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Publicly Available Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg September 25, 2009

Die Beneš-Dekrete und die Vertreibung der Deutschen im europäischen Vergleich

  • Manfred Kittel and Horst Möller

Weshalb sind deutschsprachige Volksgruppen am Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges nur im östlichen Teil Europas kollektiv aus ihrer angestammten Heimat vertrieben worden? Und warum beschränkten sich die westlichen Staaten darauf, vom dänischen Nordschleswig über das belgische Eupen-Malmedy bis zum italienischen Südtirol eine individuelle politische Säuberung gegen besonders belastete Kollaborateure des Dritten Reiches durchzuführen? Die komplexen Gründe für diese unterschiedlichen Entwicklungen erörtern Manfred Kittel und Horst Möller in einem Aufsatz, der die Ergebnisse eines international vergleichenden Projekts im Auftrag des Deutsch-Tschechischen Zukunftsfonds resümiert und dabei vor allem die Frage nach der Vergleichbarkeit der sogenannten Benesˇ-Dekrete stellt.

Why is it that ethnic Germans were, at the end of World War II, collectively expelled from their traditional homelands only in the Eastern part of Europe? Why is it, on the other hand, that, from Northern Schleswig to Eupen-Malmedy in Belgium and to South Tyrol, the Western states confined themselves to carrying out a political purge against those individuals who were directly accused of collaboration with the National Socialists? The authors of this article argue that the different extent to which the population in Eastern Europe was terrorized under the National Socialist occupation, as opposed to the population in Western Europe, cannot be regarded as a decisive reason for the different policies regarding ethnic Germans after the war. It is of much greater importance that in Eastern Europe, a whole lot of factors interacted with each other and in this very combination caused the expulsion: Previous nationalist motives that had long layered up in the nation-states in question, which had only been (re)founded in 1918 and which were not yet very settled in their existence, a much higher percentage of German minorities compared Western Europe, the (assumed) potential threat these ethnic Germans constituted, and, last but not least, the fact that the mass exodus of the Germans fitted perfectly into Stalin's social revolutionary and geo-strategic plans for the countries of his new sphere of influence east of the Iron Curtain.

Published Online: 2009-09-25
Published in Print: 2006-10-15

© Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag

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