The conventional response to date to any study of the forced removal of some twelve to fourteen million ethnic Germans from their birthplaces in Central and Southeastern Europe between 1944 and 1948 and their relocation in postwar Germany has been a hostile enquiry into the character and motives of its author—who, depending on his or her stance as to the wisdom and morality of the operation, is typically denounced as either a “Holocaust relativizer” and “revisionist” or an apologist for “ethnic cleansing.” Although it seems extraordinary that an episode now more than six decades in the past should continue to arouse such heated historiographical responses, the publication of detailed investigations into the question offers the only means of lifting the debate from the polemical level in which it has too often languished to the plane of serious and dispassionate scholarship.

Matthew Frank's Expelling the Germans, a revision of his doctoral dissertation, is a definite and welcome contribution to that process—if not an entirely persuasive or consistent one. Its thesis is simply stated. Before the Greco-Turkish “population exchange” set in motion by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, Britons almost universally looked on the forcible movement of peoples as an illegitimate instrument of policy. The perceived success of that exchange, however, caused policymakers and public alike to view similar expedients in a more favorable light. This process accelerated during World War II, so that by the time of the Potsdam Conference the principle of compulsory population transfer, provided always that it should be accomplished in an orderly and humane manner, had achieved near-universal acceptance. Even when the actual expulsions of ethnic Germans from the “Recovered Territories” of Poland and the Czechoslovak Sudetenland proved in many instances neither orderly nor humane, “the underlying principle of population transfer was never questioned” (276). The execution, on the other hand, often was; and the difficulty of reconciling the two caused Britons tacitly to abandon their brief infatuation with mass deportations and resettlements by late 1947—when, conveniently, the ethnic German expulsion program had largely been completed in any case.

The very simplicity of this interpretive scheme, however, leads Frank into numerous contradictions when he attempts to reconcile it with the much more complex body of evidence—which, so far as the English-language sources are concerned at any rate, he has mined with indefatigable industry. His assertion, for example, that “critics of the expulsions had never demanded that the Potsdam decision be reversed. No one had openly called for the abandonment of the principle of population transfer which the conference had endorsed” (219), is difficult to square with his admission twenty pages later that Richard Stokes, later to become a minister in Clement Attlee's second administration, “held the very principle of a transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia to be wrong” (240). Had he quoted more fully from the sources listed in his bibliography, moreover, Frank could have cited many more such counter-examples. The Economist, a staunch opponent of the notion of forced population transfers from the moment they were first mooted early in the war, declared in September 1945 that “if the Poles and the Czechs wish to be rated higher in civilization than the Nazis, they will stop the expulsions at once” and called on the Council of Foreign Ministers to do so if they would not (15 September 1945, 369). Nor was the Contemporary Review alone in pointing out the previous month, apropos of the Prague government's desire to be rid of its German minority, that “Hitler's expulsions cannot be regarded as precedents in international law. One cannot condemn his actions and at the same time adopt his methods” (August 1945, 82).

Similar difficulties arise when Expelling the Germans tries to show that what Frank rather dismissively terms “the liberal conscience” often exaggerated the sufferings that resulted from the transfer policy. Had he made greater use of the detailed contemporary reports of the International Committee of the Red Cross of conditions in Czechoslovak internment camps—or of the recent groundbreaking studies by Tomás T. Staněk, Adrian von Arburg, Sona Gabzdilová, and Milan Olejník—his remarkable claim that at the end of 1945 “whether German civilians would have been better off under the care of the western allies rather than in Czechoslovakia is highly debatable” (193) would have revealed itself to be unsustainable. But in any event, it is hard to see why those who had already fully accepted the principle of transfer would have been so keen to denounce the practice even beyond what the situation called for—unless, in fact, acceptance of the principle was always more qualified than the author would have us believe.

Expelling the Germans sometimes veers alarmingly off track when it strays from the English-language records with which its author is most familiar: Frank's confusion of Přemysl Pitter, a saintly Christian pacifist, with “the Czechoslovak Minister of Social Welfare” (192) is a case in point. (In fairness, the Foreign Office in London seems to have labored under the same misapprehension.) But if its analysis is not entirely convincing, Expelling the Germans nevertheless assembles a treasure trove of useful information culled from a remarkable variety of printed and unpublished sources. For this alone, the book is a valuable contribution to the literature on the expulsions and will be read with instruction and profit by all those interested in the topic.