The European Atrocity You Never Heard About

The European Atrocity You Never Heard About

R.M. Douglas -- The Chronicle of Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/article/The-European-Atrocity-You/132123/

... Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians - the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16 - were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland ... Tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies' cynical formulation, "reparations in kind") in a vast network of camps ... By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a man-made disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history.