:Vertriebene und “Umsiedlerpolitik”: Integrationskonflikte in den deutschen Nachkriegs‐Gesellschaften und die Assimilationsstrategien in der SBZ/DDR 1945–1961.(Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte, number 61.)

Abstract

The mining of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) archives continues to yield riches. Michael Schwartz's massive, detailed study of post-World War II refugees in East Germany rests primarily on research in the repositories of the Bundesarchiv Berlin, and three provincial archives (Mecklenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia). As a result of the war, approximately 15 million people fled, were expelled, or were forcibly resettled from Germany's eastern territories: lands transferred to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. Of these 15 million, some 4.3 million landed in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ), which, of course, later became the East German state. This is a revisionist work, insofar as it aims to correct the triumphalist West German version of a successful integration of the expellees into postwar society. Schwartz maintains that the expellee situation, like so many other aspects of postwar German history, needs to be considered as a gesamtdeutsch (whole German) development requiring examination of events in the “other” Germany. Historiographically, Schwartz's study is part of an on-going reconsideration and reorientation of postwar German history in light of newly available East German archives.