According to widely held beliefs the Presidential election of 1952 was unique in American political history. Observers have pointed out that it was the weariest, most expensive, most intensively and bitterly fought campaign to date. Observers also emphasized that it was a personal victory for General Dwight D. Eisenhower of landslide proportions that exploded such political theories as prosperity favoring the “ins.” It is further held that “Ike” swept the electorate off its feet because he appeared as a hero and father symbol, and that his success in the South is the beginning of a real two party system in that section. These observations must be placed against a background of historical and statistical facts, before they are translated into pleasant assumptions.

For the purpose of this survey, a population transfer is defined as the organized removal of an ethnic group from its country of residence and its subsequent resettlement in territory under the sovereignty of its ethnic homeland in which the whole is a stateconducted operation based sometimes on international agreement between two states concerned and at other times arising from unilateral action by the state of departure, with or without international sanction.

The key to the problem of the expulsion of the Germans from Hungary* was the Potsdam Conference, where the representatives of the three major Allies declared “that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken.” Thus the three major Allies assimilated the problem of the Germans in Hungary with the problems of Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia, although in reality the situation in Hungary differed greatly from that in the other two countries. The terms of the Potsdam decision might have been suitable for the Polish and Czechoslovak situations, but were most misleading when applied to Hungary.

Prussian Conservatism was not an ideology comparable to those which have breathed into every crevice of twentieth century totalitarian states. It was not really an ideology at all, if that term is understood to mean a system of thought enforced by the state so as to give every human act a political meaning. The Prussian conservatives, conditioned by an aristocratic disdain for a political rationale, were unable to agree on a uniform principle of political conduct. Shades of meaning, based largely on the balance struck between religion and political realism, persisted in coloring the conservative temperament. Yet by the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, Prussian conservatism had become a coherent body of thought distinct from liberalism, democracy, or socialism. Its historical importance became assured, when, at Bismarck's hands, Prussian conservatism entered wholeheartedly into the making of what the liberal historian, Erich Eyck, has called “German constitutionalism,” that is a system of politics respectful of authority, but equally disdainful of democracy and absolutism, in which the practical conduct of government may be guided by moral principles in an irrational world.