Análisis del Rendimiento del Mercado Vs BETA

NATIONALIZATION AND POPULATION DISCPLACEMENT

On September 7, 1945, the mayor of Göttingen, Erich Schmidt, wrote a plaintive letter to the governor (Oberpräsident) of the Province of Hannover.62 Schmidt began the letter by noting the rising number of emergency cases among refugees, and he argued for the establishment of a regulation over the governing districts (überbezirkliche Regelung) for dealing with the issue. His concern was mostly for three refugee groups for which the Friedland refugee camp would soon be responsible: young mothers with infants and small children, disabled veterans who were unable to work for the time being and could not return to their homes east of the Oder River, and lastly old and infirm persons separated from their relatives by the pressures of flight. Schmidt complained that these people wandered from place to place for mosnths without any long-term accommodation because their taking residence (Zuzug) in various localities was prohibited. If anything, the problem was worsening because other regions had been declared emergency areas and shoved the refugees into more welcoming districts. Noting the coming hardships of winter, Schmidt called for the development of a reception station to accommodate these groups. Schmidt laid the situation bare in his closing: “Göttingen, despite constant and earnest efforts, is not in the position to help itself.”63

62 _{Although this dissertation refers to the geographic region of “Lower Saxony,” it should be noted that Lower}

Saxony as a political unit did not exist until November 1946 when it was created out of the States of Hannover, Brunswick, Oldenburg, and Schaumburg-Lippe.

63 _{Letter from E. Schmidt to Oberpräsident Hannover, 7 September 1945. Stadtverwaltung und Militärregierung Nr.}

The events in September 1945 raise the question of what had caused such postwar population displacement in Germany. In fact, a wide variety of groups took part in this cross- border traffic, ranging from civilians returning home after wartime evacuations to non-German Displaced Persons returning home or searching for lost family. The largest displaced population consisted of Germans in the process of expulsion from Germany’s former eastern provinces and its neighboring Eastern European states. This chapter is concerned with reconstructing the historical path that led to the expulsions.

Of course, population displacement through war, persecution, and catastrophe stretches back to the ancient world, but the phenomenon of deliberate, mass expulsion and forced

population transfers was a defining feature of twentieth-century history. Already in the wake of World War I, European powers began their first experiments with expulsion and forcible transfers as modern tools of statecraft. France, for example, transferred roughly 100,000

“voluntary repatriates” from Alsace-Lorraine to Germany between 1918 and 1921.64 The Treaty of Lausanne negotiated between Greece and Turkey led to transfers that quickly outpaced Franco-German repatriations; roughly 1.2 million Greeks residing in Turkey and 365,000 Turks living in Greece were forcibly removed from their homes.65 Contemporaneous with the

expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, the forcible population transfers on the partitioned Indian subcontinent in 1947 affected at least 10 million people.66 At the close of the century,

64 _{R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale}

University Press, 2012), 70. See also Carolyn Grohmann, “From Lothringen to Lorraine: Expulsion and Voluntary Repatriation,” in Conan Fisher and Alan Sharp, eds., After the Versailles Treaty: Enforcement, Compliance, Contested Identities (London: Routledge, 2008).

65 _{Pertti Ahonen et al, People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and}

its Aftermath (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 9.

66 _{See Yasmine Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press,}

expulsion continued to play a key role in the “ethnic cleansing” during the wars in the areas of the former Yugoslavia, where some 4.5 million persons suffered displacement.67 The scope of German expulsions exceeded these all. Postwar expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe displaced at least 12 million people, and the figure may have exceeded 14 million, including between 500,000 and 1 million deaths.68

Explaining why Germans were subject to such extensive expulsions requires

consideration of a series of long, medium, and short-term factors. The roots of the expulsion reach back to the nineteenth-century rise of the nation as a predominant community of belonging in the multiethnic lands of Eastern Europe. The invention of the nation and the nationalization of populations by activist groups created a new dimension of political conflict leading to the First World War. The reification of nations through the assignment of national categories and grassroots identification with national communities also meant that nationally based conflicts affected ever more of the region’s peoples. The nationalization of Eastern European populations continued during and after World War I, while the postwar order created by the Peace of Paris led to sharper national conflicts.

