Reinterpreting the Expulsion of Germans from Poland, 1945–9

Abstract

This article offers a reinterpretation of the causes and driving forces behind the expulsion of Germans from Poland at the end of the Second World War. Recent scholarship has taken us beyond the German victimhood consensus of West German writers and the sanitized accounts of Communist-era Polish historians. It has demonstrated that the postwar expulsion was not merely the product of international agreements or the impulse for revenge, but was principally the outcome of the Communist-led government’s nationalist campaign to turn Poland into an ethnically homogeneous nation-state between 1944 and 1949. Several recent studies have emphasized that the regime sought to achieve ethnic purity in Poland’s ‘recovered territories’ not only through deliberate forced migration of Germans but also through systematic repopulation with Polish settlers. But there has yet to appear a detailed examination of the practical connection between these mass migration processes. By taking a locally grounded approach to the subject, this article demonstrates that the massive influx of Polish settlers in fact helped to instigate, propel and set the pace of the forced migration of Germans from postwar Poland, and that the fates of Germans and Poles thereby became inseparably intertwined.