Author: R. M. Douglas
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300183763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 696
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Book Description
The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after WWII: “a major achievement” (New Republic). Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were horrifying: at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless. In this authoritative and objective account, historian R.M. Douglas examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the forced migrations were conceived, planned, and executed, and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The first comprehensive history of this immense manmade catastrophe, Orderly and Humane is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing." It may also be the most significant untold story of the World War II.
Author: Philipp Ther
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742510944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
After World War II, some 12 million Germans, 3 million Poles and Ukrainians, and tens of thousands of Hungarians were expelled from their homes and forced to migrate to their supposed countries of origin. Using freshly available materials from Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czechoslovak, German, British, and American archives, the contributors to this book provide a sweeping, detailed account of the turmoil caused by the huge wave of forced migration during the nascent Cold War. The book also documents the deep and lasting political, social, and economic consequences of this traumatic time, raising difficult questions about the effect of forced migration on postwar reconstruction, the rise of Communism, and the growing tensions between Western Europe and the Eastern bloc. Those interested in European Cold-War history will find this book indispensable for understanding the profound--but hitherto little known--upheavals caused by the massive ethnic cleansing that took place from 1944 to 1948.
Author: Ulrich Merten
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412846943
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
The news agency Reuters reported in 2009 that a mass grave containing 1,800 bodies was found in Malbork, Poland. Polish authorities suspected that they were German civilians that were killed by advancing Soviet forces. A Polish archeologist supervising the exhumation, said, "We are dealing with a mass grave of civilians, probably of German origin. The presence of children . . . suggests they were civilians." During World War II, the German Nazi regime committed great crimes against innocent civilian victims: Jews, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and other people of Central and Eastern Europe. At war’s end, however, innocent German civilians in turn became victims of crimes against humanity. Forgotten Voices lets these victims of ethnic cleansing tell their story in their own words, so that they and what they endured are not forgotten. This volume is an important supplement to the voices of victims of totalitarianism and has been written in order to keep the historical record clear. The root cause of this tragedy was ultimately the Nazi German regime. As a leading German historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler has noted, "Germany should avoid creating a cult of victimization, and thus forgetting Auschwitz and the mass killing of Russians." Ulrich Merten argues that applying collective punishment to an entire people is a crime against humanity. He concludes that this should also be recognized as a European catastrophe, not only a German one, because of its magnitude and the broad violation of human rights that occurred on European soil. Supplementary maps and pictures are available online at http://www.forgottenvoices.net
Author: David Rock
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571817181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The end of World War II led to one of the most significant forced population transfers in history: the expulsion of over 12 million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1950 and the subsequent emigration of another four million in the second half of the twentieth century. Although unprecedented in its magnitude, conventional wisdom has it that the integration of refugees, expellees, and Aussiedler was a largely successful process in postwar Germany. While the achievements of the integration process are acknowledged, the volume also examines the difficulties encountered by ethnic Germans in the Federal Republic and analyses the shortcomings of dealing with this particular phenomenon of mass migration and its consequences.
Author: Dan Diner
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845452209
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
The myriad debates on restitution and memory, which have been going on in Europe for decades, indicate that World War II never ended. It is still very much with us, paradoxically re-invoked by the events of 1989/90 and the expansion of Europe to the east in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and economic globalization. The growing privatization and reprivatization in Eastern Europe revive pre-war memories that lay buried under the blanket of collectivization and nationalization of property after 1945. World War II did not only result in the death and destruction on a large scale but also in an a far-reaching revolution of existing property relations. This volume offers an assessment of the problematic of restitution and its close interconnection with the discourses of memory that have recently emerged.
Author: Matthew Frank
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191528471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Expelling the Germans focuses on how Britain perceived the mass movement of German populations from Poland and Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of British archival material, Matthew Frank examines why the British came to regard the forcible removal of Germans as a necessity, and evaluates the public and official responses in Britain once mass expulsion became a reality in 1945. Central to this study is the concept of 'population transfer': the contemporary idea that awkward minority problems could be solved rationally and constructively by removing the population concerned in an orderly and gradual manner, while avoiding unnecessary human suffering and economic disruption. Dr Frank demonstrates that while most British observers accepted the principle of population transfer, most were also consistently uneasy with the results of putting that principle into practice. This clash of 'principle' with 'practice' reveals much not only about the limitations of Britain's role but also the hierarchy of British priorities in immediate post-war Europe.
Author: Alfred M. De Zayas
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312121594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
The closing phase and the aftermath of World War II saw millions of refugees and displaced persons wandering across Easter Europe in one of the most brutal and chaotic migrations in world history. The genocidal barbarism of the Nazi forces has been well documented. What hitherto has been little known is the fate of fifteen million German civillians who found themselves at the mercy of Soviet armies and on the wrong side of new postwar borders. All over Eastern Europe, the inhabitants of communities that had been established for many centuries were either expelled or killed. Over two million Germans did not survive. Many of these people had supported Hitler, and for the Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, and surviving Jews, their fate must have seemed just. However, the great majority--East Prussian farmers, Silesian industrial workers, their wives and children--were guiltless. Their fate, sentenced purely by race, remains an appalling legacy of the period. Alfred de Zayas's book describes this horrible retribution. On the basis of extensive research in German and American archives, he outlines the long history of these German communities, scattered from the Baltic to the Danude, and, most movingly, reproduces the testimonies of surviors from the catastrophic exodus that marked the final end to Nazi fantasies of Lebensraum.
Author: Hugo Service
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107595484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
At the end of the Second World War, mass forced migration and population movement accompanied the collapse of Nazi Germany's occupation and the start of Soviet domination in East-Central Europe. Hugo Service examines the experience of Poland's new territories, exploring the Polish Communist attempt to 'cleanse' these territories in line with a nationalist vision, against the legacy of brutal wartime occupations of Central and Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The expulsion of over three million Germans was intertwined with the arrival of millions of Polish settlers. Around one million German citizens were categorised as 'native Poles' and urged to adopt a Polish national identity. The most visible traces of German culture were erased. Jewish Holocaust survivors arrived and, for the most part, soon left again. Drawing on two case studies, the book exposes how these events varied by region and locality.
Author: Georg Wildmann
Publisher: Danube Swabian Association of U.S.A.U.S.A.
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
Author: Max Paul Friedman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521822466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Table of contents
