Trajectories of population displacement in the aftermaths of two world wars

Abstract

The death, destruction and displacement wrought by the Second World War are topics of undiminished interest to historians and to a wider public. The historiography frequently emphasises the transformative impact of the war in Europe, not only in terms of territorial adjustment but also in a series of social calamities, including the destruction of European Jewry, huge military losses (particularly in Soviet Russia), the rupturing of social ties in Central and Eastern Europe where social upheaval prefigured the formation of Communist governments, and the mass expulsion of people who were deemed not to ‘belong’.1 Recent scholarship suggests that these calamities had antecedents in programmes, practices and ideologies that can be traced back to the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the state entertained ideas about social and demographic engineering and population management, by conceiving of a ‘social body’. The modern state’s pursuit of perfection through reshaping social organisation and refashioning behaviour culminated in organised efforts to rid society of unwanted elements that did not correspond to that utopian vision.2 These projects, as is well known, came to terrible fruition in Hitler’s European empire.3 The 1940s also witnessed continued Soviet social and ethnic cleansing. The Bolshevik leadership targeted class enemies and engaged in a series of mass deportations, whose purpose was both punitive and developmental, in that remote regions of the Soviet land mass were opened up for economic transformation.