Forced Migrations

Report Outline
German Proposals for Resettement of Europe
Mass Migrations of Previous Centuries
Exchange of Greeks, Bulgarians and Turks
Population Shifts in the Present War

German Proposals for Resettement of Europe

Since the beginning of the present war, Germany has followed a policy of regrouping populations and nations which seems to be a distinct reversal of the pre-Munich demand for sovereignty over all lands where Germans live. The new program was announced by Hitler in a speech to the Reichstag on October 6, 1939, a few days after the capture of Warsaw, but its implications went largely unnoticed at the time because attention was focussed on the bid for peace which the speech also contained. The Fuehrer included in his list of German aims:

As the most important task,…to establish a new order of ethnographic conditions, that is to say, resettlement of nationalities in such a manner that the process ultimately results in the obtaining of better dividing lines than is the case at present. In this sense, however, it is not a case of the problem being restricted to this particular sphere, but of a task with far wider implications, for the east and south of Europe are to a large extent filled with splinters of the German nationality, whose existence they cannot maintain.

In their very existence lie the reason and cause for continual international disturbances. In this age of the principle of nationalities and of racial ideals, it is Utopian to believe that members of a highly developed people can be assimilated without trouble. It is therefore essential for a fat-sighted ordering of the life of Europe that a resettlement should be undertaken here so as to remove at least part of the material for European conflict. Germany and the Union of Soviet Republics have come to an agreement to support each other in this matter.