Was the expulsion of Germans after World War II politically justified?

driftingseal12 said:Give me a break.🤣

Definition of genocide

Article 2 of The Convention defines genocide as

...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of The Group ; ( C ) Deliberately inflicting on The Group conditions of Life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part ; ( d ) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within The Group;
(c) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of The Group ; ( C ) Deliberately inflicting on The Group conditions of Life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part ; ( d ) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within The Group;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within The Group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

– Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2 [ 3 ]

Expulsion of Germans after World War II

With at least 12 million[195][196][197] Germans directly involved, possibly 14 million or more, it was the largest movement or transfer of any single ethnic population in modern history[196] and largest among the, post-war expulsions in Central and Eastern Europe (which displaced more than twenty million people in total).[195]. Many German civilians were also sent to internment and labor camps. RJ Rummel estimates that 1,585,000 Germans were killed in Poland and 197,000 were killed in Czechoslovakia.[198] The events have been usually classified as population transfer,[199] or as ethnic cleansing.[200] Martin Shaw (2007) and W. D. Rubinstein (2004) describe the expulsions as genocide.[201] Felix Ermacora writing in 1991, (in line with a minority of legal scholars, considered ethnic cleansing to be genocide)[202][203] and stated that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was genocide.[204]

"...any of the following actions carried out with the specific goal of destroying, whether entirely or just partially, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in its capacity as such:"
It just doesn't apply when you're talking about the Germans. There really isn't any intention to destroy Germans as a people. And that’s exactly why there’s no genocide.
It wasn't really an issue of wiping out Germans from the Sudetenland, Silesia, Prussia, or the Danube regions—it was more about relocation. While there were certainly instances where lives were lost, that was a much smaller fraction of the overall story, and honestly, those deaths weren't usually driven by ethnicity alone. It’s a bit more nuanced than just one single factor when you look at the broader picture.

People weren't really debating whether to wipe out the Germans entirely, it was more about slashing their population, leveling their cities and industry, and basically turning Germany back into a giant farming community.

Richard Wilson4 said:People weren't really debating whether to wipe out the Germans entirely, it was more about slashing their population, leveling their cities and industry, and basically turning Germany back into a giant farming community.

But in the end, the Americans stepped in and blocked all of that. Their logic was pretty straightforward: they wanted to rebuild Germany into a respectable, stable nation as quickly as possible to serve as one of the primary bulwarks against the Red menace.

James Nguyen13 said:But in the end, the Americans stepped in and blocked all of that. Their logic was pretty straightforward: they wanted to rebuild Germany into a respectable, stable nation as quickly as possible to serve as one of the primary bulwarks against the Red menace.

Honestly, it was a stroke of luck that that communist Roosevelt kicked the bucket, even though he managed to mess up half of Europe at Yalta by handing it over to another totalitarian regime... 👎

It would have basically been a form of genocide, too. You had the Mexicans thinking about keeping some version of America within those old borders—with plenty of massacres along the way—while the others were planning on starving millions of Germans to death.

I’m honestly not sure how this ties back to Roosevelt. It wasn't like he just handed over half of Europe to the Russians on a silver platter; they simply moved in and took control, and there wasn't much anyone could have done to change that reality at the time. Neither Roosevelt nor anyone else in the USA had any intention of surrendering Western Europe—Germany included.

James Nguyen13 said:I’m honestly not sure how this ties back to Roosevelt. It wasn't like he just handed over half of Europe to the Russians on a silver platter; they simply moved in and took control, and there wasn't much anyone could have done to change that reality at the time. Neither Roosevelt nor anyone else in the USA had any intention of surrendering Western Europe—Germany included.

They gave up the Czech Republic, for example. Even Patton pulled back a few miles from Prague.

Richard Wilson4 said:They gave up the Czech Republic, for example. Even Patton pulled back a few miles from Prague.

Honestly, they gave away much more than that to the communists. Think about it—they ceded large portions of Finland (which they could have taken entirely), parts of Greece, Northern Iran, and South Korea (and yes, in those early days right after the war, almost all of Korea was under communist control), plus Trieste, parts of Korea, and eventually much of Austria.
When it comes to Czechoslovakia, the agreement was simply to accept a democratic government, which the USSR actually respected during those first three years. In short, the USSR made up for that withdrawal from Czechoslovakia many times over elsewhere.