German nationalism
German nationalism is the nationalist idea that Germans are a nation, promotes the unity of Germans and German-speakers into a nation state, emphasizes and takes pride in the national identity of Germans. The earliest origins of German nationalism began with the birth of romantic nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars when Pan-Germanism started to rise. Advocacy of a German nation-state began to become an important political force in response to the invasion of German territories by France under Napoleon. In the 19th century Germans debated the German Question over whether the German nation state should comprise a "Lesser Germany" that excluded Austria or a "Greater Germany" that included Austria; the faction led by Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck succeeded in forging a Lesser Germany. Aggressive German nationalism and territorial expansion was a key factor leading to both World Wars. Prior to World War I, Germany had established a colonial empire in hopes of rivaling Britain and France.
In the 1930s, the Nazis came to power and sought to create a Greater Germanic Reich, emphasizing ethnic German identity and German greatness to the exclusion of all others leading to the extermination of Jews, Poles and other people deemed Untermenschen in the Holocaust during World War II. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the country was divided into East and West Germany in the opening acts of the Cold War, each state retained a sense of German identity and held reunification as a goal, albeit in different contexts; the creation of the European Union was in part an effort to harness German identity to a European identity. West Germany underwent its economic miracle following the war, which led to the creation of guest worker program. German reunification was achieved in 1990 following Die Wende. Germany has emerged in the world. Due to post-1945 repudiation of the Nazi regime and its atrocities, German nationalism has been viewed in the country as taboo and people within Germany have struggled to find ways to acknowledge its past but take pride in its past and present accomplishments.
A wave of national pride swept the country. Far-right parties that stress German national identity and pride have existed since the end of World War II but have never governed. Defining a German nation based on internal characteristics presented difficulties. Since the start of the Reformation in the 16th century, the German lands had been divided between Catholics and Lutherans and linguistic diversity was large as well. Today, the Swabian, Bavarian and Cologne dialects in their most pure forms are estimated to be 40% mutually intelligible with more modern Standard German, meaning that in a conversation between a native speaker of any of these dialects and a person who speaks only standard German, the latter will be able to understand less than half of what is being said without any prior knowledge of the dialect, a situation, to have been similar or greater in the 19th century. Nationalism among the Germans first developed not among the general populace but among the intellectual elites of various German states.
The early German nationalist Friedrich Karl von Moser, writing in the mid 18th century, remarked that, compared with "the British, Swiss and Swedes", the Germans lacked a "national way of thinking". However, the cultural elites themselves faced difficulties in defining the German nation resorting to broad and vague concepts: the Germans as a "Sprachnation", a "Kulturnation" or an "Erinnerungsgemeinschaft". Johann Gottlieb Fichte – considered the founding father of German nationalism – devoted the 4th of his Addresses to the German Nation to defining the German nation and did so in a broad manner. In his view, there existed a dichotomy between the people of Germanic descent. There were those who had left their fatherland during the time of the Migration Period and had become either assimilated or influenced by Roman language and customs, those who stayed in their native lands and continued to hold on to their own culture. German nationalists were able to define their nation more especially following the rise of Prussia and formation of the German Empire in 1871 which gave the majority of the German-speakers in Europe a common political and educational framework.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, some German nationalist added elements of racial ideology culminating in the Nuremberg Laws, sections of which sought to determine by law and genetics, to be considered German. It was not until the concept of nationalism itself was developed by German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder that German nationalism began. German nationalism was Romantic in nature and was based upon the principles of collective self-determination, territorial unification and cultural identity, a political and cultural programme to achieve those ends; the German Romantic nationalism derived from the Enlightenment era philosopher Jean
Austria
Austria the Republic of Austria, is a country in Central Europe comprising 9 federated states. Its capital, largest city and one of nine states is Vienna. Austria has an area of 83,879 km2, a population of nearly 9 million people and a nominal GDP of $477 billion, it is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north and Slovakia to the east and Italy to the south, Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The terrain is mountainous, lying within the Alps; the majority of the population speaks local Bavarian dialects as their native language, German in its standard form is the country's official language. Other regional languages are Hungarian, Burgenland Croatian, Slovene. Austria played a central role in European History from the late 18th to the early 20th century, it emerged as a margraviate around 976 and developed into a duchy and archduchy. In the 16th century, Austria started serving as the heart of the Habsburg Monarchy and the junior branch of the House of Habsburg – one of the most influential royal houses in history.
