Zwangsmigration im Europa der Moderne. Nationale Ursachen und transnationale Wirkungen

Since the so-called “spatial turn”, historians have been intensively dealing with concepts of space and macro-regions. While Eastern Europe has received considerable attention, fewer studies have examined Western Europe and its heterogeneities during the Cold War era, especially beyond the examples of Great Britain, France, or Germany. The current issue analyses the internal differences in Western Europe from the 1940s until the end of the 1970s. It explores in particular the contrast between the geopolitical discourse of a homogeneous “Western bloc” and competing concepts that stressed the internal differences between the countries and regions considered to belong to the geopolitical “West”, such as the idea of industrialized “Northern” and agrarian “Southern” countries and regions. By focusing on the role of experts in national and transnational spheres, their discourses, as well as approaches to economic, political, and cultural differences, it demonstrates, via implicit and explicit concepts of a “North” and a “South”, how the idea of the “West” was negotiated and discussed.

This article reviews the various terminology used for “forced migration” and suggests that scholars and publicists employ language that reflects the level of violence frequently inherent in the process. Therefore terms like “forced deportation” and “ethnic cleansing” would be preferable. The piece also reviews the history of “forced migration” since the end of the 19th Century and suggests that the role of international factors, while clearly a part of the process, are frequently over-emphasized and that historians should focus on the motives, intentions, and actions of the states, political elites, and local actors that carry out the actions.

Ethnic ‘Cleansing’ is a significant element of European and Global History. This contribution at first discusses problems of terminology and proceeds with integrating the phenomenon in contexts of ideological and structural patterns of Modernity. Central is the discussion of different models to define and explain modern Ethnic ‘Cleansings’, implying temporal or geographical limitations or emphases. Finally the question is focused if there are ‘rational’ goals and purposes of Ethnic ‘Cleansings’, and if permanent effects and intended “successes” could be assessed. The entanglement of ethnic and social conflicts in many examples of Ethnic “Cleansing” seems to contribute to possible answers, and also offers a key to explain some origins of implementing such violent policies.

In their inherent strive for ethnic purification, nation-state actors have two means at their disposal: On the one hand the expulsion of citizens not belonging to the titular nation and on the other assimilation either by incentive or, more frequently, by force. Also territorial losses can contribute to ethnic homogenization—a side effect not intended, of course, by nation-state actors. The modern history of the Principality (later Kingdom, People’s Republic and Republic) of Bulgaria, founded in 1878 is shaped by all three phenomena: expulsion, forced assimilation of non-Bulgarian(speaker)s and territorial changes. 19th and 20th century Sweden on the other hand did not turn to expulsions, since the losses of Finland and Norway homogenized the population considerably. Still, until the 1970s the Swedish state pursued a policy to assimilate minor ethnic and social groups applying even forced sterilization.

This essay focuses on the Nazi ethnic and racist policy in Eastern and Western Europe. From the beginning on the Nazi plans for the war against Poland intended to transform huge parts of Polish territory into areas of German settlement – the realization of the Nazi project of Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Germanization of these areas meant racist differentiation of the local people and different practices of inclusion and exclusion, whether they were classified as German or of German origin, as friendly or hostile Poles or as Jewish. These racist measures had been practiced in Western Europe, too. The context of Nazi ethnic politics was a conceptual shift from nation to Volk, from demos to ethnos since the end of nineteenth century. The coincidence of the definition of people not only an ensemble of citizens but as a cultural, ethnic unit and the rise of biology as a dominant pattern of interpreting human nature made ‘biopolicy’ (Foucault) a common political practice not only in Nazi Germany but all over Europe. What made Nazi ethnic politics unique was the unalterable, exclusionary Anti-Semitism which lead to systematic mass murder and the violent eagerness of the Nazi regime to realize its vision of an ethnically structured ‘New Europe’ in which Germans should rule as a superior race.

On November 7, 1938 Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish refugee, shot and killed Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris. The Nazi regime took this assassination as a pretext for unleashing extreme violence against hundreds of thousands of German Jews, their dwellings, shops, and synagogues, a process that culminated in the so-called ‘Reichskristallnacht’ of November 9, 1938. Grynszpan belonged to a Jewish family from Hanover that had been deported to Poland by the Nazi authorities days before - together with some 15,000 to 17,000 other German Jews. The article offers a detailed account of the situation stateless Jews faced at the end of the 1930s, in the context of a growing refugee crisis caused by Nazi racial policies. The article also describes Herschel Grynszpan’s ordeal in French and German custody and the postwar European aftermath of his case.

The subject of the article is the mass exodus of the Italian speaking or Italian oriented population of Istria, a peninsula on the north-eastern Adria occupied by the Yugoslav Army of Marshall Tito at the end of WW2 and attributed to Yugoslavia with the peace treaty between Italy and the United Nations in 1947. The ‘exodus’ involved some 270.000-300.000 people, corresponding to 85-100% of those who understood themselves as ‘Italians’. Therefore, although no official measures were taken to carry out an ‘ethnic simplification’ of the territory, the result was the disappearance of a substantial ethnic component, leading to an unchallenged Croatian predominance in ‘socialist Istria’. The authors assert that a crucial factor for the ethnic-national struggle in Istria and the subsequent abandonment of the peninsula by the ‘Italians’ was the uncertain attribution of the territory after WW2. The area was deeply fragmented; some sectors were occupied by the Yugoslavs and others by British-American troops. Both Italy and Yugoslavia claimed the territory for themselves. People rallied to the Italian or the Yugoslav cause and waged relentless battles. Of course the Yugoslavs were in a stronger position thanks to the Army, the secret police, the Communist administration and Communist networks. Therefore, the struggle between Communists and anti-Communists which also affected the rest of Yugoslavia, did on the Italo-Yugoslav border take on the character of an ethnic–national clash between ‘Italians’ and ‘Slavs’.

How did the idea of the Polish nation-state and the idea of a homogeneous Polish nation develop in the era of the World War I? And is there a connection with what today is known as ethnic cleansing? The importance of the Great War on both on politics, economy and society can hardly be overestimated. What influence did it have on the population in the areas which after 1918 formed the Polish state? Was there an impact of conflicts of national interests during the Great War on the post-war situation? And to what extent was the idea of a Polish nation-state connected with the concept of ethnic ‘purity’? The author claims that there are continuities which under specific historical circumstances resulted in ethnic cleansing.

From 1939 to 1945, Poles were forced to live under two regimes of occupation which both turned to mass expulsion in exercising political control. Still, however, there were significant differences between Soviet and German rule. Stalin was suspicious of Poles and Jews, but he did not plan to change the ethnonational structure of the newly annexed territories. After the liquidation of unwanted social strata a reeducation of the remaining population, no matter of which ethnic or religious background, into ‘class-conscious’ Soviet citizens was planned. The German occupation regime on the other hand aimed from the very beginning at radically changing the occupied and annexed part of Poland. Here, ethnicity determined the relationship between occupiers and occupied and, in particular, the latter’s living condition and thus their chances for survival.