The German Question, Part One Hundred Fifty-Six

"Hitler & The German Question" Part Two

Hitler's increasingly violent racism certainly excluded German Jews as being "Germans," first with legal measures and later by mass murder.

As in Poland, Germans were forcibly expelled from Czechoslovakia immediately after the end of the war, and those expulsions continued for more than a year, but some Germans remained, in some cases being "retained;" that is, not permitted to leave by the Czech government, because of special work skills. The numbers were relatively small compared to the prewar German population. There were deaths among the German population during the expulsions, and the number of casualties is very much in dispute, but 15,000 to 20,000 is a likely minimum.

The Soviet military began arresting Germans in Hungary, even before the war was over. Thousands were sent to the Soviet Union, never to return. After the war, the communist government of Hungary expelled tens of thousands of Germans to occupied Germany and Austria, but even then some Germans remained as part of the national Hungarian population. In the case of Rumania too, thousands of Germans had fled the advancing Red Army, but at least a quarter of a million Germans remained, although as communism "waned" (there's that word, see previous "Word History") in the late 1980s, many left for Germany. Similar happened in the Soviet Union, although untold thousands of ethnic Germans died in Soviet prisons or labor camps, or when they were forcibly moved from their home areas to Siberia or to other remote regions.

As the war wound down in Yugoslavia, many Germans fled, but many were killed by communist resistance or military units, or sent to Soviet labor camps. Quite a number of the Germans from northern Yugoslavia eventually emigrated to the United States in the 1950s, with many coming to Cleveland, where their presence, more so now their descendants, is still evident.

Austria was reestablished as an independent nation, although a pro-German unification party remained on election ballots, with an ever decreasing share of the vote as the years ticked by. I must admit, I regret the separation of Austria from Germany, and I often wonder if things would have been different, if Austria had become part of Germany after World War One, as was likely before the Versailles Treaty forbade it. Would the Germans still have gone berserk under Hitler or some other right wing leader? Maybe, as let's not forget where the chief nutcase came from... Austria!

It is my "intention" to finish this series in three more articles: the next one about the western boundaries, one about the positive German contributions to the world (especially after all of this nasty period of Hitler and the Nazis), and one with a basic bibliography. I'm not guaranteeing it will be just three articles, but let's see if I can do it.

WORD HISTORY:
Wax-This is the now archaic verb, not the substance made by bees or used for candles, and it is most commonly used in modern times in the expression "wax and wane" (see previous article for "wane"), and it is related to English "eke," as in "eke out a living." It goes back to Indo European "wegs, weks," and the related Indo European "aug," which had the meaning "to increase." This gave Old Germanic "wahksijan," with the general sense of "to increase, to grow." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "weaxan," with the same "increase, grow" meaning. This later became "waxen," before the modern version. Common in the other Germanic languages: German has "wachsen," Low German Saxon and Dutch have "wassen," West Frisian has "waakse," Danish and Norwegian have "vokse," Swedish has "växa," and Icelandic has "vaxa;" all with the same general meaning of "to grow."