Author Description

The starting point of this book is the events taking place in the eastern German provinces after the military collapse of the German army in 1944 and onwards. German civilians fled or were expelled from the areas east of the rivers Oder and Neisse. In the wake of these events, a humanitarian crisis followed. Many people lost their lives due to military actions, abuse from the new power holders in the form of massacres, mass rape and internement under inhuman conditions. Around 10-12 million Germans from the eastern and southern part of Europe had subsequently to find a new home with the reduced German state territory. This book analyses the integration of this experience in public memory. It proposes that in the first periode of the new founded Federal Republic of Germany, the fate of the refugees attracted much attention and solidarity, as contrasted to the many other victim groups who had sufferend under the nazi regime. As new evidence and a new historical awareness of the Holocaust emerged, the memory of the expelled was gradually socially and politically marginalised.