Preliminary Programme

In the spring and early summer of 1945 the Swedish Red Cross and the international refugee organisation UNRRA saved approximately 13 000 Polish women and men who survived diffrent Nazi concentration camps. Due to the political situation in 1945, the Swedish goverment permitted those ”repatriandies” who wanted to stay in Sweden to do so. This project will partly investigate who returned to Poland and who stayed in Sweden, partly analyse the decision-making process where some repatriandi decided to return while others decided to stay in Sweden. For practical reasons I will disregard from those who decided to move on to for example Israel and USA. In this project I will adopt the perspective of ethnicity, gender and class.
The theoretical basis for the project is three concepts concerning refuge:
background, context and purpose.
In this case, background consist of both the women’s adolescence and life in pre-war, catholic Poland as well as the forced labour, encroachments and the constant threat of death in Ravensbrück and elsewhere during their imprisonment. The context consist of the circumstances the survivors met in Sweden during their six months as repatriandi: undressing and shower together with police inquiries at the arrival to Malmoe, the time in a refugee camp with surveillance and limited contact with the surrounding society, temporary seasonal labour, and gradually increasing possibilities for meetings with both Swedish men and women as well as government officials. Purpose refers to the relationship that the women had to their country of origin and the set of problems regarding returning back. I wish to examine the significance of hope that, in the future, being able to return home had for surviving in the concentration camps. These hopes probably guided the women’s lives in the Swedish refugee camps to. In this case the purpose is complicated by the fact that the Poland they where returning to wasn’t the same that they had been forced to leave. Poland was moved westward by the Allies, losing territory to the USSR in the east while gaining German territory in the west. The purpose was further complicated for the survivors when the Swedish government in the end of 1945 started to pave the way for them to stay in Sweden instead of returning to the uncertainties in Poland. (Show less)

The image of Czechoslovakia in the 1930’s as a refuge for the opponents of the Nazi-regime became an integral part of Czechoslovak history. It is true that many thousands refugees left Germany (and later Austria) for Czechoslovakia because of the political or/and racial reasons. There was still no deep research done on the politics towards the emigrants and on the network of the charitable organizations which supported them. There are only sporadic texts about the political and cultural elite among the refugees. Thomas Mann or Otto Strasser had however totally different opportunities and propositions than the majority of other emigrants.
My research shows so far that the attitude of the Czechoslovak state towards the refugees was not as different from other European states. What made the situation of the German and mostly Jewish refugees unique was not so much support from the state administration but rather the help of the local German Jewish elite. Especially the members of the German Jewish minority in Prague were running the majority of the charitable institutions and they also became key persons in organizations focused on emigration of the refugees into more safer countries. Interestingly, the care for the German refugees from Germany and later from Austria and Sudetenland held back the support of the Czech Jews who after the Munich agreement also realized the danger of the spreading Nazism. These lead to the fact that more German speaking than Czech speaking Jews from former Czechoslovakia managed to leave the country. These happened though especially in central Bohemia and Moravia the change from German to Czech language and nationality was very dominant among the Jewish society during the interwar period. (Show less)

There are three main themes among Swedish scholars, on the topic Sweden and Nazism. The first has been concerned with efforts to explain or understand the activities of the coalition government. These traditional scholars have been challenged by a growing number of scholars and laymen, who instead want to put the searchlight on the morality, or rather, the immorality, of these actions. The picture is more or less completed with the third main group of interest; surveys of different rightwing organisations in Sweden. The most common view is that Sweden and the Swedes, with few exceptions, kept quiet. This is in many ways a proper picture, although I think it needs to be nuanced. In order to question this image of consensus I examine the reactions outside the political parties who were bound by the surrounding world’s compulsory actions. The immediate crushing of the German unions, and of course the great number of political murders that took place directly after Machtübernahme ought to result in stronger reactions from the working class, in comparison with the capitalist class, in spite of Hitler’s rhetorical anti - capitalism. Through a study of a branch rather than of a nation, I think I can show an interesting distinction which emanates from the relation to the capital. The main reason why it is the maritime industry that is under the magnifying glass is that it was in the practical epicentre of the German/Swedish trade with coal, coke, ore and ball bearings. I build my presentation on cartoons from the union periodical paper, Sjömannen. My aim is to show the attitude to domestic as well as German Nazism alongside with some commentary on communism, capitalism and spokesmen for appeasement. (Show less)

Sociologists and political scientists often use a theory of social implications of forced
migration to explain demographical and political changes and predict the consequences of the world-scale forced displacement of peoples in the last two decades. This theory
implies that the immediate results of the forced migrations are the loss of familiar
surroundings and the loss of representatives of the native ethos through the death and
separation, deformation and transformation of the national spiritual and material values:
and destruction of social institutions like daycares and schools. More importantly, the
theory states that in a long run, the forced migration results in the transformation of
mentality, or ethnic self?consciousness, and in the creation and preservation of the image of the "enemy" on individual and group levels.
This theory can prove very useful if applied to the study of historical phenomena.
My research indicates that the affects that the forced displacement of the 1940s had on
ethnic Germans residing in the Soviet Union, fit perfectly into the above theory's
conclusions. Prior to the forced displacement, Germans in the Soviet territory refused to
perceive themselves as one ethnic entity and were very segregated. Thus, the Germans of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Baltic States, Southern Russia, and Caucasus prided themselves
at being different from one another and from Volga Germans. Even the latter believed to be at least four distinct peoples, and some even attempted to preserve the cultural and
dialectical differences of their Swabian, Hessen, and other ancestors.
However, the experience of the forced migration to special settlements with its immediate affects, which included numerous deaths, starvation, and unbearable living conditions, had altered the ethnic self-identity of Germans in the Soviet Union. These once very distinct groups of Germans reemerged in the 1960s with a homogenous pan-
German self-consciousness of "Soviet Germans." Moreover, the strong and uniform image of the "enemy" was preserved for decades and resulted in mass immigration of Soviet Germans to their ethnic motherland after the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Show less)