Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948 (review)

This handsome volume is an important reminder that ethnic cleansing did not begin in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. Although the term was not common earlier, Eastern and Central Europe had previously experienced genocide, often in the name of ethnic purity. Yet, as Mark Kramer points out in his comprehensive introduction, the study of ethnic cleansing, primarily meaning forced migration, has become an important area of research only in recent years.

The focus of this book is on the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia after World War II. The circumstances are well-known; the details, until now, have rarely surfaced. The basic circumstance was the support of probably most German-speaking Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks for Nazi Germany's war effort, and the subsequent retaliation against all ethnic Germans by postwar governments. The Germans were forced to repatriate to Germany (a country some of them had never even visited and certainly did not know well or consider home), but in a moment of understandable fury and revenge this was a relatively small detail that could be, and was, overlooked.

On a much smaller scale, this is what happened to ethnic Hungarians as well. Mentioned but not discussed in this volume is that many ethnic Hungarians, notably in Slovakia, were returned to Hungary. This policy was odd in light of the Slovak government's enthusiastic support for Nazi Germany, very possibly more enthusiastic than the support for Adolf Hitler extended by Hungary until the spring of 1944. It would have been interesting to deal with this particular case because it points to a curious political circumstance that obtained after World War II. Somehow, Czechoslovakia—including Slovakia, which was ruled as a Nazi puppet regime during the war—ended up as an "ally" and a "winner," whereas Hungary, a loyal ally of Germany that had nevertheless attempted in some small ways to distance itself from the Germans, was not treated much better than Germany itself.

Of course, Czechoslovakia was a victim of Nazi Germany, and therefore it was entitled to decent treatment by the Allies, but its postwar success in making the expulsion of its German-speaking citizens acceptable and legitimate owed much to the efforts of Edvard Benes. A politician of seemingly unlimited energy, a man given to intrigues, who became Czechoslovakia's president after World War II, Benes had worked tirelessly during the war to convince not only the Anglo-Saxons but the Soviet Union as well that the transfer of minority populations was fully justified. His efforts greatly contributed to the Allied decision around 1944 to accept that all ethnic Germans should be removed en masse from Central and Eastern Europe. Yet Benes, guided by his hatred toward ethnic Germans and Hungarians, might have devoted too much energy to dealing with the past rather than the future. The past suggested an interest in expelling ethnic Germans from the Czech lands and ethnic Hungarians from Slovakia, but the critical issue at hand with respect to the future was the urgent need to resist Josif Stalin's plans for Central and Eastern Europe. Eagle Glassheim rightly notes: "As Soviet armies pushed their way west, Benes prepared to enter his liberated country with Allied support for a policy of large-scale expulsion of Sudeten Germans" (p.201). Because his (past-oriented) priorities were misplaced, Benes's government was in no position to resist the Soviet Union, and his country is still paying a price for the policies of collective guilt incorporated into the Benes decrees of 1945.

The volume offers ample documentation on what happened to the ethnic Germans of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Scholars will greatly benefit from the extensive research presented here about how the expulsion of Germans was carried out in...