The Impact of the War and Collective Punishment on Ethnic German Families

Tóth, Ágnes (2022) The Impact of the War and Collective Punishment on Ethnic German Families. In: Post-WWII Migration in the V4 Countries : Propaganda Analysis of Central European Migration Flows. Centre for Social Sciences, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Silesian Museum, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Budapest, pp. 111-135. ISBN 978-80-89524-72-3

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Abstract

Several consequences of the war – the loss of family members, the lack of a family member who had been imprisoned for a longer period of time – and in some regions the deportation to forced labor affected not only the Germans but also other groups of the Hungarian society. But there is a crucial difference in the measures carried out against the Germans, their abridgement, deprivation of their rights and deportation based on the principle of collective culpability. The Germans were overtaken by several punitive actions in parallel. The deportation to forced labor was hardly over when their mass internment began, nonetheless, their eviction from their homes, then the deprivation of their lands during the implementation of the land reform, the restrictions of their civil rights, and finally, their deportation. These actions that were carried out in parallel or in rapid succession were consecutive, and their effects were mass-produced and had an enormous influence on the lives of several generations. The study presents the life situations that German families had to face during the last period of the war and in the following decades in Hungary. It also touches upon the personal and community strategies that all those who were involved addressed these hopeless situations.

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