Download Background paper of the conference

Annual Conference of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience
Totalitarianism, Deportation and Emigration
The Forced Displacement of Populations and Waves of Migration in 20th century
Europe caused by the Policy of Totalitarian States
Viljandi, Estonia, 28–30 June 2016
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Background paper by Toomas Hiio, Chairman of the Board, Estonian Institute of
Historical Memory and Member of the Executive Board, Platform of European Memory
and Conscience.
Migration and the forced displacement of peoples was a consequence of the policy of
Europe’s totalitarian regimes and their satellites. The forced displacement of populations
was a violation of human rights, and this was often accompanied by genocide and crimes
against humanity.
The image of a hermetically sealed Iron Curtain has often overshadowed the awareness of
this fact. This conference will analyse the circumstances that led to the forced displacement
of large groups of people due to unlawful repression or the redrawing of borders, or the
distribution of spheres of influence, as well as the reasons that compelled people to leave
their homelands behind at all costs and regardless of obstacles. The negative aspects of
migrations and deportations will be analysed: the loss of one’s homeland, difficult living
conditions in one’s new location, and others. Yet the plans of governments that caused
migrations and deportations will also not be ignored, whether these plans be genocide,
ethnic cleansing, or also the colonisation of uninhabited regions using forced labour, the
alleviation of manpower shortages, or national territorial unity and compensation for war
losses.
The displacement of populations became an object of the attention of the contemporary
European public in connection with the collapse of empires in World War I and changes
in national borders. The conventions adopted at the Hague peace conferences in 1899
and 1907 also prescribed, among other things, the protection of civilians in times of war
and occupation. One of the first tasks of the League of Nations was to cope with large
waves of refugees and famine in former territories of the Ottoman Empire as well as in
Russia, which had been cast into the tumult of civil war. The first High Commissioner for
Refugees was the Norwegian scientist, explorer and politician Fridtjof Nansen, who was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in aiding the millions in Russia struggling
against famine and his work for the refugees in Asia Minor and Thrace.
The establishment of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, and in 1933 in Germany
led to the forcible displacement of populations and new waves of refugees. While the
deportation of people on the basis of social attributes already began in Soviet Russia
during the civil war and culminated with repressions against peasants in the 1930s, the
policy of Hitler’s Germany was aimed primarily against Jews. After Germany and the
Soviet Union signed a mutual nonaggression pact in August of 1939, hundreds of
thousands of ethnic Germans were relocated to Germany and Polish territories occupied
by Germany from regions consigned to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. The Soviet
Union seized Eastern Poland in September of 1939, and the Baltic States and Bessarabia,
which had belonged to Romania, in the summer of 1940. Even before the start of the war
against Germany in the summer of 1941, hundreds of thousands of people who were
branded as “socially dangerous elements” were deported from those regions to Siberia.
The Soviet Union attacked Finland in the autumn of 1939 and captured Karelia in the
Winter War that subsequently broke out. Finland relocated nearly half a million
residents of Karelia to Finland. In addition to Karelians, up to 60,000 Ingrian Finns, who
lived in the region between Leningrad and the Estonian border that had been occupied
by Germany, were relocated to Finland in 1942 and 1943.
During World War II, German authorities deported millions of Jews from all over Europe
to concentration camps located primarily in the territory of occupied Poland but also in
the Baltic States, Ukraine and Byelorussia, where the majority of them fell victim to
genocide. The same fate was met by the Sinti and Roma in occupied Europe.
Additionally, millions of prisoners of war and residents of other countries were taken to
Germany as a slave labour force. At the same time, a number of ethnic groups that had
been categorised as “hostile nationalities” were deported in the Soviet Union during
1941–1944: Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmucks, some ethnicities from the
Northern Caucasus including the Chechens, and others.
Jossif Stalin’s Soviet Union was admittedly the greatest victor of the war and an ally of
the Western countries, yet the forced displacement of tens of thousands of people
continued in the Soviet Union until Stalin’s death. The citizens of many Eastern
European countries, chiefly Germans but also others as well, were also forcibly taken to
the Soviet Union. Stalin’s death in 1953 ended massive repressions against residents of
the Soviet Union and most of the survivors were allowed to return home from the prison
camps of the Gulag or from forced banishment. The last German prisoners of war, about
9000 strong, who had been convicted, were also allowed to return from the Soviet Union
to their homeland in 1955.
After the declaration of two German states in 1949, about four million people left East
Germany for West Germany and elsewhere over the course of 40 years. Resistance to
communist rule led to new waves of refugees. About 200,000 people fled Hungary in
1956 after the Hungarian Uprising was crushed. More than 70,000 Czechs and Slovaks
fled to other countries a dozen years later after the Prague Spring was crushed. About
250,000 Poles left for other countries another dozen years later when martial law was
established in Poland.
In the very year that the Berlin Wall came down, Bulgaria’s communist leadership
forcibly expelled about 300,000 Bulgarian Turks to Turkey.
Even though the Soviet Union’s borders were practically hermetically sealed, some
minority groups were allowed to leave the Soviet Union on the basis of international
agreements. Jews and Russia’s Germans (Volga Germans) were granted emigration
permits in the 1970’s. The procedure was complicated and many applicants ultimately
were not granted emigration permits. But there were also peoples whose forced exile
did not end until perestroika, such as the Crimean Tatars, who then started returning to
the Crimea.
The collapse of the Eastern Bloc brought with it a new population displacement. A
number of East Germans fled to West Germany by way of other Eastern Bloc countries.
Tens of thousands of additional Jews and Volga Germans left the Soviet Union. The
Government of Finland allowed all Ingrian Finns who had been sent back to the Soviet
Union after 1944 to settle in Finland. The opening of the borders also brought legal and
illegal migration, chiefly to Western European countries, the USA and Canada, motivated
primarily by the desire for a better standard of living.
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Possible topics for conference contributions:
1. Beginning of the refugee policy of the League of Nations: the resettlement, flight and
deportation of Greeks, Turks and Armenians from Soviet Russia after the revolution of
1917, and other such matters.
2. The displacement of populations in the policy of totalitarian states: Menschenmaterial,
socially dangerous elements, hostile nationalities, refugees (deportations in the Soviet
Union in the 1920s and 1930s, flight from Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s and the
policies of other countries concerning the acceptance of those refugees, Umsiedlung –
the resettlement of Germans from Eastern Europe in Germany at the end of the 1930s
and the outset of the 1940s, and other related matters).
3. The massive and forced displacement of people in and from regions occupied by
Germany during World War II: policy of annihilation and genocide as well as slave
labour manpower.
4. Deportation during World War II and after the war in the Soviet Union and in
countries that fell under the control of the Soviet Union: the deportation of the “socially
dangerous elements” from regions captured in 1939 and 1940, the deportation of ethnic
minorities in the Soviet Union during World War II, deportations in the Soviet Union
after World War II, deportations from Eastern European countries.
5. After Stalin’s death: flight from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland after 1956, 1968
and 1980 respectively; escape attempts and shootings at borders of the Iron Curtain,
emigration of Volga Germans and Jews from the Soviet Union, emigration of Romania’s
Germans during the reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, and other similar topics.
6. The movement of populations during and after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc: the
expulsion of Turks from Bulgaria in 1989, flight from East Germany, emigration of Volga
Germans from the Soviet Union, return of Ingrian Finns to Finland, (economic) refugees
from Eastern Europe, and other such topics.