Between Germany and Poland: Ethnic-cleansing and politicization of ethnicity in Upper Silesia under national socialism and communism, 1939--1950

This dissertation examines how national-socialist Germany and communist Poland defined and classified nationality in an ethnically mixed borderland. Responding to the failure of Germanization and Polonization in the inter-war period, both states rejected the right of the individual to choose his or her national identity. In Germany, through the "science" of race, nationality came to be based on racial/biological principles, not on cultural and linguistic ones. Minority nationality was perceived as a threat to the purity of the nation-state and was dealt with by ethnic cleansing. After the war, the Polish authorities continued this process, using the same national-socialist methods of nationality categorizing and ethnic cleansing. The question is, to what extent did they also implicitly adopt the national-socialist biological view of nationality? Although the communist authorities never openly acknowledged the role of national-socialist racial thought on postwar nationality policies, its influence is evident in the state's minority policies. The authorities based the "verification" and "rehabilitation" of the Silesians on the same individual examination by commissions of nationality experts that the Nazis used. This dissertation seeks to broaden the historiographical debate on "ethnic cleansing," seeing it not just as a policy of expelling a minority nationality, but as a process of classification that begins with determining who will not be expelled; a process that focuses on the categorization and construction of a national majority and how this leads to the creation of a national minority that then must be excluded from the body politic of the homogenized nation-state.