From Ethnic Cleansing to Ethnic Resurgence: The German Minority in Poland, 1945–95

Abstract

The re-emergence of a German minority in Poland as a cultural and political force is one of the more remarkable aspects of social and political transformation since the ending of Communist rule in 1989. The expulsion of ethnic Germans from the states of Central Europe in the late 1940s was widely regarded as a final resolution of the ‘problem’ of the German minorities in the region. Yet in Poland the expulsions of the late 1940s were followed by decades during which tens of thousands more people of German descent or affiliation migrated westwards — most going to the Federal Republic. By the 1980s the ‘problem’ seemed once more to have been finally resolved. There were no longer any Germans in Poland — or so government spokesmen claimed. Consequently, the emergence of a sizeable German minority in the late 1980s and early 1990s caught many Poles by surprise.