WWII, Expulsion, Ethnic Cleansing

Persian rugs, porcelain, clocks, furnitures, militia and exotics. On the flows of furniture from confiscated Moravian-Silesian castles in the auction house Karel Ditrich Brno 1948–1950

Political developments in the early post-war Czechoslovakia led to radical ownership-property and structural-social changes. The quantity of confiscated objects was received in the arts trade, or even directly on the foreign market, through both illegal and legal ways. The permanent, officially unrecorded flow of confiscated artistic assets into private hands led in August 1949 to nationalization of private auction houses under the "Antikva" trademark. The continuing illegal flows of artistic property caused clashes between ministries. Against the attempt to preserve "state cultural assets" in public institutions, the economic interests of the state in the economic crisis stood. The paper based on fragmentary preserved sources reconstructs the situation in the arts auction business between 1945 and 1951. The Brno-based company Karel Ditrich, whose auctions dealed the artistic assets from the estates and chateaux of southern and northern Moravia, serves as an example of the auction house handling the confiscated property.

Die Vertreibung der Ungarndeutschen aus dem Komitat Pest nach den Vertreibungs-Namensverzeichnissen

Im Jahre 1947 erschien eine Regierungsverordnung, dass ein Namensverzeichnis mit den Ver- treibenden zusammengestellt werden soll. Diese Liste enthält aber nicht nur diejenigen, die zur Zeit in Ungarn lebten, sondern auch diejenigen, die schon vertrieben oder von Vertreibung befreit waren; so konnte diese für die ungarische Regierung als „Inventar” dienen. Um diese Liste als Quelle für den Prozess der Vertreibung nutzen zu können, muss man diese mit anderen Archivquellen jeder einzelnen Gemeinden vergleichen. In dieser Studie analysiert die Autorin vier Gemeinden: Budaörs, Nagykovácsi, Csobánka und Dunabogdány.
Die Namensverzeichnisse wurden aus verschiedenen Aspekten untersucht. Die Verteilung nach dem Alter der Personen in den Listen zeigt, dass jeder vierten-fünften potenziellen Vertreibender noch Kind war, die Sünde gegen das Land kaum begangen hätten. Unter  den Gründen der Ver- treibung beschäftigte sich die Autorin mit der Volksbund-Mitgliedschaft und mit dem Waffendi- enst in Wehrmacht und SS. Die Konklusion ist, dass diese Gründe bei der Vertreibung nicht ganz dominierend waren. Die Schlussfolgerungen sind mit der Hilfe der Tabellen bewiesen.
Die Studie bekräftigt die in der Fachliteratur schon erwähnte Tatsache, dass die Vertreibung der Ungarndeutschen nach Vermögensverhältnissen durchgeführt wurde. Ausserdem macht die Autorin Aufmerksamkeit darauf, dass der Quellenwert dieser Listen nur sehr vorsichtig behandelt werden darf.

Wenn im April 1945 in dem Bezirk Žamberk 22 731 Einwohner der deutschen Nationalität  lebten, sie bildeten 44 % aller Einwohner des Bezirkes.Überwiegend in den Sommermonaten 1945 wurden 8538 Deutschen mutwillig über die Grenze der Tschechoslowakei vertrieben. Inzwischen erreichten die Sieggroßmächte in Postupim den Vertrag über die Assiedlung der Deutschen, der die Verbannung legalisierte. In den regulären Transporten von Mai bis September 1946 wurden 13 528 Personen der deutschen Nationalität aus dem Bezirk Žamberk verschoben. Die Anzahl der Deutschen  wurde noch zu 612 in August 1948 erniedrigt als es zu den nachtäglichen Verschiebungen ins Innland kam. Durch die Aussiedlung fast aller deutschen Einwohner des Bezirkes Žamberk wurde die ganze wirtschaftliche, politische, kulturelle und Populationstruktur der Bevölkerung verändert. Die deutschen Würzel der hiesigen Orte wurden zersört.

