ABSTRACT
In literature it is often erroneously maintained that between the two world wars no major cases of “population transfer” (ethnic cleansing) or “massacres” (genocide) were observed in Central Europe. By the mid-1920s, the various continuing legs of the Great War in Central and Eastern Europe had come to an end, while the region’s destroyed or territorially curtailed empires had been firmly replaced with ethnolinguistic nation-states and the communist (non-national in principle, but nationally organized) polity of the Soviet Union. This gigantic overhauling of the political shape of Central Europe generated waves of millions of refugees and expellees. Similarly, millions had earlier been forced out of their homes during the Balkan Wars, World War One, and the follow-up conflicts; many died in orchestrated bloodbaths, out of which the 1915 genocide of Armenians and Assyrians is the best known (see Map 19).
