Deportation of Germans from Romania after World War II

The deportation of Germans from Romania after World War II, conducted on Soviet order early in 1945, uprooted over 30,000 of Romania's Germans, one tenth of whom lost their lives. The deportation was part of the Soviet plan for German war reparations in the form of forced labor, according to the 1944 secret Soviet Order 7161.

The last non-communist government of Romania, headed by Prime Minister Nicolae Rădescu, declared itself "completely surprised" by the order that Romania's Soviet occupiers issued on January 6, 1945. The order provided for the mobilisation of all the German inhabitants of Romania, with a view toward deporting many of them to the Soviet Union. The deportation order applied to all men between the ages of 17 and 45 and women between 18 and 30. Only pregnant women, women with children less than a year old and persons unable to work were excluded. On January 13, 1945, when arrests had already begun in Bucharest and Brașov, the Rădescu government sent a protest note to the (Soviet) Vice-President of the Allied Control Commission for Romania, General Vladislav Petrovich Vinogradov. This note explained that the armistice treaty (signed on September 12, 1944) did not envision expulsions and that Romanian industry would suffer following the deportation of so much of its workforce, and especially of a high percentage of its skilled workforce, to be found among its German population. In closing, Rădescu raised humanitarian concerns regarding the fate of women and children left behind. The expulsion has been characterised as being one of the first manifestations of the Cold War, as it showed the impossibility of joint control between East and West, even before the end of World War II.

Statistics regarding the expulsion of Transylvanian Saxons indicate that up to 30,336 individuals were deported to the Soviet Union — some 15% of Transylvania's German population (according to 1941 data). 12% of expellees were outside the age limits provided for in the deportation order; a 13-year-old girl was deported, as were people aged 55. 90% of expellees ended up in the Ukrainian SSR (the areas of Dnipropetrovsk, Stalino and Voroshilovgrad), the rest in the Urals. (see Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union for more background.)

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