Cared for or abandoned?

In early 1945 the war had come home for Nazi Germany. On 12 January, the Red Army launched a major offensive in the East and broke the German lines. In East Prussia, the easternmost province of the Third Reich, no civilian evacuation plan had been prepared. More than a million ethnic Germans, mostly women, children and the elderly, attempted to escape the encirclement of the Red Army. They left their houses on horse carts or on foot, in the bitter cold of the Eastern European winter. How did the Nazi welfare organizations deal with this mass of refugees? Could the lives of thousands of German civilians have been saved? This book analyzes one of the most unexplored crimes that the Nazi regime perpetrated against its own population at the end of the Second World War.

Autorentext

Marco Siddi is a Marie Curie Researcher at the University of Edinburgh. He studied Modern History and German at the University of Oxford and earned a Master's degree in International Studies from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. He is also editor of the Italian journal of international relations 'Meridiani Relazioni Internazionali'.