Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

Mass displacement was accomplished through state-sponsored terror. There were “forced marches in which inhabitants of entire villages were cleared at fifteen minutes’ notice and driven at rifle-point to the nearest border.” In scenes reminiscent of the Holocaust, they were packed into trains with “up to 80 expellees crammed into each cattle car without adequate (or, occasionally, any) food, water or heating” and sent on journeys lasting weeks. “Hundreds of thousands of detainees” were herded into former Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, which were “put to a new purpose,” Douglas writes. Red Cross officials recorded the brutal regime in the camps, “with beatings, rapes of female inmates, grueling forced labour and starvation diets of 500–800 calories the order of the day.” Children were routinely “incarcerated, either alongside their parents or in designated children’s camps.” The British Embassy in Belgrade reported in 1946 that the conditions of Germans in Allied concentration camps “seem well down to Dachau standards.” The refugees who finally arrived in Germany were “declared ineligible by the Allied authorities to receive any form of international relief.” Lacking accommodation in a bomb-ravaged country, many “spent their first months or years living rough in fields, goods wagons or railway platforms.” Death followed devastation. The most conservative estimates put the number of Germans who died during relocation at about five hundred tho...