In the medium-term, the failure of the minority rights protection through the League of Nations and the destabilizing influence of nationalist politics in multinational states had two effects. First, the region was primed for more violent conflict. Second, the idea that national conflict should be resolved by the creation of nationally homogenous states gained more

adherents. Finally, the postwar expulsion of Germans cannot be understood without reference to

67 _{Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly, “Opinion on situation of refugees and displaced persons in some}

parts of the former Yugoslavia,” by Iwinski, Doc. 7397 (Committee on Migration, Refugees and Demography, 1995).

68 _{Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 1. The extent of the expulsion and death rate remain controversial, but there is}

the causative context of World War II. Almost immediately following the outbreak of the war, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime began a program to remake Eastern Europe along national and racial lines, committing atrocities and privileging Germans and their allies at the expense of putatively inferior races. This wartime disruption of national communities in turn made it easier to imagine and to realize the forcible transfer of the German populations that had seemed to provoke or at least provide the pretext for war.

The Nationalization of Eastern European Populations

At its most fundamental level, nationalist conflict in Eastern Europe stemmed from the region’s patchwork of multiethnic populations. The migrations and invasions of Germanic and Slavic groups in the regions generally stretching between the Volga and Oder Rivers and between the Baltic and Adriatic Seas produced complicated patterns of settlement during the ancient and medieval eras.69 Germanic populations in particular grew along the Baltic Sea as a consequence of the Teutonic rule and, later, Hanseatic trade networks. Beginning in the seventeenth century, German-speaking settlers moved inland and eastward into the areas of Poland-Lithuania, along the Danube, and eventually by invitation into tsarist Russia along the Volga, the Black Sea, and in the Caucuses.70 Nevertheless, it is important to note that these linguistic and cultural groups did not constitute primordial nations. Instead, these populations only became nationalized during the transition to modernity in Eastern Europe. Although the descendents of various settler groups may have come to identify in national terms and engage in

69

On the history of ethnic German settlement in Eastern Europe, see the excellent summary by Eric Steinhart in his dissertation; Eric Steinhart, “Creating Killers: The Nazification of Black Sea Germans and the Holocaust in

Southern Ukraine, 1941-1944,” (Ph.D. diss.,University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010).

70 _{See Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich: Zweihunderte deutsch-russische Kulturgemeinschaft}

explicitly national conflicts during the twentieth century, any suggestion that their ancestors already constituted nations or that conflicts between different groups is anachronistic.

Like other communities of belonging, nations develop from the self-understanding and loyalty of their members. Benedict Anderson’s much celebrated and oft-repeated phrasing defines the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” 71 Nations are simultaneously “imagined” and real in the sense that an individual conceives of himself or herself as a member of a political community connecting complete strangers through cultural ties. The imagining of the nation as a limited, definable community thus makes it real. Nations are in turn useful to both the state and its population. Anderson, for example, understands the development of nationalism as a beneficial historical phenomenon because, in his view, the nation’s sovereignty emphasizes freedom, the

Enlightenment, and the Revolution in opposition to the “hierarchical dynastic realm.”72 John Breuilly’s discussion of nationalism is likewise crucial for understanding what advantages the national community offers to the modern state. He argues that the fundamental point of

nationalism is “above and beyond all else, about politics, and […] politics is about power.”73 _In particular, nationalist politics are useful to the modern state for their capacity for internal mobilization and coordination.74

71 _{Within scholarship on nationality, reference to Benedict Anderson’s evocative phrasing of “imagined}

communities” has become rote but nonetheless necessary. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:

Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006; original: Verso, 1983), 6.