As archduchy, it was a major component and administrative centre of the Holy Roman Empire. Following the Holy Roman Empire's dissolution, Austria founded its own empire in the 19th century, which became a great power and the leading force of the German Confederation. Subsequent to the Austro-Prussian War and the establishment of a union with Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was created. Austria was involved in both world wars. Austria is a parliamentary representative democracy with a President as head of state and a Chancellor as head of government. Major urban areas of Austria include Graz, Linz and Innsbruck. Austria is ranked as one of the richest countries in the world by per capita GDP terms; the country has developed a high standard of living and in 2018 was ranked 20th in the world for its Human Development Index. The republic declared its perpetual neutrality in foreign political affairs in 1955. Austria has been a member of the United Nations since 1955 and joined the European Union in 1995.
It is a founding member of the OECD and Interpol. Austria signed the Schengen Agreement in 1995, adopted the euro currency in 1999; the German name for Austria, Österreich, derives from the Old High German Ostarrîchi, which meant "eastern realm" and which first appeared in the "Ostarrîchi document" of 996. This word is a translation of Medieval Latin Marchia orientalis into a local dialect. Another theory says that this name comes from the local name of the mountain whose original Slovenian name is "Ostravica" - because it is steep on both sides. Austria was a prefecture of Bavaria created in 976; the word "Austria" was first recorded in the 12th century. At the time, the Danube basin of Austria was the easternmost extent of Bavaria; the Central European land, now Austria was settled in pre-Roman times by various Celtic tribes. The Celtic kingdom of Noricum was claimed by the Roman Empire and made a province. Present-day Petronell-Carnuntum in eastern Austria was an important army camp turned capital city in what became known as the Upper Pannonia province.
Carnuntum was home for 50,000 people for nearly 400 years. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the area was invaded by Bavarians and Avars. Charlemagne, King of the Franks, conquered the area in AD 788, encouraged colonization, introduced Christianity; as part of Eastern Francia, the core areas that now encompass Austria were bequeathed to the house of Babenberg. The area was known as the marchia Orientalis and was given to Leopold of Babenberg in 976; the first record showing the name Austria is from 996, where it is written as Ostarrîchi, referring to the territory of the Babenberg March. In 1156, the Privilegium Minus elevated Austria to the status of a duchy. In 1192, the Babenbergs acquired the Duchy of Styria. With the death of Frederick II in 1246, the line of the Babenbergs was extinguished; as a result, Ottokar II of Bohemia assumed control of the duchies of Austria and Carinthia. His reign came to an end with his defeat at Dürnkrut at the hands of Rudolph I of Germany in 1278. Thereafter, until World War I, Austria's history was that of its ruling dynasty, the Habsburgs.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, the Habsburgs began to accumulate other provinces in the vicinity of the Duchy of Austria. In 1438, Duke Albert V of Austria was chosen as the successor to his father-in-law, Emperor Sigismund. Although Albert himself only reigned for a year, henceforth every emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was a Habsburg, with only one exception; the Habsburgs began to accumulate territory far from the hereditary lands. In 1477, Archduke Maximilian, only son of Emperor Frederick III, married the heiress Maria of Burgundy, thus acquiring most of the Netherlands for the family. In 1496, his son Philip the Fair married Joanna the Mad, the heiress of Castile and Aragon, thus acquiring Spain and its Italian and New World appendages for the Habsburgs. In 1526, following the Battle of Mohács, Bohemia and the part of Hungary not occupied by the Ottomans came under Austrian rule. Ottoman expansion into Hungary led to frequent conflicts between the two empires evident in the Long War of 1593 to 1606.
The Turks made incursions into Styria nearly 20 times, of which some are c
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was a German politician and leader of the Nazi Party. He rose to power as Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and Führer in 1934. During his dictatorship from 1933 to 1945, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland in September 1939, he was involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust. Hitler was raised near Linz, he moved to Germany in 1913 and was decorated during his service in the German Army in World War I. In 1919, he joined the German Workers' Party, the precursor of the NSDAP, was appointed leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he was imprisoned. In jail, he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf. After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-semitism and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda, he denounced international capitalism and communism as part of a Jewish conspiracy.
By July 1932 the Nazi Party was the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, but did not have a majority, no party was able to form a majority parliamentary coalition in support of a candidate for chancellor. Former chancellor Franz von Papen and other conservative leaders persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Shortly after, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act of 1933, which began the process of transforming the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany, a one-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of National Socialism. Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter what he saw as the injustice of the post-World War I international order dominated by Britain and France, his first six years in power resulted in rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression, the abrogation of restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I, the annexation of territories inhabited by millions of ethnic Germans, which gave him significant popular support.
