Anyone see it?, BBC 2 last night(not sure if on Iplayer)it was primarily about how the defeated Ost German's/Ethnic Germans and the left overs of the Wermacht were treated by the people and soldiers of the Eastern European countries and ultimately the great powers..
but to do so, they showed scenes I think have rarely been shown on UK television: film of lorries deliberately speeding along crushing bodies, beautiful young women with their faces a pulped mass or missing half a one, films of german citizens being battered to death by mobs, close ups of a man under a hail of blows from someone wielding a big tin pot, the children who had to bury their mother themselves in the woods, mass executions, especially in Czhechoslovakia and Poland, The brutality showered down on these people was visceral and part of a wider strategy to deport millions of Ost Germans from the East, many died on these train journeys and death marches. all this was quietly condoned by the leaders who had met at Yalta
Of course, this is exactly what the master race had meted out to many many milllions, on a industrial scale, they reaped what they sowed would be the argument, but it was harrowing viewing
Interestingly they never mentioned the deaths in the west , including the thousands of German POW's left to die in the open, documented in the book, 'Other Losses'.*
*though these claims have been challenged.
Update, it was the Potsdam Treaty which finalised the expulsions, not Yalta, though that contributed.
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