In what was once eastern Germany, an anguished tide of humanity, one of the greatest mass movements of Germans in history, flowed toward the borders of the shrunken Reich. At least 10,000,000 hungry Germans were being uprooted from their old homes in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland by the new Polish, Czech and Russian owners.
The wanderers choked the roads in Russian-occupied Germany. Ragged, barefoot, with children in their arms, and the shabby remains of homes stacked on perambulators, carts and wheelbarrows, they trudged westward. But they were barred from the British...