72 _{Ibid., 7.}

73 _{John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 1-2.} 74 _{Ibid., 2, 353.}

The European watershed for the emergence of nationalist politics occurred during the Revolutions of 1848. A combination of poor harvests and the longer-term discontentment of peasants and artisans over economic dislocation led to the outbreak of revolution in France, which then spread eastward before stopping short at the edge of Russia. For liberal and more radical revolutionaries, the question was not only the introduction of democratic institutions and the liberalization of economies, but also the extent to which European states should be reordered along national lines. In the German case, the parliamentarians in Frankfurt also confronted the issues of national unification and its ramifications for citizenship. Brian Vick has argued that the liberal nationalists at Frankfurt hoped to create an expansive, inclusive basis for German

citizenship with the understanding that Protestant-German culture would predominate.75 _The prospect of fragmentation along national lines, however, proved particularly worrisome to the monarchy in multinational Austria-Hungary and ultimately helped to scuttle a possible Greater German solution.76 Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, nationalist groups in the Polish, Hungarian, and Czech cases also wrestled with issue of exclusive nationalism and its effect of blunting territorial claims.77 _{Although the eventual conservative victories undermined the goals of radical and} national revolutionaries, Europe’s monarchies (particularly in Austria-Hungary) increasingly had to compete with developing national consciousness for popular loyalty.

As the Revolutions of 1848 suggested, the nation constituted only one form of communal belonging among many different forms of imaginable communities. Class, religion, localities, and even monarchs could also form the basis for primary or situational self-identification. During

75 _{Brian Vick, Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Cambridge,}

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 212-213.

76 _{Ibid., 214.}

the latter half of the nineteenth-century, national activists in Eastern Europe therefore not only competed with each other to increase the breadth of their communities, but they also contested other forms of group identity.

In a landmark study of the Germany minority in Prague from 1861 to 1914, Gary Cohen was one of the first historians to show the contingency of national self-identification. Cohen found that nationality was closely tied to class and cultural identity. He further argued that status as political, cultural, and economic elites became defining features of German national

belonging.78 Crucially, Cohen also demonstrated the extent to which national identity was malleable and a product of rational class-interested choice. He found that lower-class Germans who lived in a predominantly Czech environment “faced strong pressures to assimilate with the Czechs […] in the end, many were simply absorbed into the Czech-speaking majority.”79

Resistance to the permanent adoption of national identities frustrated national activists in Eastern Europe, particularly in the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In his examination of the Habsburg officer corps from 1848 to 1918—the initial period of intensified nationalist

activism—Istvan Deak demonstrated that officers from the empire’s constituent groups remained stubbornly nonnational. The officers even shed ethnic identities by associating themselves with the supranational figure of the emperor and the institution of the army. The officers did

eventually succumb to nationalization during the second year of World War I when combat losses had turned the professional army into a “citizens’ militia.”80 Jeremy King has likewise shown that for the residents of Budejovice/Budweis, “individual choice and national

78 _{Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (West Lafayette: Purdue University}

Press, 2006), 204.

79 _{Ibid., 209.}

80 _{Istvan Deak, Beyond Nationalism: A Social History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 (New York:}

competition” slowed the nationalization process, stripping “the process of much of its seeming naturalness and irreversibility.”81

Because definitions of “German,” “Czech,” and other categories were ambiguous enough to allow residents to switch between the two for their own advantage, national activists tried to force populations to adopt a single national identity during the fin de siècle. Nationalists in southern Bohemia, South Styria, and South Tyrol recast these lands as “language frontiers” to normalize national identity and to eliminate the possibility of alternative loyalties. According to Pieter Judson, these nationalists “struggled to popularize their positions among local inhabitants, to make nationalism particularly relevant to local concerns, and to bind local populations

permanently to one side or the other.”82 _{At the turn of the century, children also became} particular targets of national activists’ efforts. As Tara Zahra has argued, children could “slip easily between linguistic and national communities, threaten[ing] to expose the deepest

assumptions of nationalist politics as myths.”83 Indeed, children were so important to nationalists that when a nationalist government emerged in post-World War I Czechoslovakia, the

modernizing state apparatus came into increasing conflict with parents over the nationalization of the private, family sphere.

