the nationality of all inhabitants of the czech provinces and ...

Chapter VI The Implementation of the Transfer
THE CZECH PROVINCES
AND THE GERMANS IN THE
IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH
OF THE WAR
The difficult circumstances prevailing
during the last months of the war were
further complicated by the increased
migration of the German population. It
is extremely difficult to establish the
exact number of Germans who were to
be found on Czechoslovak territory at
210
Silesia, with several hundreds of
thousands more refugees coming from
the whole of the eastern part of the
Reich. German sources, however, give a
figure of between 3 million and
3.4 million. It is thus virtually impossible
to determine a precise number. One
method of establishing a reasonably
reliable figure for the inhabitants of
Bohemia and Moravia is to use the
statistics for the issue of food rationing
The day before the Soviet forces arrived,Toussaint, the German commander of Prague,
handed over power in the city to representatives of the Czech resistance on condition
that the Germans would be allowed to leave and give themselves up to the Americans
(left).The Czech police reacted to numerous denunciations by widespread
arrests of people suspected of being informers and collaborators.
the end of the war. Naturally enough, no
precise records exist; this was made
impossible not only by the breakdown of
administrative structures in the final
phases of the war, but also by the
practically uncontrollable mass
migration that took place among the
population. In trying to ascertain figures
for the numbers of the German
population we have to rely on estimates,
which may later be corrected as a result
of further research.
At the period in question, at least 4
million German civilians were to be
found on Czechoslovak territory. The
majority belonged to the permanently
settled population, but perhaps as many
as 1 million consisted of refugees from
coupons. They show that at the
beginning of May 1945 there were some
3,325,000 people living in the occupied
Sudetenland, of which about 600
thousand were Czechs or other people
with non-German nationality. This gives
a figure of roughly 2,275,000 Germans.
This however includes people who for
various reasons came to live in the area
after 1938. Only somewhat later, on
June 25, 1945, there were only
2,716,239 German civilians in the whole
of Bohemia and Moravia.
A certain proportion of this number
consisted of German families who had
been resettled here during the course of
the war. For example, during 1943
Germans came from South Tyrol to