It was believed, that since Adolf Hitler used existence of large German minorities in other countries as pretext for waging aggressive wars, removing Germans from territories of other countries will remove potential causes of future problems. Also, there was little empathy for German victims, since they themselves started policy of ethnic cleansing in occupied territories, for example in Greater Poland.
The subjects of this policy included Germans living east of the Oder-Neisse line, ethnic Germans living in Poland and Sudetenland Germans in Czechoslovakia. Communists also expelled ethnic Germans from other eastern European countries. Many expelled Germans found refuge in West Germany, a few in East Germany, and large numbers in many countries of the world.
At the time the policy was undertaken and 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 the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) 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, and even within West Germany there was little sympathy for the claims of the expellees.
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 1990s the Iron Curtain came down. The issue of the treatment of Germans after World War II for the first time began to be reexamined. The primary motivations for this was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed previously untouchable issues such as crimes committed by Russians during World War II to be raised.
Reports have surfaced of Soviet massacres of German civilians (see the book A Terrible Revenge). Also some of former German concentration camps were used as temporal camps for Germans.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during his Soviet military service had objected to the brutal murder of German civilians of East Prussia. For that he was put in Siberian Gulag for 10 years. There he memorized and later documented his experiences in the military as well as in the Gulag.
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