1954 marked the beginning of a brief but intense migratory flow from the
city of Trieste towards Australia. Following a prolonged period of
Anglo-American administration, the city had been returned to Italian
jurisdiction once more; and with the dismantling of the Allied caretaker
government and the subsequent economic integration of Trieste into the
Italian State, a climate of uncertainty and precariousness had left the
Triestines psychologically disenchanted and discouraged. Although
historically Trieste did not have a tradition of migration, many chose to
emigrate during this period. Among those who left were former
employees of the Allied Military Government who were concerned for
their future, but there were also others with stable employment. Importantly, Triestine migration displays many atypical characteristics
when compared to Italian migration in general. Unlike many other
Italian migrants, most Triestines came to Australia as part of complete
nuclear family units, many were assisted passage migrants and a
significant number of these were in possession of trade qualifications on
their arrival. Importantly, furthermore, the Triestines are the only
immigrants of Italian origin to have mass migrated from an urban
environment. And, as this study highlights, this factor has impacted on
the migratory experiences and the identity and community making
process of this group.
The Triestines who immigrated to Australia during this period were
particularly aware of themselves as Triestines. Political and economic
forces had historically fostered the development of a Triestine identity
and during the post war period, when many of these immigrants had
experienced a sense of betrayal, the act of migration served to strengthen
a feeling of circumscribed Triestine identity once more. By narrating and analysing the immigrant experiences of this group, this
research reveals that this identity was also reinforced by the migration
experience and process as the urban mind-set of the Triestines initially
set them apart as 'strangers' within both the Anglo-Saxon reality and the
Italo-Australian one. By negotiating both similarities and difference in
the context of a shared immigrant experience, the Triestines were,
however, successfully able to become part of the Italo-Australian
community, but they continued to maintain a distinct sense of their own
identity as Triestines. What emerges from this study is that this enduring
sense of identity can be seen to be tied, not to essentialist notions of
identity, but to a continued and dynamic process of negotiation which
allowed the triestini to adopt various 'positionalities' which became part
of a dialectical process of identity construction.By examining the migrant experience of both first and subsequent
generations of Triestines in the Australian city of Melbourne in a
historical context, this study thus highlights the importance of both the
past and the present experience in the process of migrant settlement and
identity construction. The study is based on archival and field research,
including interviews with 75 informants. It holds in balance a story of
group formation (how the Triestines evolved as a group within
Melbourne) with an account of group identity (who they were as
Triestines).

This paper will focus on the general social development of the Korean community in the Russian Far East, Tsarist-era attitudes and Russian nationalism(s), and the circumstances which limited the promised 'territorial autonomy' for Koreans after the October Revolution (1917). The logic behind the indigenisation programmes was to win the loyalties of the Soviet national minorities through a comprehensive platform of education, representation and placement as Soviet cadres. These policies aspired to erase the memory of the inequities during Tsarism. Therefore, we will compare how the Koreans of the RFE were viewed by Tsarist and then later, Soviet leaders and their regimes to order to examine how ‘continuities’ were carried over into Soviet society, state and policymaking. This study will also delve into whether Japanese citizenship laws would have considered the Soviet Koreans as their imperial subjects. The latter, the trope of the Koreans as Japanese ‘secret citizens and sympathisers’ hindered their access to greater acceptance as a Soviet people. This trope will now be put to rest with the evidence accumulated in this study. Finally, touching upon broader terms and themes, I will argue that the principal tension of Koreans in the USSR was that they were a Soviet ‘other’, an East Asian nationality who adopted Bolshevism and its culture and excelled in education and institutionally as cadres. Their sense of economic life matched that of other Soviet minority ‘middlemen’ such as the Jews, the Armenians and others. Unfortunately, as the Soviet state sought to rein in its borders and peoples, the fate of Soviet Koreans erupted into a clash between utopian ideals, political realities and especially, human frailties.
Keywords: 1925 Soviet-Japanese Convention, Vladimir K. Arsenev, korenizatsiia, intervention, Soviet Koreans, Chinese, territorial autonomy, N. Sakhalin, primordialism

Ein Kurzportait von Martin Sandberer, als einem Vertreter der „Generation des Unbedingten“ (Michael Wildt), in dem seine Werdegang vom nationalsozialistischen Studentenfunktionär zum Massenmörder im Baltikum nachgezeichnet und analysiert wird. 
Aus: Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte 9 (2014), S. 274-284.

