Orphans Of Versailles
Orphans Of Versailles

Author: Richard Blanke

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0813161398

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The lands Germany ceded to Poland after World War I included more than one million ethnic Germans for whom the change meant a sharp reversal of roles. The Polish government now confronted a German minority in a region where power relationships had been the other way around for more than a century. Orphans of Versailles examines the complex psychological and political situation of Germans consigned to Poland, their treatment by the Polish government and society, their diverse strategies for survival, their place in international relations, and the impact of National Socialism. Not a one-sided study of victimization, this book treats the contributions of both the Polish state and the German minority to the conflict that culminated in their mutual destruction. Based largely on research in European archives, it sheds new light on a key aspect of German-Polish relations, one that was long overshadowed by concern over the German revanchist threat and the hostility that subsequently dominated the German-Polish relationship. Thanks to the new political situation in central Europe, however, this topic can finally be addressed evenhandedly.

The German Minority in Interwar Poland
The German Minority in Interwar Poland

Author: Winson Chu

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-06-25

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1107008301

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Explores what happened when Germans from three different empires were forced to live together in Poland after the First World War.

Orderly and Humane
Orderly and Humane

Author: R. M. Douglas

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-06-26

Total Pages: 696

ISBN-13: 0300183763

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The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after WWII: “a major achievement” (New Republic). Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were horrifying: at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless. In this authoritative and objective account, historian R.M. Douglas examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the forced migrations were conceived, planned, and executed, and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The first comprehensive history of this immense manmade catastrophe, Orderly and Humane is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing." It may also be the most significant untold story of the World War II.

Poles in Kaiser's Army on the Front of the First World War
Poles in Kaiser's Army on the Front of the First World War

Author: Ryszard Kaczmarek

Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9783631814840

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The book deals with the fate of Poles from Poznań, Upper Silesia, Masuria, and Eastern Pomerania, who served in the German Imperial Army during the First World War. In regiments recruited on the Polish soil, it was common to use the Polish language, and from 1917 Poles deserted to the Polish Army in France

Germans to Poles
Germans to Poles

Author: Hugo Service

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-11-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781107595484

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At the end of the Second World War, mass forced migration and population movement accompanied the collapse of Nazi Germany's occupation and the start of Soviet domination in East-Central Europe. Hugo Service examines the experience of Poland's new territories, exploring the Polish Communist attempt to 'cleanse' these territories in line with a nationalist vision, against the legacy of brutal wartime occupations of Central and Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The expulsion of over three million Germans was intertwined with the arrival of millions of Polish settlers. Around one million German citizens were categorised as 'native Poles' and urged to adopt a Polish national identity. The most visible traces of German culture were erased. Jewish Holocaust survivors arrived and, for the most part, soon left again. Drawing on two case studies, the book exposes how these events varied by region and locality.

Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland
Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland

Author: Brendan Karch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1108487106

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A century-long struggle to make a borderland population into loyal Germans or Poles drove nationalist activists to radical measures.

Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages
Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-08-16

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 900446655X

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This volume examines mutual ethnic and national perceptions and stereotypes in the Middle Ages by analysing a range of historical sources, with a particular focus on the mutual history of Germany and Poland.

Elusive Alliance
Elusive Alliance

Author: Jesse Kauffman

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-08-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0674286014

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Jesse Kauffman explains why Germany’s ambitious attempt at nation-building in Poland during WWI failed. The educational and political institutions Germany built for its satellite state could not alleviate Poland’s hostility to the plundering of its resources to fuel Germany’s war effort.

Poland 1939
Poland 1939

Author: Roger Moorhouse

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0465095410

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A "chilling" and "expertly" written history of the 1939 September Campaign and the onset of World War II (Times of London). For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians. In Poland 1939, Roger Moorhouse reexamines the least understood campaign of World War II, using original archival sources to provide a harrowing and very human account of the events that set the bloody tone for the conflict to come.

Hitler Strikes Poland
Hitler Strikes Poland

Author: Alexander B. Rossino

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13:

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A gripping examination of the systematic and murderous ways that Germans first put into place their criminal ideology in their invasion of Poland, during which tens of thousands of civilians were killed to make ``living space'' for Germans in the east.