By David Stafford. A compelling account of the aftermath of the
Second World War WE KNOW IT TODAY AS ethnic cleansing, but as
the war in Europe drew to a close, it was called “population
transfer”. At the Potsdam Conference, the US and Britain asked
(only) that it be “humane and orderly”. It was neither. Among
the least humane and orderly was the forced exodus of millions
of ethnic Germans from Silesia and Pomerania. In the summer of
1945, Berlin railway stations were filled with diseased and
starving refugees: “They died in hundreds,” the Australian war
correspondent Osmar White reported, “lying on platforms awash
with filth. I walked through sidings where trucks were piled