Berlin museum centering on Germans expelled after WWII opens

“Without the Nazi policies of expulsion and annihilation, 14 million Germans wouldn’t have lost their homes as a result of flight and expulsion,” she added. “But that doesn’t change the fact that their expulsion by the Allies and the eastern and central European states in the aftermath of World War II was also an injustice.”

In its efforts to provide context, the exhibition explores “forced migration as a phenomenon of modern Europe,” including displacements during World War I, the arrival of Vietnamese “boat people” in West Germany in the 1970s, the fallout from the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1990s and the European migration crisis of recent years.

Exhibits include some 30 passports, including a German Jew’s passport stamped with the letter “J” in the Nazi era, a “Nansen passport” for stateless refugees from 1937 and a modern-day provisional refugee passport. There is the diary of a girl from East Prussia, a territory Germany lost at the end of the war, chronicling sexual violence.

There’s also a bicycle used by a Syrian refugee to cross the Russian-Norwegian border in 2016. And there are audio accounts by people recounting their arrival in Germany.

Visitors are given a chronological account of Nazi atrocities, followed by the flight and expulsion of the Germans in the final months of the war and afterward. “At the same time, millions of Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian or Slovakian citizens lost their homes in the time,” curator Jochen Krueger said. “We tell their story here too.”