As is well known, migration studies have long since become a vibrant field. Fortunately for historians of eastern Europe, the area of their interest is also profiting from a growing body of in-depth studies. With Seth Bernstein's Return to the Motherland and David Zimmerman's Ensnared between Hitler and Stalin, we have two new monographs that allow us to look at forced migration in Europe from different perspectives. Both works emphasize the question of migrant agency and show in different ways that (forced) migration should be understood as a history of entanglements.
The topic of (forced) repatriation to the Soviet Union was emotionally charged during the Cold War. The “betrayal of Yalta” as a place of memory had a different meaning for different migrant communities. For parts of the Russian diaspora, it was the moment when western powers abandoned Russian anti-communists by agreeing to repatriate all forced laborers and POWs of Soviet origin (in the borders before September 1939) back to the Soviet Union. The view that most DPs were returned by force and sent to the Gulag was also shared by many commentators, adopted by historiography, and contested after the opening of the archives in the 1990s. Seth Bernstein's synthesis aims to move beyond the ideological trench warfare of the past. Instead, it offers a nuanced and in-depth look at the repatriation processes. New sources—particularly from Ukrainian archives—are used not only for statistical extrapolations but also to “humanize the experience of forced labor and repatriation” (5). Thanks to this approach, Bernstein challenges the widespread Cold War era assumption “that only non-returners exercised agency over their fates” (7). The first part of the book deals with the conditions and experiences of slave laborers in Germany. It provides a good overview of the deportation process and its racial underpinnings and the differences in working and living conditions between the countryside, where prisoners usually had more food, and the cities. Most of this is well known, but individual examples illuminating the human dimension of forced labor as well as an examination of the interconnectedness of violence, racial ideology, and sexuality add value to current research. Bernstein also shows that both collaboration and resistance had their limits. Personal cost-benefit calculations played as much a role as the opportunity factor.
After this necessary contextualization, the author turns to the main theme of his work—the return to the Soviet Union. Displaced persons (DPs) were faced with the difficult choice of returning to their loved ones in Stalin's Soviet Union or trying to avoid repatriation and rebuilding their lives abroad. According to the author, this alone testifies to the fact that DPs believed to have power over their lives. The chaos of the immediate post-war period would eventually have given them a “modicum of agency” (103).
As mentioned at the beginning of this review, the question of whether the majority of DPs returned to the Soviet Union voluntarily or under duress was once particularly controversial. Similar to Viktor Zemskov, Bernstein holds the opinion that the majority of “Soviet-born DPs” decided to return voluntarily.Footnote 1 He cites their desire to reunite with family left behind in the Soviet Union as perhaps the main reason. As true as that might be, it did not become evident to this reviewer how Bernstein came to his conclusions. What the author shows far more clearly is that not all returnees were sent to the Gulag. After “filtration,” the majority came home, while a not insignificant number were sent to labor battalions. In the end, economic considerations prevailed over security ones. Only in a minority of cases, according to Bernstein, did the repressive organs conduct “serious investigations” (109). These are not entirely new insights, of course, but Bernstein can draw on fascinating and often heartbreaking accounts. One example is the story of Josef A., a Holocaust survivor who was assigned to a labor battalion after the war. From mines in the Donbas he returned to his native Hrodno to search for his family, only to find that they had all been murdered by the Germans. The last injustice and humiliation was his subsequent arrest in 1948; he was sent to jail and forced labor (135–36).
The repatriation itself was by no means orderly; the use of violence by (often drunk) Red Army soldiers—including sexual violence against female repatriates—was not uncommon. And although there were rarely violent clashes at the place of return, the local population was all too often suspicious of the supposed traitors who had allegedly enriched themselves in Germany and were now believed to enjoy economic benefits. After their arrival, the repressive organs continued to monitor the returnees. Thousands were imprisoned as spies and traitors in the post-war years. The author interprets the repression and policing as a form of political reintegration of former DPs, with the Cold War reinforcing the culture of mistrust. Although generalizations are difficult for many reasons, he estimates the total number of arrests at around 8%, the vast majority of which occurred during filtration, with only 1.5% after return (147).
A separate chapter is devoted to the state's handling of the memory of forced labor and war captivity. The idea that POWs would self-organize and resist contradicted the Party's claim to unquestioned leadership. It was only after Stalin's death that more space was given to the memory of war captivity, and it was then that the Soviet-Jewish veteran and historian Efim Brodsky was able to publish his pioneering work. As Bernstein points out, however, Brodsky also remained rooted in Soviet thinking: he knew that resistance and collaboration were not mutually exclusive in many cases but concealed this fact, which was uncomfortable for the Soviet self-image.