Zum gleichnamigen Vortrag  des emeritierten Professor an der Yale University Peter Demetz (Yale University, Ehrendoktor der Masaryk-Universität 2014), Schüler und Nachfolger von René Wellek, über die Studentenexilzeitschrift Skutečnost, in der von einer jungen Generation von intellektuellen im Geiste von T.G. Masaryk nach einer demokratischen Neuorientierung gesucht wurde. Die Zeitschrift wurde als Brücke zwischen Ferdinand Peroutkas Přítomnost und Pavel Tigrids Svědectví wahrgenommen. Es wurde u,a. bereits über die Vertreibung von Sudetendeutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei (lange vor Jan Mlýnáriks/ Danubiusˇ Thesen) diskutiert und das Prinzip der Kollektivschuld abgelehnt. Vgl. die Videoaufnahme des Vortrags http://wiko.phil.muni.cz/cs/content/2012-peter-demetz-doma-i-v-exilu

Testo di Aldo Pizzigalli con prefazione di Augusto Turati che descrive le politiche di pulizia etnica operate dal governo italiano attraverso l'italianizzazione forzata dei nomi.
Il testo non è di mia autoria, è una riproduzione del libro del 1929.

Chameria region begins from South of Albania, Northwest region in Greece. The name Cham has been associated with the people that have lived in the area close to the river with the same name (Thyam). Chams (Çam or Çamë) and the Greek name Tsamides (Τσάμηδες). Chameria has been populated mostly by Albanian Muslims including Yanina (Ioanina),the capital of Southern Albania. According to more than 20 diplomats, historians, geographers Greeks, Turks and Europeans have identified Illyrian Macedonians and Epiriotes (Chams), as far as Yanina (Ioanina) as Albanians. Grestner, an Austro-Hungarian Albanalog has stated: There have been two different views on these people. The Greek view is that they are Turk-Albanians. This had to do for the reason that this population belongs partly of Islamic faith. Whereas the other view point considers them Albanians. For this they base it on language and race, where Orthodox and Cham Muslims have been identified, when most of them were converted to Islam. Contentious arguments are brought from both sides in this issue. One side argues that both groups Muslims and Orthodox Cham have been subject to ethnic cleansing, genocide and assimilation imposed by Greek state in different periods. On the other side Greek administrations have not acknowledged such Albanian ethnic identity and their presence. According to them, such population left - due to the fear of being brought to justice. This argument is based on the facts that Cham Muslims collaborated with Germans during WWII. When dealing with this Cham population that belongs to the Christian Orthodox religion have been called Greeks. Indeed such idea would find ground only as much as Albanian catholic would be roman. In the authors’ opinion the main reason for this is the policy of Greece used on the assimilation and division of Chams on religious lines. The policy of all Greek governments has been to ethnically cleanse all Albanian population from the region, (with the exception of short lived Pangallo’s government that tried to solve such issue). Referring to the witnessed reports and many other documents, the persecution and discriminations were a daily occurrence toward Cham Albanians since the annexation of this region to Greece in 1913. The legal perspective would highlight the path to solution. Of course if the Greek administration stops denying and hindering the democratic process in continuance of hiding the Genocide and ethnic cleansing to all "others", in Greece.

