Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950) in the context of "Abolition of Prussia"

The Potsdam Agreement (German: Potsdamer Abkommen) was the agreement among three of the Allies of World War II: the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union after the war ended in Europe that was signed on 1 August 1945 and published the following day. A product of the Potsdam Conference, it concerned the military occupation and reconstruction of Germany, its border, and the entire European Theatre of War territory. It also addressed Germany's demilitarisation, reparations, the prosecution of war criminals and the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from various parts of Europe. France was not invited to the conference but formally remained one of the powers occupying Germany.

Executed as a communiqué, the agreement was not a peace treaty according to international law, although it created accomplished facts. It was superseded by the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany signed on 12 September 1990.

The demography of Germany is monitored by the Statistisches Bundesamt (Federal Statistical Office of Germany). According to the most recent data, Germany's population is 83,577,140 (31 December 2024) making it the most populous country in the European Union and the nineteenth-most populous country in the world. The total fertility rate was rated at 1.38 in 2023, significantly below the replacement rate of 2.1. For a long time Germany had one of the world's lowest fertility rates of around 1.3 to 1.4. Due to the low birth rate Germany has recorded more deaths than births every year since 1972, which means 2024 was the 53rd consecutive year the German population would have decreased without immigration. However, due to immigration the population has actually increased during the last half-century. In 2023 the number of people with a foreign background was 29.7%; this category includes foreigners, naturalized citizens, ethnic German repatriates from Eastern Europe and the children of all of the above.

Until the early 20th century Germany was also a large emigrant nation; in the 19th century more than 5 million citizens of the German Empire emigrated to the US alone, and in the early 20th century Germany lost another two million to the US as well as significant numbers to Latin America, Canada and Eastern Europe. However, after World War II immigration began to outweigh emigration, as around 14 million ethnic Germans were expelled from the former eastern provinces of the Reich and other areas in Eastern Europe. Of these, roughly 12 million made their way to present-day Germany and several hundred thousand settled in Austria and other countries, while several hundred thousand died. Some additional 4.5 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe repatriated after 1950, especially around the end of the Eastern Bloc and mostly from the former Soviet Union, Poland and Romania.

From 1945 to 1990, the divided Germany began with the Berlin Declaration, marking the abolition of the German Reich and Allied-occupied period in Germany on 5 June 1945, and ended with the German reunification on 3 October 1990.

Following the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 and its defeat in World War II, Germany was stripped of its territorial gains. Beyond that, more than a quarter of its old pre-war territory was annexed by communist Poland and the Soviet Union. The German populations of these areas were expelled to the west. Saarland was a French protectorate from 1947 to 1956 without the recognition of the "Four Powers", because the Soviet Union opposed it, making it a disputed territory.

Central or Middle Bavarian form a subgroup of Bavarian dialects in large parts of Austria and the Free State of Bavaria along the Danube river, on the northern side of the Eastern Alps. They are spoken in the 'Old Bavarian' regions of Upper Bavaria (with Munich), Lower Bavaria and in the adjacent parts of the Upper Palatinate region around Regensburg, in Upper and Lower Austria, in Vienna (see Viennese German), in the state of Salzburg, as well as in the northern and eastern parts of Styria and Burgenland. Before 1945 and the expulsions of the Germans, it was also spoken in Hungary and southern Bohemia and Moravia.It also influenced Austrian German.

Moselle Franconian (German: Moselfränkisch; Luxembourgish: Muselfränkesch) is a West Central German language, part of the Central Franconian languages area, that includes Luxembourgish.

The expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II was part of a broader series of evacuations and deportations of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe during and after World War II.

During the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Czech resistance groups demanded the deportation of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia. The decision to deport the Germans was adopted by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile which, beginning in 1943, sought the support of the Allies for this proposal. However, a formal decision on the expulsion of the German population was not reached until 2 August 1945, at the conclusion of the Potsdam Conference.

Baltic Germans (German: Deutsch-Balten or Deutschbalten, later Baltendeutsche; Estonian: Baltisakslased; Latvian: Vācbaltieši;Livonian: Līwõdsaksad; Latgalian: Baļtejis vuocīši) are ethnic German inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, in what today are Estonia and Latvia. Since their resettlement in 1945 after the end of World War II, Baltic Germans have drastically declined as a geographically determined ethnic group in the region, with diaspora generally relocating to Germany proper and beyond.

Since the Late Middle Ages, native German-speakers formed the majority of merchants and clergy, and the large majority of the local landowning nobility who effectively constituted a ruling class over indigenous Latvian and Estonian non-nobles. By the time a distinct Baltic German ethnic identity began emerging in the 19th century, the majority of self-identifying Baltic Germans were non-nobles belonging mostly to the urban and professional middle class.