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

Abstract

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 782 The contrast between German and Romanian actions is illustrated by the fact that the largest proportion of Jews to survive Axis rule during the Second World War in the Soviet Union was in Transnistria. Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. D. Deletant and UCL SSEES Service, Hugo. Germans to Poles: Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2013. ix + 378 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £65.00: $99.00. The title of Hugo Service’s impressive monograph, Germans to Poles, actually refers to two important events, simultaneous and intertwined but with distinctive dynamics, that unfolded in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The first involved the forced emigration of millions of Germanspeaking residents of what had been the eastern regions of Germany, as well as their replacement by millions of in-migrating Polish-speakers. The second involved an attempt to change from German to Polish the ethnic classification of hundreds of thousands of bilingual residents of those regions, facilitating their transition from wartime membership in a German racial community to post-war membership in a homogeneous Polish nation-state. Thanks to a recent surge in scholarship, some in English but most, predictably, in German and Polish, these phenomena are much better known than they were a generation ago. But Service’s book is among the first major studies that offers a combined analysis of mass migration on the one hand and attempted mass cultural assimilation on the other. The primary-source research for Germans to Poles is focused on two case studies. The first is the district/county of Hirschberg/Jelenia Góra in Lower Silesia, located in the mountainous region bordering the current-day Czech Republic and not far from the current German-Polish frontier. This was an area inhabited before the war almost exclusively by German-speakers with no sense of Slavic descent. In this sense, it was representative of most of the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, where the local German population would be deemed essentially unassimilable and thus slated for removal. But as Service carefully explains, the immediate wartime and post-war experiences of different areas varied enormously. In contrast to regions such as East Prussia, which witnessed large-scale flight and de-population before the end of the war, Hirschberg/Jelenia Góra was among the last areas to remain under Nazi rule and so was more a destination than a point of departure for refugees in the winter and early spring of 1945. Polish in-migrants, however, had already REVIEWS 783 begun to arrive by the time hostilities ended. Some were forced emigrants from Poland’s own pre-war eastern territories, which were now absorbed by the Soviet Union. Others came from central Poland, often with the goal of scavenging for mobile property rather than establishing permanent residence. The growth in local population, which soon exceeded the pre-war level, spurred pressure for the expulsion of the remaining German residents. But the need for skilled labour was a countervailing factor in the immediate post-war period, leading to special dispensations to allow — indeed, coerce — thousands of skilled German workers to remain in the country temporarily. The on-going migration of other groups, such as Jewish Holocaust survivors and Ukrainians uprooted from areas near the new Polish-Soviet frontier, further complicated the demographic landscape in the late 1940s. This was anything but the ‘clean sweep’ envisioned by Allied policy makers. Service’s second local case study, of the district of Oppeln/Opole in western Upper Silesia, reveals an even more complicated set of dynamics. As in Hirschberg/Jelenia Góra, in-migration by Polish speaking-speaking settles often preceded German out-migration. But unlike in Lower Silesia, the majority of the existing residents of Oppeln/Opole were officially not considered to be German at all but rather Polish autochtones subjected to superficial and reversible germanization under generations of Prussian/German rule. The subsequent ‘verification’ of these inhabitants ostensibly recognized them full and equal members of the Polish nation. But in practice, both state authorities and in-migrants from elsewhere in Poland often continued to treat...