ABSTRACT
Forced migrations have the centre of highly politicized processes of memorialization. The forced migrants were uprooted from their social and territorial context, and they typically became victims of not only the war but also often discrimination in their ‘new’ homelands or, in the case of Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers, in their original homelands when they returned after the war. Internationally, collaborative attempts to define areas of shared memory have started only slowly in the last few years and encountered many problems. The eastward expansion of the European Union might contribute to the shaping of common memories; however, the question again arises as to how much of this is imposed and how much is actually shared by the populations. In 1951 the Federal Ministry for Expellees commissioned the collection of testimonies from individual refugees and expellees for a documentation of their mass flight and expulsion during and after the Second World War.
