Germans to Poles: Communism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War by Hugo Service (review)

The expulsion of the German population of central and southeast Europe during the five years after the Second World War is at last beginning to attract the attention it deserves from anglophone scholars. Much work, however, remains to be done. Although more than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the opening of many of the relevant state archives in the principal expelling countries (Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary), it is hard to think of any episode of comparable importance in respect of which English-speaking historians of modern Europe have displayed such a striking incuriosity. This is all the more remarkable inasmuch as so many aspects of the expulsions remain to be fully explicated. In particular, delineating the logistical elements of what proved to be a massive multinational operation, accomplished at breakneck speed and with little or no advance planning, is a task whose surface has barely been scratched.

For this reason, the appearance of Hugo Service’s fine study of the means by which two districts of southwestern Poland, Jelenia Góra (Hirschberg) and Opole (Oppeln), substituted a Polish migrant population for their German ones, is especially welcome. Following in the footsteps of David Curp’s pioneering scholarship on Wielkopolska (Greater Poland), Service astutely selects for his comparative study a region of the “Recovered Territories” assigned to Poland by the Potsdam Treaty that was almost entirely German in composition, and another whose people were often bilingual and that thus provides scope for examining the operation of the postwar Polish regime’s ethnic screening policies. In Lower Silesia, Jelenia Góra (the former Hirschberg) and its environs underwent an almost total demographic transformation from 1945 to 1948. The prewar population of some 115,000 Germans was replaced by an even larger number of Polish settlers. The Upper Silesian town of Opole (Oppeln) witnessed less dramatic changes, the emphasis here being on Polonizing the region by the simple administrative means of declaring the local population to be “autochthons” or “indigenous Poles,” in many cases despite the national indifference, linguistic incompetence, or even former Nazi Party membership of the individuals concerned. In this, as Service notes, the postwar Polish authorities in many respects followed precedents set during the war by the Nazi occupiers, who had adopted equally arbitrary policies of ethnic classification in pursuit of larger political and strategic objectives.

This was not the only element of continuity in the postwar Polish government’s approach to the problem of its minority populations. Despite the predominance of the Communist party in the governing coalition, the new régime not only promoted the revival of the Polish Western Association, a prewar pressure group committed to territorial expansion at Germany’s expense and the removal of national minorities from Polish soil, but appointed Stanisław Grabski, a leading member of Roman Dmowski’s right-wing and Germanophobe National Democratic movement, as deputy president of the Home National Council. Service presents much evidence to show that the postwar Polish state’s embrace of such chauvinistic elements, and its enthusiasm for forced migrations, had the goal of accomplishing “not only the uprooting of German citizens and ethnic Germans, but also the expulsion of ethnic Ukrainians and various other transformative processes aimed at turning Poland into a homogeneous nation-state.”

However, the repopulation of the Recovered Territories with settlers from the eastern lands ceded by Poland to the Soviet Union in 1944, and the “re-Polonization” of Silesians, Masurians, and others whose cultural and national connections to the new Polish state were weak or non-existent proved to be far greater challenges than expected. “Verification” measures aimed at preventing the depopulation of newly acquired lands by reclassifying persons who had been given German citizenship by the Nazis as Poles often proved ineffective in persuading their intended beneficiaries to remain. Attempts to eradicate every trace of the centuries-long German presence, by penalizing the use of...