Nazi-Soviet population transfers

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The Nazi-Soviet population transfers were a series of population transfers between 1939 and 1941 of Germans in an agreement between Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Germans were evacuated from territories which were occupied by Soviet Union in 1940 due to the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, notably Bessarabia and the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, all of which traditionally had large German minorities. Notably, the majority of the Baltic Germans had already been resettled in late 1939, prior to the occupation of Estonia and Latvia by Soviet Union in June 1940.

These "Germans from outside Germany", known as Volksdeutsche, after spending some time in refugee camps in Germany, were eventually resettled in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany and in Zamosc County, as decided by Generalplan Ost. In most cases they were given farms that were taken away from 110,000 Poles who were expelled from the area [1].

At the end of World War II, most of the German settlers were evacuated by German authorities to avoid reprisals from the advancing Soviet armies.