Did the 1944–47 population transfers end ethnic conflict?

The short answer

• Poland’s border moved to the Curzon Line. Stalin insisted on keeping the eastern Polish lands the Soviet Union had seized in 1939, and at Yalta Roosevelt and Churchill accepted a border close to the Curzon Line with compensation in the west. Nearly half of pre-war Poland changed hands, including the Polish cities of Lwów and Wilno. Once the line was fixed, the people on the wrong side of it became a problem that both governments chose to solve by moving them.
• The war of 1943 in Volhynia. Wartime ethnic violence destroyed belief in coexistence. In 1943–44 Ukrainian nationalist insurgents killed tens of thousands of Polish civilians in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, and Polish units killed thousands of Ukrainians in reprisal. The violence convinced both peoples, and the authorities that now ruled them, that coexistence had failed. Population exchange looked like the humane alternative to more massacres, which is why even many victims of forced removal saw it as a kind of safety.
• Communist nation-building. The new communist government in Warsaw lacked popular legitimacy and sought it in nationalism, presenting itself as the builder of a Poland for Poles alone. Ethnic homogeneity fitted Stalin’s preference for clear borders and loyal populations, and it gave the regime land to distribute to settlers. Removing Germans in the west and Ukrainians in the south-east served the same project of a state whose nation and territory finally coincided.
• Treaties that ceded land. Peace treaties gave borderland people a choice that most resolved by leaving. Finland lost Karelia under the Moscow Armistice of 1944 and the Paris treaty of 1947, and Italy lost Istria, Fiume and Zara to Yugoslavia under its own Paris treaty that February. Neither treaty required anyone to leave, but both gave people a choice between a new state and their home. The scale of departure in each case shows how few people believed they could remain safely as minorities under a victorious neighbour.

What it changed

A Poland of Poles. Poland emerged as one of the most ethnically uniform states in Europe, although before the war about a third of its citizens had not been Poles. The cost was paid by Germans, Ukrainians, Lemkos and Polish easterners alike, and by the destruction of multi-ethnic cities such as Lwów and Wilno. When the 1990 border treaty that closes this atlas made the result permanent, it also ended any hope among the uprooted of reclaiming their old homes.

Integration at home as a model. Finland’s resettlement of 410,000 Karelians within a few years, paid for by its own landowners and taxpayers, showed that a poor state could absorb a huge displaced population if it treated them as citizens with claims. West Germany’s Equalisation of Burdens law of 1952 applied similar thinking on a far larger scale, as chapter 6 shows. Integration at home was the solution Europe found for its citizens, and it was not on offer to stateless DPs.

Exiles in Trieste and beyond. Many Istrian exiles waited for years in camps around Trieste and in Italian cities before resettling in Italy or emigrating to Australia, the Americas and elsewhere. The Free Territory of Trieste, divided between Allied and Yugoslav administration, was settled only in 1954, when Italy took the city and Yugoslavia the hinterland, setting off a last wave of departures from the Yugoslav zone. Magazzino 18, a warehouse in Trieste’s old port, still holds the furniture many of them never reclaimed.

Displaced persons who would not go east. Many of the Ukrainians, Poles and Balts already in German camps in 1945 came from the very regions now annexed by the Soviet Union. Since their homes now lay inside the USSR, “going home” meant becoming Soviet citizens, and most refused. Their refusal shaped the DP camps and the Cold War politics of asylum described in chapter 4, where the right to refuse return became the core of refugee protection.