ABSTRACT
Among the many cruelties that darken the history of twentieth-century Europe, mass expulsions of ethnic groups occupy a prominent position. The precedent set by such events as Turkish deportations of Armenians during World War I and the forcible Greco-Turkish and Greco-Bulgarian population transfers of the 1920s found application on numerous subsequent occasions, particularly during and shortly after the Second World War. As a result, at least some 50 million Europeans were forcibly uprooted from their homes in the course of the last century.1 Many millions lost their lives in the process, and those who survived the ordeal typically bore lasting scars, emotional and often also physical, from the violence and turmoil they had witnessed. To make matters worse, the tribulations of the forced migrants did not conclude with the end of the expulsions themselves. The next challenge for the typically impoverished and demoralised expellees was to adjust to the societies in which they had found refuge. Their integration thus became an urgent task, not only for the newcomers themselves but also for the polities which had received them, as the potentially destabilizing effects of discontented expellee populations soon scared policy-makers and other leaders into action.