Soviet repatriation efforts did not end with the first postwar years, but continued until the late 1950s. Two chapters deal with these rather unsuccessful efforts. From 1946—the last forced repatriation ended in spring—until 1951, only 5% of the people who were considered by the authorities to be potential candidates for repatriation decided to move to the Soviet Union, which was 20,386 individuals. The next chapter deals with the “Return to the Motherland” campaign of the 1950s. It has been largely neglected in the literature, which makes it all the more regrettable that the author does not seem to be familiar with Lilita Zalkaln's dissertation on the subject. It's called Back to the Motherland and deals with Soviet efforts to repatriate Latvian DPs and is available online.Footnote 2 It might also have been helpful to include Simo Mikkonen's chapter “Not by Force Alone” from an edited volume that appeared in 2013.Footnote 3
David Zimmerman's monograph has a similar thematic focus and timeframe: it deals with flight and displacement before and during the Second World War and also emphasizes individual human experiences. The focus, however, is not on the millions of forced laborers and prisoners of war, but on a small number of academics: thirty-six scientists and scholars who fled from Hitler's Germany to the Soviet Union. Their situation was characterized by a double threat: they were, in Zimmerman's key metaphor, “ensnared in the web of hatred and murder spun by Hitler and Stalin” (11).
The reasons for fleeing Germany are well-known: most of the refugee academics were harassed and removed from their positions because of their Jewish heritage. Others had to flee because they were married to a Jewish woman or because of their communist convictions. It was usually young men, including physicists and engineers, who found refuge in the Soviet Union. This was due both to global market conditions and to the peculiarities of Soviet demands: the first five-year plan, adopted in 1929, called for a massive expansion of industrial and scientific capacity in the USSR. In 1930, it was decided necessary to recruit up to 40,000 “foreign engineers, foremen and skilled workers” (41). As to be expected for the male-dominated academia, the vast majority of refugees were men. Only three were women: the physicist Charlotte Houtermans, who followed her husband to the Soviet Union, the physicist Barbara Ruhemann, and the musicologist Lotte Schlessinger. The author explains the fact that his protagonists were mainly young people in the early stages of their careers through the antisemitic backlashes in western universities. The Academic Assistance Council and the American Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars both feared that they would foster antisemitic reactions if young Jewish academics entered the job market and became serious competition for young British and American scholars and graduate students. The Soviet Union recruited these people and gave them permanent positions with attractive salaries and well-equipped laboratories. An important research center for foreign scientists became the Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute (UFTI) in Kharkiv.
Initially, the Soviet offer was taken up mainly by scientists whose careers in the west were not taking off. Sympathy for communism rarely played a decisive role. In 1933, however, the character of the emigration changed. One of the first legislative changes made by the National Socialists was the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” introduced in April 1933. As a result of this and similar racial measures to follow, Jewish university members began to lose their positions. Social Democrats and communists were also particularly affected by the massive purges at the universities. Nevertheless, for the vast majority of academics (this distinguished them from German communists) Britain and the US remained the destination of choice. Those who accepted the Soviet offer after 1933 usually did so because they wanted to escape political persecution and could not find a position in the west.
It is sometimes said that American and British universities were only able to get the brightest minds out of Nazi Germany. According to Zimmerman, this was only partly true. Among those who went to the Soviet Union were some of the leading experts in their fields. Of course, there was fierce competition for the scarce positions. In the US, the Great Depression led to mass layoffs at universities. But there were non-academic reasons at work, too, such as antisemitism on campuses.
The contribution of foreign academics to the development of Soviet science is difficult to measure. Because of the peripheral position of the Soviet Union, it was not easy for the refugees to achieve outstanding results. And, as Zimmerman points out, Hitler's invasion destroyed most of their achievements. This makes the moments in the book when the author recalls their contributions and highlights the interconnections between German and Soviet scientific cultures all the more commendable. Zimmerman shows, for example, how the musicologist Ernst Emsheimer turned to folk songs, in which he became interested during his work at the Hermitage, where he collected material from all regions of the Soviet Union. He continued to pursue this research endeavor even after leaving the country (116).
The author gives a detailed account of everyday life in the Soviet Union. The refugee academics had to adapt to the poorer living conditions and suffered from the darkening political climate of the late 1930s. Those of them who had hoped that the 1936 constitution would bring liberalization were soon bitterly disappointed: the mass terror, which of course did not stop at the doorsteps of universities and research institutions, meant a hard caesura in many respects. Expulsions, arrests, interrogations, torture, and executions followed. The ominous dynamic resulting from the cooperation between the two dictatorships was also felt by the refugees. Siegfried Gilde, Alexander Weissberg, and Fritz Houtermans were handed over to the Gestapo during the prisoner exchanges that took place between 1939 and 1940. Their fate was tragic. The circumstances of Siegfried Gilde's death are unknown. He was either murdered during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto or in one of the extermination camps. Alexander Weissberg barely survived, but his entire extended family, including the love of his life, were killed by the Germans. Physicist Fritz Houtermans also survived. Despite his Jewish roots (the Nuremberg Laws categorized him as a “second-degree half-breed”) and communist past, his colleague Max von Laue was able to exert his influence: Houtermans was released, but his rights remained restricted.
