All Under One Roof: Persecutees, DPs, Expellees, and the Housing Shortage in Occupied Germany

In postwar Germany, Allied personnel and displaced populations competed with local Germans for housing. Examining group interactions and conflicting interests in this competition sheds light on issues of responsibility and reconciliation in the occupied country. In the East, Germans quickly grasped...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Feinstein, Margarete Myers (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Oxford University Press 2018
In: Holocaust and genocide studies
Year: 2018, Volume: 32, Issue: 1, Pages: 29-48
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Summary:In postwar Germany, Allied personnel and displaced populations competed with local Germans for housing. Examining group interactions and conflicting interests in this competition sheds light on issues of responsibility and reconciliation in the occupied country. In the East, Germans quickly grasped the key political interests of the Soviet occupiers: inhospitable landlords were denounced as “Nazis,” and many East Germans rewrote their pasts to claim “victim-of-fascism” status. In the West, Germans cast themselves as allies in the battle against Communism. Wartime and postwar victims in both East and West struggled to gain a moral status that would facilitate access to resources and authority; yet in neither East nor West did they create united fronts. Meanwhile, the alliance between local Germans and ethnic German expellees against the DPs and Communists did facilitate integration of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe into western German society, changing the social and political landscape.
ISSN:1476-7937
Contains:Enthalten in: Holocaust and genocide studies
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1093/hgs/dcy010