IT'S NOT ETHNIC CLEANSING WHEN WE DO IT:

9. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War (2012), by RM Douglas. 

There has been a ton of great research on the Eastern Front of World War II since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This scholarship may well be put on the back burner again as geopolitics once again get a little more heated in that part of the world. In the meantime, books such as Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Tara Zahra's Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families After World War 2 are some of the essentials in this regard, but for my money Colgate historian RM Douglas's 2012 book is the best of them all, at least from an Anglo-American standpoint. The subject matter is brutal and self-explanatory, so if light-hearted histories are your thing, skip this book. If you are more of a rationalist and skeptic of power, you'll find much to enjoy about Douglas's well-written history, including the turning of a blind eye by Allied forces as non-Germans ruthlessly purged German-speaking women and children from the lands they had lived in for decades or centuries. Lebensraum wasn't conceived of by Nazis as a space that needed to be cleared for Germans, it was a place already occupied by German-speaking peoples - again, sometimes for centuries - that needed to be cleared of the German speaker's neighbors. Chapter 10 ("The International Reaction") is alone worth the price of admission, as it details quite explicitly how the victorious democracies of World War II allowed one of the largest ethnic cleansing campaigns to happen right under their noses.

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