Benign Neglect

NORBERT MUHLEN

In the years immediately following World War II, some 16 million people were driven out of Central and Eastern Europe; two million of them did not survive the violence, disease, and near-starvation they were subjected to during their involuntary migration. The world at large paid little attention to their fate. Part of the reason for this negligence was that the victims were of German descent: in the wake of the Nazi crimes, it was fashionable to assume that “they had it coming to them,” despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of them had in no way been involved in the horrors of the Hitler period. Furthermore, this exodus was set in motion and enforced by the Communist leadership of the Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and not-yet-Communist Czechoslovakia: governments which, as Americans were told, always did the right thing in their own progressive way. As many people were expelled from their homelands in these few years as had emigrated to the United States in the four decades between 1881 and 1920. Yet unlike those emigrants, the German migrants arrived against their will in a war-torn country; penniless, deprived of their possessions, they were dumped, after their trek to the West, into ruins.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Joseph Stalin

NORBERT MUHLEN

In the years immediately following World War II, some 16 million people were driven out of Central and Eastern Europe; two million of them did not survive the violence, disease, and near-starvation they were subjected to during their involuntary migration. The world at large paid little attention to their fate. Part of the reason for this negligence was that the victims were of German descent: in the wake of the Nazi crimes, it was fashionable to assume that “they had it coming to them,” despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of them had in no way been involved in the horrors of the Hitler period. Furthermore, this exodus was set in motion and enforced by the Communist leadership of the Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and not-yet-Communist Czechoslovakia: governments which, as Americans were told, always did the right thing in their own progressive way. As many people were expelled from their homelands in these few years as had emigrated to the United States in the four decades between 1881 and 1920. Yet unlike those emigrants, the German migrants arrived against their will in a war-torn country; penniless, deprived of their possessions, they were dumped, after their trek to the West, into ruins.