settlements throughout Eastern Europe. The physical and psychological suffering of the uprooted millions can hardly be estimated. To this day the wounds have not completely healed.