The Ukrainian nationalist-led ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles in Volhynia during 1943–44 has long been the subject of international tension and contentious public and scholarly debate. This article analyzes the topic through a microhistorical lens that looks at one ethnic cleansing operation in the Liuboml’ area of Volhynia that killed hundreds of Poles. Using newly declassified materials from Ukrainian secret police archives, alongside more traditional testimonial sources, I demonstrate that not all participants were prepared nationalist ideologues eager to kill. Rather, there was a range of actors involved in the massacres and the Ukrainian nationalist leadership was able to recruit average peasants to participate in ethnic cleansing through diverse mechanisms. This disaggregation of the killers and their motives not only contributes to growing social science research on mobilization for violence, but also challenges assumptions inherent in the double or triple occupation thesis frequently used to explain violence in Volhynia from 1939 to 1945.

My doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of the Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS troops using in-depth interviews with former volunteers as the main primary source. This phenomenon, even if significant in size (depending on the source, some 15 000-20 000 Italian men volunteered in the Waffen-SS), has been hitherto largely unknown to historical research. The available literature on the Italian volunteers, mainly written by military history enthusiast journalists and methodologically weak, concentrates mainly on the combat operations and military organization, and offers a rather stereotypical profile of the volunteers.

My dissertation does not aim to reconstruct the military history of the different divisions of the Waffen-SS in which Italian volunteers operated but instead to examine the subjective, private and intimate experience of the volunteers in order to understand the motivations, attitudes, beliefs and cultural and family background, as well as their political ideas. The main objective of my doctoral dissertation is to discover the ideological precepts of the volunteers’ political credo. As the last phase of fascism and its ideology, often defined as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascism, is still the object of wide academic debate, a better understanding of the volunteers’ ideology also contributes to deepening overall knowledge of the nature of this last phase.

The theoretical frame of my dissertation lies in oral history, in particular in the postmodernist approach to oral history, through which I reconstruct the volunteers’ ideology. In-depth interviews with former volunteers are the main primary source, but multiple data collection methods have been adopted. Phone interviews and correspondence with the volunteers have also been considered as primary sources. In addition to interviews and correspondence, family archives consisting of diaries, correspondence with the volunteers’ relatives and photographic material have also been collected and examined. An ethnographic observation of the volunteers’ domestic spaces has been conducted during the in-depth interviews, and photo self-elicitation techniques have been used in cases where the volunteers were willing to share their photographs.

An exhaustive portrait of the ideological structure of the volunteers has been obtained, as well as of the cultural and social origins of the values that contributed to the rise and adoption of this ideology. Further, the volunteers’ motivations to enlist have been clearly reconstructed, together with their cultural, political, social and military backgrounds. The results of the research are particularly relevant both for comprehension of the Italian phenomenon of volunteering in the Waffen-SS and for the reconstruction of the ideological dynamics of the last phase of fascism. The volunteers’ political and ideological system, which can be defined as the Italian SS-fascist ideology, disagrees strongly with the vaguely described ideological profile offered by previous studies that describe volunteers as generically “super-fascist”. The research also offers the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the final fascist ideological trajectory, currently defined, not without a certain level of approximation, as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascist ideology.

Contemporary approaches to integrating "self" and the "other"—such as multiculturalism, cultural diversity, race relations, inclusiveness strategies, or identity politics—are flawed from the perspective of traditional thought. At their core, modernist ideologies are inimical to and destructive of all human diversity. The new face of antipathy to pluralism is becoming more deceptive as it grows less focused on respecting diversity and more on promoting ideological uniformity and the erection of a global monoculture. This essay argues that it is from a metaphysical perspective that human diversity can be fully understood and can seek to reconcile the dichotomy of "self" and the "other".

Book Review of Martin Shaw.  What Is Genocide?  Cambridge, England:  Polity Press, 2007.  Pp. viii + 222.  In Ethnic and Racial Studies 31:7 (Oct. 2008):  pp. 1352-1354. 

