Many Germans fled in the path of the Red Army as it ground steadily towards Berlin in the spring of 1945 - but not all. Those left behind were often subjected to forced labour under arduous conditions. The mother of Helge Speith, who was 14 at the time, was one of those who decided to stay put in her home in Darlowo, today on Poland's Baltic coast, when the Soviet troops entered on March 7.
The Speiths and others like them thought they would be better off under communist than under Nazi rule. "There was no reason to flee. My parents were leftists, after all," Speith says. "We saw ourselves as being liberated from fascism." He, his brother and their mother were to regret the decision within 24 hours. Helge Speith witnessed mass rape. "I was forced to go on a march in the direction of Russia along with other Germans able to work. The Red Army subsequently used us to dig graves and to work on farms," he says.
In March 1946, he began working for a Polish market gardener, and the conditions became more bearable. The way Nazi Germany subjected non-Germans, including many Poles, to forced labour during World War II has been thoroughly documented over decades and is regularly a topic for school educational projects. But little has been said on abuses against Germans.
Around 130 German and Polish historians, archivists and witnesses met recently in Greifswald across the German border to the west of Darlowo to discuss the grim days following Germany's capitulation, including the fate of Germans who were made to do forced labour.
"We have to be able to look back on the past without fear and to expose the historical facts without emotion," said Andrzej Jakubovski, vice-marshal of the province of West Pomerania in north-western Poland. More than 185,000 Germans were conscripted into forced labour by the Polish authorities in the Polish part of Pomerania alone after the end of the war, according to Polish historians present at the conference.
The number pressed into service by the Red Army remains unknown, because Poland has no access to Russian archives of the period, according to Jan Macholak of the state archive in Szczecin, the provincial capital. Most of the Germans worked in agriculture. Pressing the Germans into forced labour was in part to exact compensation for the devastation caused by the war, but there was also economic necessity, as the population of Western Pomerania had collapsed to 3.5 million from 8.5 million before the war.
The Speith family was held in Poland for more than two years, working for the authorities. In July 1947, they were allowed to travel to the Soviet zone in occupied Germany - the future East Germany. Speith, now 81, describes those two years as a time of "absolute absence of legal rights." Nevertheless, he firmly believes that his situation was better than that of the Polish forced labourers under the Nazis in the Third Reich.
Among them was Wanda Berg, who did forced labour under the Nazis on a farm near Woldegk in the same region between 1942 and 1945. "Both of us had to deal with good and bad people," she says. Amid the confusion that followed the end of the war, many Germans who had fled west in the path of the Red Army decided to return to their homes in the east, according to Macholak.
Some Germans did not leave, because it was not clear to them where the ultimate border between Germany and Poland would lie. German forced labourers suffered hardships such as not being fed well and being kept in camps, but historians warn against equating their fate with those who were forced into work by the Nazis.
"The living conditions of the Germans in Poland were markedly better than those foreign forced labourers in Germany had to endure during the war," Macholak says, noting that they had considerable freedom of movement. Ulf Dembski, the acting mayor of Greifswald, says Germans were recruited into forced labour only because Germany attacked Poland in 1939. "We should not forget that," he said.