Despite being buried as a Righteous Gentile in Israel, Oskar Schindler’s property was confiscated by the liberal democratic government of Czechoslovakia under Benes and he was permanently banned from ever returning to his Sudeten homeland. He was one of over three million ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia and dispossessed of their property by the Benes regime solely because they were German. This ethnic cleansing also took place in the USSR, Poland, and Hungary violently removing over 12 million ethnic Germans from their ancestral homelands.
At a bare minimum the number of ethnic German civilians to perish prematurely from 1941-1948 due to deportation, expulsion, overwork and starvation in labor and concentration camps, and even shootings at the hands of the Allies is at least one million people. This is a bare minimum figure and does not include at least 350,000 victims of terror bombing. Higher figures for German civilian deaths from ethnic cleansing and internment in camps range up to over three million. But, the exact numbers themselves are not so important. The minimum estimates of one million fatalities is already comparable in size with the Armenian and greater than the Rwandan genocide in terms of absolute numbers. The middle range of the estimate at two million including a million from eastern Germany and Poland and almost a quarter of a million in the USSR is comparable in total numbers to the those killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Needless to say this a huge number of people and it is only generally dismissed as morally insignificant because of the identity of the victims.
It should be noted that much of this ethnically targeted killing started already before there were any National Socialist run death camps. Most notably the mass deportation of ethnic Germans in the USSR eastward started in Crimea on 15 August 1941. It greatly accelerated from 3-20 September 1941 with the deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan which provoked the National Socialists to deport Jews from Germany and Austria to ghettos in the east. This first deportation of Jews from Germany and annexed Austria was explicitly justified as retribution for the ethnic cleansing of the Volga Germans. Although to be fair the only prominent Jew involved in the forced resettlement of the Volga Germans was Lazar Kaganovich. Nonetheless part of the justification for the uprooting in fall 1941 and later extermination of German and Austrian Jews was the Soviet deportation of the Volga Germans.
One can of course note that it defies basic logic to blame and punish German and Austrian Jews for the crimes of Kaganovich and other members of the Stalin regime in 1941. But, surely blaming and punishing almost 14 million ethnic German civilians between the Oder-Neisse line and Valdivostok for the crimes of Hitler is just as devoid of logic. Unfortunately, almost nobody views the mass crimes against ethnic Germans during WWII by the Allies starting with the deportation of the Crimean and Volga Germans as actually a crime. But, rather they are said to be totally justified by the crimes of the National Socialists. While a few academics like Robert Hayden have tackled this moral problem head on, many people in the US and UK continue to repeat the claim that the mass expulsion, internment in camps, and other atrocities against ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, in the 1940s and even 1930s was totally justified by the existence of Auschwitz.
The creation of a moral framework that justifies any and all crimes by the Allies by reference to the Holocaust of course is one of the root causes of continuing massive violence by the USSR, UK, France, US and other Allies after the end of WWII. All one has to do is invoke the magic of “Antifascism” to get total exemption from any mainstream moral sanction for mass murder, theft, and enslavement. It gave carte blanche to the Soviets in the Baltic States, western Ukraine, and Central Europe, the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Algeria, and the British in Kenya to use death squads, concentration camps, and torture despite the condemnation of the German use of these instruments of repression at Nuremberg. There is a direct line of moral impunity from the terror bombing of German cities to the terror bombing of North Korean, Iraqi, and Syrian cities later. Having opposed National Socialism every crime by the Allied powers became justified forever. This is of course why anti-imperialists of both the right like Ernst Nolte and left like Dirk Moses have correctly rejected the idea that the Holocaust is unique and completely unconnected to Soviet and colonial crimes.