Abstract
Matthew Frank provides an important service through this book by tracing the origins and gradual acceptance of the idea of population transfer as an acceptable solution to the minorities question in Europe. It comes at a timely moment when migrant issues and nationalist politics are again on the rise. His book is largely a narrative story that explains the why and how this policy came to be implemented in various cases of twentieth century Europe. Anyone wanting insight into this process will never have to look further than this book.
The author begins by showing the earliest publicly espoused mentions of population transfer around the turn of the century. These ideas were both uncommon and largely derided by their contemporaries. As Frank shows in Chapter One, it was Eleftherios Venizelos, a Greek Prime Minister, who was the first statesman to promote the idea seriously. Chapter Two explains the background, discussions and implementation of the Lausanne Conference of 1922–3, which sanctioned a Greek–Turkish population exchange. Frank highlights the role of Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, who as the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, helped lend his weight to the proposal. Frank then follows the story of the Italian–German negotiations and final agreement over South Tyrol, an area bordering Austria, but on the Italian side, which contained many German speakers. As with the Sudeten Germans, it was a German minority group that Hitler could use in his efforts for territorial aggrandizement. In Chapters Five to Seven, the author argues that through Czechoslovak wartime diplomacy, the Big Three’s complicity and the contingencies of postwar negotiations the largest population transfer in history occurred. Article 12 of the Potsdam Agreement, which sanctioned the forced migration of 12 million German speakers, was, as Frank makes clear, one of the only places where the Grand Alliance held together in the postwar negotiations. In the final chapter, the author explores what he aptly terms the ‘afterlives’ of the population transfer idea through several Cold War cases where transfer was considered, but not implemented.
It is a diplomatic history with its traditional litany of personages and conference table talks. Frank does a nice job breathing life into some of these folks. For instance, the interplay of the diplomats involved in the Greco–Turkish transfers demonstrates a facility of observation and a familiarity borne of careful research. Frank paints lively portraits of not only Dr Nansen and Venizelos but also of the Turkish negotiator, Hamid Bey and Nansen’s assistant Philip Noel-Baker ‘who was also a philhellene who rarely missed an opportunity to push the interests of Greece and was capable of being recklessly indiscreet in his denunciations of the Turks’ (p. 57).
The book also reminds us of the importance of these men’s discussions because their decisions held such drastic consequences for millions of people. Most remarkable in this sense, is that the shifting political winds determined who would stay and who would go more often than any clear guiding principle. Frank illustrates this fact nicely through many of the cases in this book. German and Italian officials had negotiated the question of South Tyrol for more than a year without reaching an agreement. Once the war began, however, an agreement was reached within weeks. Czechoslovak efforts to remove its Hungarian population at war’s end hinged on New Zealand diplomats. Even in the most important case here, that of the postwar German transfers, the Big Three had apparently little concern about the issue when they sat down in Potsdam in July 1945 and, instead, it was ‘accomplished facts’ that determined the course of events. Yet, as Frank argues, such facts ‘were not only recent developments on the ground, but what had transpired in the chancelleries, foreign ministries, and research institutes during and even before the wars’ (p. 286). In other words, by the end of the Second World War, the idea of population transfers had become widely accepted as a viable policy.
While the narrative here is compelling, the level of detail can be overwhelming. One does wonder at times what principles were guiding the author’s decision to include certain materials, but not others. The opening vignette seems somewhat random. The Dutch attitude toward the German population transfer, the USA’s forced removals of Native Americans and Japanese internment, and the postwar Bidault Plan to relocate some Germans to French territory, which never came to fruition, hardly seem relevant to the larger story being told. By contrast, the Heim ins Reich policies of the Nazis are only briefly discussed as are the various Soviet population transfers, particularly those from occupied Poland. Considering the volume of details covered in the book, it is strange that Soviet, and, to a lesser extent, Nazi decision-makers remain largely in the background. By contrast Frank paints Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak President, as a master manipulator of the transfer policy in a way that likely overstates his actual influence. Despite these criticisms, the book lends important insights into the history of one Europe’s most important and overlooked policies and, for that reason in particular, it deserves a read.