A Clean Sweep? Ethnic Cleansing, Ethnic Erasure and Poland's Postwar Nationalist Revolution, 1945-1960 (Research Brief)

This project has two main goals. The first is to examine in detail at the local level the various and ongoing ramifications for Polish society of ethnic cleansing, which I will situate within the context of Poland’s broader national revolution (which included not only the country’s postwar ethnic cleansing and territorial reconfiguration, but also the public and official efforts to develop a monolithic Polish national identity binding on all of the country’s inhabitants). The second goal is to raise another set of questions by examining continuing Polish efforts at a process I will call ethnic erasure — the effort to eliminate all traces of “Germandom” from Poland. This study will thus add new dimensions to the study of ethnic cleansing.

Download the pdf at the top of this page for the full brief.

Timothy Curp, of Ohio University, was a 2002-03 Short-Term Travel Grants fellow.