More than half a century after the end of world War II, it is possible to see how postwar developments came to reflect the hopes of World War II leaders or to confound them. Perhaps no figure of the war would be more disappointed by subsequent developments than the man who insisted on war in 1939, Adolf Hitler. It was not simply that Germany was utterly defeated instead of victorious, as he had anticipated. Far from conquering vast stretches of land for German agricultural settlers, Germany would lose not only the same pieces of land that had been lost by the peace settlement of the prior great conflict but also large parts of pre-1939 Germany, including much of its most important agricultural land (as well as mines and industry), where Germans had made up the overwhelming majority of the population for centuries. Furthermore, in addition to the Germans fleeing or being driven out of the areas ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union, several million additional people of German cultural background were driven out of Czechoslovakia and other countries of central and southeast Europe. Instead of lots more Lebensraum, the German people had very much less – and Germany now had to accommodate an additional eleven million people within its reduced boundaries. In recent years, Germany has also welcomed tens of thousands of people of German background who decided to move from the former Soviet Union and from Poland to Germany.

Several further population changes either had taken place by 1945 or would occur soon after. On the one hand, there were the enormous casualties of war.