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During the Second World War, the Nazis deported millions of Soviet, Baltic and Polish civilians, soldiers and prisoners of war to Germany. Many others were uprooted within occupied territories. This volume examines the 'violent peacetime' that followed the war, as these displaced persons strove to return home or to flee westwards during a time of territorial changes, the brutal imposition or reassertion of communist power, widespread nationalist resistance, state strategies of socio-ethnic engineering and economic reconstruction, new forms of international humanitarian intervention and emerging Cold War antagonisms. Contributors discuss the politics, personnel, administrative structures and everyday experience of Allied displaced persons camps in Germany; the political 'filtration' and sanitary screening procedures which Soviet repatriates underwent before they were permitted to return to their homes; and governmental arrangements for sorting, classifying and transferring people throughout the contested borderlands. The book pays close attention to how displacement, internment, resettlement and diaspora were experienced by migrants, and how they have been remembered and commemorated. Warlands will fascinate anyone interested in population displacement as state practice and social experience.
