Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2015
Abstract
The chapter deals with the situation in Czech Borderlands after the end of WWII, when this area became a place of mass migration and societal cleansing - a site of a radical historical experiment. What had been planned and practiced by the Nazi authorities under German rule since October 1938 was now completed.
The ethnic groups that had lived here together for hundreds of years were forced to separate according to seemingly impartial, but actually political and instrumental, rules. Post war violence and cleansing can be interpreted as a natural consequence of the war, this study shows, however, how it legitimized various forms of repression, terror, and physical violence, which characterize the Stalinist early 1950s as well.