© 2008 Eric J. Schmaltz
Department of Social Sciences
Northwestern Oklahoma State University

Around 50 to 60 million people were displaced during the course of World War II (WWII) and its immediate aftermath. Approximately 12 million of these were German nationals from territories east of the Oder-Neisse line or ethnic Germans from Eastern European countries who either fled or were forced to leave their homelands through a combination of flight from the Red Army, evacuation by Nazi forces, spontaneous eviction by Eastern European authorities and internationally sanctioned population transfers authorized by the Potsdam agreement.  This so-called “expulsion” not only affected the forced migrants themselves, but also had lasting consequences for the Eastern European societies they left behind, the newly created East and West German nations that were the primary recipients of them, and German immigrant communities around the globe that subsequently witnessed a large influx of them in the late 1940s and 1950s.  Despite the enormous significance of this population movement, however, it has attracted only modest scholarly attention outside of Germany.    Moreover, until the last ten years one-sided German perspectives that were either overly or implicitly political dominated the English language literature on the subject.  In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, historians from a number of fields began to show a renewed interest in the subject. Often drawing on newly declassified archival materials from Eastern Europe, these historians rejected earlier notions that the expulsion was primarily an act of retributive justice for Nazi crimes and instead suggested that it could be understood primarily in terms of two inter-related processes: a drive towards ethnic homogenization inaugurated by the formation of nation states and the consolidation of Communist power. This paper reviews and analyzes the English language literature on the German expulsion.

Koreans in the Russian Far East were deported to Central Asia in 1937-38 as 'potential fifth columnists', 'suspicious' or as an 'unreliable' people. This article chronicles their struggles to resettle and establish new lives through labour and sport as a Soviet nationality. The article also covers the period of 1940-1979 and the role of football in Soviet life, as part of the 'defence' of the Soviet Union (oborona) and its role in Soviet Korean life. Life in the post Second World War era was clearly one where Russians were 'primus inter pares' among all Soviet nationalities. This article establishes that the rise of Soviet sport was financed by the productivity of the working peoples of Central Asia in particular the Korean kolkhozes of Uzbekistan. However, even Soviet sport had its biases or preferences. The field of ‘sport’ is influenced by each society's views, hierarchies and socio-politics and yet, each society can be changed and influenced by 'new agents' wielding their particular habitus. After the Second World War, Koreans in Soviet sports were regarded as an 'unknown quantity' but typically being of a smaller and a shorter stature, they were not viewed as having as much 'potential' in competitive sports as that of Russians, Tatars, Ukrainians and others. Interviews and oral history with the first Korean pioneers in football such as Dmitrii An, Il He and Anton Yoon presented the challenges, setbacks and successes that they faced and overcame. In the end, the Koreans of Central Asia and Politotdel deconstructed the official confines and meaning(s) of sport and labour and infused this ‘cultural field’ with their individual and collective habitus and Korean ‘agency’ which displayed a truer, more inclusive sense of the USSR as a polity of many equal nations (nationalities) and Soviet ‘internationalism.’ Keywords: Koreans, Soviet sport, football, nationalities deportations.

Vorgeschichte und Situation der ‚Deutschen‘ nach 1945; Die „wilden“ Vertreibungen; Aussiedlungen nach den „wilden Vertreibungen“; Aussiedlungen auf Basis des Potsdamer Abkommens; Aussiedlungen auf Basis der Dekrete von 1946; Das Ende der Ausweisungen

