Once more, the contrast with the period after 1945 is sobering. Between 1918 and 1926 roughly half the German population of what was now Polish territory chose to emigrate.34 After the Potsdam Conference of 1945 the proceedings were far more brutal. Within three years the entire German population of much of eastern Europe had been violently expelled at the point of a gun. In Silesia that amounted to 3 million people. Almost 100,000 people were confirmed dead, with another 630,000 recorded as missing, or ‘fate unknown’.35 The same treatment was meted out to the inhabitants of the Sudetenland.