The outbreak and fighting of World War I further sharpened national divides in Eastern Europe. In Austria-Hungary, the start of the war initially caused nationalist associations to match their rhetoric to wartime patriotism, because they believed that demonstrations of loyalty through

81 _{Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics (Princeton: Princeton}

University Press, 2002), 10.

82 _{Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Late Imperial Austria}

(Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4.

83 _{Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands (Ithaca:}

active participation in the war effort would be rewarded later.84 Nationalist groups in Bohemia then remained in a “holding pattern” for much of the rest of the war.85 As the war came to a close in 1918, however, the inhabitants of languages frontiers began adopting national identities in greater numbers. This phenomenon did not emerge because citizens suddenly “realized” their identities or found themselves free express national identification, but instead because claiming nationality became a requirement for acquiring aid from the Habsburg government and the successor states.86

In Russia, worries about enemy nationalities led to harsher repression than was the case in Austria-Hungary. The tsar’s government and military particularly feared German-speaking populations as a potential fifth column. As a result, the military targeted German-speakers in the western lands of the empire through a program of expropriation, revocation of linguistic and cultural autonomy, and deportation.87 The liberalization of Russia following the February Revolution in 1917 included the revocation of measures targeting Germans, but the subsequent October Revolution undid the relaxation of these policies.88 Such repression of German-speakers contributed to the construction of Germans as an enemy nation within Russia. Yet, the

crystallization of a German national identity in Russia was also part of a larger awakening of national consciousness through displacement along the front. Roughly six million people were

84 _{Judson, Guardians of the Nation, 219.} 85 _{Ibid., 223.}

86 _{Ibid., 229.}

87 _{Steinhart, “Creating Killers,” 48-49; Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World}

War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 23; and Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 100, 104- 108.

uprooted by the fighting and Russian military’s program of population displacement. This status as refugees sharpened national consciousness among the displaced minorities as well as in the minds of the groups hosting them in Russia’s interior territories.89

Fighting and occupation by German troops on the Eastern European front during World War I solidified German and local understandings of nationality. German soldiers arriving in territories of Lithuania and the Kurland were shocked by the “elective ethnicities” of the native populations. According to Germans, this national confusion and putative backwardness

necessitated the introduction of German Kultur as part of a civilizing mission.90 Irrational economic policies embittered the region’s inhabitants and forced them to view conflicts with the occupation force of Ober Ost in starkly national terms.91 _{Indeed, German heavy-handedness} proved counterproductive to winning allies among nationalists in Eastern Europe. The plan to create Lithuanian and Polish buffer states displeased both nations: Lithuanians would lose territory to the Poles, and treaties would have tightly bound the new national states to Germany militarily and economically.92 It is therefore unsurprising that German attempts to recruit nationalists to their cause were ultimately rebuffed and instead left a legacy of increased nationalization through conflict with German occupiers.

89 _{Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 160-189.}

90 _{Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World}

War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29.

91 _{Ibid., 180.}

Minority Protection and Population Transfers

Despite the seeming triumph of Woodrow Wilson’s concept of national self-

determination, the creation of national democracies in Eastern Europe mostly stemmed from a cynical Realpolitik rather than a liberalistic commitment to Wilsonian ideals. To be sure, national self-determination had entered the interwar political vocabulary of Eastern Europe. Yet, many of the successor states created out of the multinational empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia followed a multinational model.93 Multinationality and the resulting conflicts were the price paid for the creation of the medium-sized states that France and Britain preferred as counterweights to Germany and as “bastions against Bolshevism” farther east.94

The most obvious example of political realism overriding self-determination were the decisions to ensure that Germany emerged from the war with decreased territorial holdings. For instance, Article 88 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye forbade union between Germany and the rump Austrian state by declaring Austria’s independence “inalienable” and barring actions that would “by any means whatever compromise her independence.”95 Significant German-speaking minorities also lived in Czechoslovakia and Poland, both of which were