The German occupation of Belgium, France, Poland and the Baltic lands, and the entry of the Russian army in Galicia and Bukovina in 1914-15, established the framework early on. Wartime occupation was closely associated with policies to resettle civilians who were thought to pose a danger to military action or who provided the occupation regime with a convenient source of forced labour. Nor was the enemy always to be found outside the borders of the belligerent state: internal “elements” also had to be monitored, and they too might be subject to extreme measures. The war supported a growing perception of one’s enemy as an aggregate, not just as contingents of able-bodied men, but as people characterised by an ineradicable difference. We need to acknowledge expressions of ethnic and class hatred and to understand how these antagonisms were magnified by wartime mobilisation. Īny study of resettlement must accordingly take account of human agency as well as the institutions in which key actors were embedded. It may seem an obvious point to make, but the vocabulary of discrimination and hatred was turned into concrete action by fellow human beings who responded to rapid political, social and economic changes that were already being set in motion before the First World War. These harsh-sounding terms scarcely begin to describe the depth of mutual antagonism and human suffering that mass warfare unleashed. The extensive terminology of wartime violence against civilian populations finds expression in words such as “resettlement”, “evacuation”, “deportation”, “expulsion”, “transfer”, “exchange”, “ethnic cleansing”, and so on, to cite only those in the English language.
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