At the end of the war, not all refugees were able to resume their academic careers. According to Zimmerman, those who succeeded had excellent contacts and a good deal of stubbornness. But just as in the case of former forced laborers, the confrontation of the blocs created new rules. They differed in east and west. One example is the career of the physicist and historian of science Gerhard Harig. A Marxist, Harig survived the Buchenwald concentration camp and made a career in East Germany's scientific establishment. As a high-ranking functionary and member of the Council of Ministers, Harig not only campaigned for the compulsory introduction of Marxist-Leninist studies at East German universities, but was also personally involved in the purges of students and faculty members in the 1950s. Despite his loyalty, he became a victim of Walter Ulbricht's cadre policy: he was replaced by Wilhelm Girnus in 1957 but was allowed to continue his academic career as a professor at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. While the war strengthened the socialist and communist convictions of some survivors, others lost all faith in communism after their traumatic experiences in the Soviet Union.
As this review indicates, both studies are highly nuanced. Given the complexity of motivations and personal and political constellations, it is quite practical that Zimmerman's book provides an overview table. However, it is composed in such a way that in some cases it causes confusion. For example, Fritz Lange's “Reason for dismissal/heritage” reads—“Jewish, Communist.” His alleged Jewish heritage is not mentioned once in the text, however. The entry for Fritz Georg Houtermans, on the other hand, reads: “Leaves after harassment from Gestapo. SPSL document says for being Jewish but he was only ¼ Jewish.” This rather irritating description probably means that in 1933, the year of his emigration to England, Houtermans might well have been considered Jewish by the Gestapo, who paid him and his wife an unexpected visit. However, his membership in the KPD is an equally if not more likely reason for the harassment. After the Nuremberg Laws came into force (1935), Houterman was considered to be a “jüdischer Mischling zweiten Grades” (Second Degree Half-breed). This, and the intervention of the physicist Max von Laue, saved his life when he was deported from the Soviet Union to Germany in 1940 and arrested. Another minor criticism is that Zimmerman does not explain why the authorities decided to scatter foreign scientists throughout the Soviet Union. The sole exception was UFTI in Kharkiv. Was this simply due to the size of the country or did the authorities want to avoid a concentration of foreign scientists? It would also have been helpful to contextualize why a scientific “powerhouse,” harboring many foreign scientists, emerged in Ukraine and not in Moscow, Leningrad, or another Soviet republic.
Both authors have a clear and engaging writing style, and Zimmerman is not afraid to use literary devices, such as the cliffhanger. It is therefore worth comparing the narratives of the two books. If Bernstein's study can be read as a corrective to the Cold War tragedy narrative of betrayed people who had been deprived of all agency, Zimmerman's text can be interpreted as a corrective to stories of “triumphant escapes in which refugees rebuilt their research and teaching careers” (35–36). Both correctives are necessary because they show us the complexity of migration processes and the scope and limits of individual agencies. Zimmerman emphasizes that, compared to the Jewish population as a whole, displaced scholars had more control over their fate. Statistically, their chances of surviving the Holocaust were higher. Six out of eight displaced scholars who ended up in Nazi-occupied Europe after fleeing or being expelled from the Soviet Union survived. This interpretation is quite plausible, although one has to ask how representative Zimmerman's rather small selection is. Bernstein's protagonists on the other hand lacked access to international networks of professionals, friends, or relatives. When it came to determining their fate, east European DPs had only a “modicum of agency” (103), but they were not completely powerless. Wherever opportunities arose, they seized them. For example, as long as it was possible, many DPs used real or fictitious resistance histories as an asset to improve their postwar situation with the scarce resources at hand. Both studies show how the processes of entanglement and disentanglement affected people's lives. Industrialization in the Soviet Union, driven by international aid, allowed people who saw no chance of an academic career in the west to emigrate to the Soviet Union. They too contributed to the internationalization of Soviet science, but the Great Terror and the invasion of Hitler's armies destroyed most of their achievements. During the war, Germany deported millions of people to perform slave labor in industry and agriculture. The post-war repatriation of these people was soon overshadowed by and even contributed to the emergence of the Cold War. Their memory is still marginalized today, but not forgotten. As a subject of research, it contributes to cross-border networking and the international exchange of knowledge.
This reviewer is grateful for the opportunity to have read these thought-provoking and in-depth studies.
