In order to completely cut off the opportunity for the Germans to rise, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgensau even believed that Germany should be turned into a country dominated by agriculture and light industry. In the future, Germany's export products should be mainly coal, beer, alcoholic beverages, toys, textiles and so on. On this basis, Germany only needs to maintain a minimum standard of living.
If this were done, of course, it would succeed in destroying the Germans' war potential, but the German people would be miserable.
Fortunately, after the outbreak of the Cold War, the United States and Europe needed a strong Germany as a shield in front of them, which allowed Germany to rise again.
However, at first, the Germans were reprised by the Allies, especially the Germans living outside Germany.
Between 1945 and 1950, Europeans witnessed the largest forced migrations in human history, with some 12 to 14 million German-speaking civilians, the vast majority of whom were women, the elderly and children under the age of 16, forcibly removed from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
According to a December 1945 Report by the New York Times, the number of immigrants who migrated in just a few years was about the same as the number of immigrants who entered the United States in nearly half a century from 1900 to 1945.
After moving out of their birthplaces, these people were placed in the German cities occupied by the Allies, but these German cities had become a ruin.
They endured starvation, disease, beatings, and even executions here, and according to incomplete statistics, at least 500,000 people lost their lives!
Germans outside Germany were severely persecuted in their return to Germany.
In Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in the Soviet Union, the Germans here were beaten, raped, and brutally destroyed their homes in retaliation for their actions during the war.
There were about 200,000 Germans living in Yugoslavia, and after the end of the war, Yugoslavia retaliated against the German nation, and their villages were directly turned into internment camps.
According to statistics, more than 50,000 people lost their lives, and survivors were not allowed to immigrate to Germany until after 1948.
Official data in Hungary in 1945 showed that there were 470,000 German speakers at the time, of whom 300,000 had German citizenship.
Of these people, 84 per cent were children under the age of 12 or over the age of 60 and women, of whom 150,000 were stripped of their citizenship and property and then deported to western Germany, and about 100,000 were driven to Austria.
After the end of World War II in the Netherlands, the Dutch Minister of Justice proposed a plan called Operation Black Tulip. The plan was intended to drive all German expatriates from the Netherlands.
The program lasted from 1946 to 1948, in which about 15% of the German expatriates were deported, first identified by the Dutch government as hostile subjects, their spouses and children were also regarded as hostile objects, and then, starting on September 10, 1946, German expatriates and their families in Amsterdam were arrested in the middle of the night and told that within an hour they needed to pack 50 kilograms of luggage, that they were allowed to carry only 100 guilders, and that all remaining property would be confiscated by the state. The men were then taken to detention centers on the German border.
In this way, thousands of Germans left the Netherlands almost penniless.
In Poland Poland is the country with the largest number of Germans.
In 1945, there were about 4.6 million Germans in Poland, of whom about 1 million had Polish citizenship, and the remaining more than 3 million were residents of the former Germany.
More than 2 million Germans were deported in 1946, and by 1950 a total of 3.15 million German civilians had been deported. The remainder were planned to be Polish citizens, but by the 1960s many had also left Poland for Germany.
In retaliation against the Germans, Poland also established many labor camps and forced them to work.
According to statistics from the German Federal Archives in 1974, more than 200,000 German civilians worked in Polish labor camps, with a mortality rate of 20 to 50 percent.
This incident was later considered one of the most important examples of massive human rights violations in recent history, but at the time it was considered to be a legitimate revenge for the wartime atrocities committed by Nazi Germany!