Potsdam – Zwang oder Möglichkeit? Zeitgenössische Interpretationen

Ein Schwerpunkt in der Geschichte der Aussiedlung der Ungarndeutschen ist die Interpretation des Potsdamer Abkommens. Sowohl die damaligen Politiker, als auch die Historiker, die sich mit diesem Thema beschäftigten, stritten sich darum, ob die Aussiedlung für die ungarische Regierung ein Zwang oder eine Möglichkeit war. Diese Studie befasst sich damit, wie die damaligen Politiker das Abkommen interpretierten.
Mit der Verwendung von Archivquellen, Presseorganen und durch die Analyse des Textes des Abkommens in verschiedenen Sprachen versucht die Autorin eine Antwort auf die Frage zu geben. Die ungarische Regierung hatte die Absicht, einen Teil der Ungarndeutschen zur Aussiedlung zu zwingen, und dafür bekam sie von den Großmächten Erlaubnis, aber danach wollte niemand da- für verantworten. Die ungarische Regierung war nicht in der Lage, die Aussiedlung auf Grund der Kollektivschuld offen auf sich zu nehmen, weil die als Präzedenz für das Schicksal der Ungarn in der Tschechoslowakei hätte dienen können. Die Leiter des Staates durften nicht anders vorgehen, als den Zwang des Potsdamer Abkommens zu betonen.
Als Historiker können wir jetzt sagen, dass es kein Zwang, sondern eine Möglichkeit war, aber die zeitgenössischen Politiker durften es offen nicht auf sich nehmen.

Bayer's human rights violations included non-consenting human victims of quasi-medical experiments related to Nazi "world domination" of which only a handful survived. Bayer commissioned the Nazi Party to build Auschwitz to facilitate this process.

Cette réflexion porte sur la quête du chez-soi des réfugiés de guerre et sur la maison en tant qu’objet principal de cette quête. Elle s’appuie sur des enquêtes ethnographiques réalisées auprès d’expulsés allemands de la Seconde Guerre mondiale qui effectuent des voyages de retour vers leurs lieux d’origine. L’objectif est d’appréhender la manière dont ces expulsés visitent et ré-habitent leurs maisons d’enfance ainsi que l’impact du retour sur leur conception du chez-soi. Le concept d’« habiter » de Martin
Heidegger permet de cerner le rapport à l’ancienne maison, tel que vécu et exprimé par les expulsés allemands. Ré-habiter temporairement les lieux d’origine favorise une réflexion qui mène à la modification du rapport aux lieux d’origine, au passé personnel et à soi.

Ethnic Cleansing - Origins of the Concept:

Do you know the origins of the term "ethnic cleansing"? Contrary to entrenched beliefs, this expression was not coined during the Yugoslav wars. The violent removal of opponents and entire communities has been called cleansing since biblical times. This book analyzes the religious, class, and racial aspects of the dangerous metaphor of cleansing. The concept of cleansing was gradually ethnicized by the end of 19th century within academic circles. By the interwar period, it had evolved into the political projects of creating “ethnically pure” territories and performing “ethnic cleansing” of their populations. These plans were set in motion during the Second World War and the term “ethnic cleansing” appeared in the Balkans. Sidelined in the postwar period, this ethnopolitical jargon returned to the fore in Yugoslavia during the 1990s, whereas the practice continues to this day around the world.

Con este artículo aspiramos a plantear vías y elementos para el análisis, el estudio y la comprensión de un fenómeno complejo de violencia étnica con múltiples implicaciones a todos los niveles y un escenario transnacional marcado por diferentes tempos, razones y estímulos, todo ello propiciado por las consecuencias de la guerra y las condiciones planteadas por la inmediata posguerra. Por tanto, nuestro objetivo sería dar cuenta de la complejidad inherente al éxodo y la expulsión de las comunidades alemanas y Volksdeutsche de Europa centro-oriental a la par que introducir una nueva variable en nuestra comprensión de la guerra civil europea.

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In this article we want to pose some lines and objects in order to go into detail about the analysis, research and understanding of a complex phenomena of ethnic violence, a problem with too much implications at every level in a transnational scene characterized by different tempos, reasons and stimulus, all of that favoured by the consequences of war and postwar situation. Therefore, our aim is to show the complexity attached tothe exodus and expulsion of German and Volksdeutsche communities at Central-Eastern Europe. At the same time we would like to introduce a new fact in our understanding of the European civil war.