Hitler sought Lebensraum for the German people in Eastern Europe, his aggressive foreign policy is considered the primary cause of World War II in Europe. He directed large-scale rearmament and, on 1 September 1939, invaded Poland, resulting in Britain and France declaring war on Germany. In June 1941, Hitler ordered an invasion of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, German forces and the European Axis powers occupied most of Europe and North Africa. In December 1941, shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, Hitler declared war on the United States, bringing it directly into the conflict. Failure to defeat the Soviets and the entry of the United States into the war forced Germany onto the defensive and it suffered a series of escalating defeats. In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, he married his longtime lover Eva Braun. Less than two days on 30 April 1945, the two committed suicide to avoid capture by the Soviet Red Army. Under Hitler's leadership and racially motivated ideology, the Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of at least 5.5 million Jews and millions of other victims who he and his followers deemed Untermenschen or undesirable.
Hitler and the Nazi regime were responsible for the killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. In addition, 28.7 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European theatre. The number of civilians killed during World War II was unprecedented in warfare, the casualties constitute the deadliest conflict in history. Hitler's father Alois; the baptismal register did not show the name of his father, Alois bore his mother's surname Schicklgruber. In 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Alois's mother Maria Anna. Alois was brought up in the family of Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. In 1876, Alois was legitimated and the baptismal register changed by a priest to register Johann Georg Hiedler as Alois's father. Alois assumed the surname "Hitler" spelled Hiedler, Hüttler, or Huettler; the name is based on "one who lives in a hut". Nazi official Hans Frank suggested that Alois's mother had been employed as a housekeeper by a Jewish family in Graz, that the family's 19-year-old son Leopold Frankenberger had fathered Alois.
No Frankenberger was registered in Graz during that period, no record has been produced of Leopold Frankenberger's existence, so historians dismiss the claim that Alois's father was Jewish. Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary, close to the border with the German Empire, he was christened as "Adolphus Hitler". He was the fourth of six children born to his third wife, Klara Pölzl. Three of Hitler's siblings—Gustav and Otto—died in infancy. Living in the household were Alois's children from his second marriage: Alois Jr. and Angela. When Hitler was three, the family moved to Germany. There he acquired the distinctive lower Bavarian dialect, rather than Austrian German, which marked his speech throughout his life; the family returned to Austria and settled in Leonding in 1894, in June 1895 Alois retired to Hafeld, near Lambach, where he farmed and kept bees. Hitler attended Volksschule (a state-owned primary schoo
Chancellor of Germany
The title Chancellor has designated different offices in the history of Germany. It is used for the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, the head of government of Germany; the term, dating from the Early Middle Ages, is derived from the Latin term cancellarius. The modern office of chancellor evolved from the position created for Otto von Bismarck in the North German Confederation in 1867; the role of the chancellor has varied throughout Germany's modern history. Today, the chancellor is the country's effective leader, although in formal protocol, the Bundespräsident and Bundestagspräsident are ranked higher. In German politics, the chancellor is the equivalent of a prime minister in many other countries; the chancellor is elected by the Bundestag. The current, official title in German is Bundeskanzler, which means "Federal Chancellor", is sometimes shortened to Kanzler; the 8th and current chancellor is Angela Merkel, serving her fourth term in office. She is the first female chancellor.
The title of Chancellor has a long history, stemming back to the Holy Roman Empire, when the office of German archchancellor was held by Archbishops of Mainz. The title was, at times, used in several states of German-speaking Europe; the modern office of chancellor was established with the North German Confederation, of which Otto von Bismarck became Bundeskanzler in 1867. With the enlargement of this federal state to the German Empire in 1871, the title was renamed to Reichskanzler. With Germany's constitution of 1949, the title of Bundeskanzler was revived. During the various eras, the role of the chancellor has varied. From 1867 to 1918, the chancellor was the only responsible minister of the federal level, he was installed by the federal presidium. The Staatssekretäre were civil servants subordinate to the chancellor. Besides the executive, the constitution gave the chancellor only one function: presiding over the Federal Council, the representative organ of the states, but in reality, the chancellor was nearly always installed as minister president of Prussia, too.
Indirectly, this gave the chancellor the power of the Federal Council, including the dissolution of parliament. Although effective government was possible only on cooperation with the parliament, the results of the elections had only an indirect influence on the chancellorship, at most. Only in October 1918, the constitution was changed: it required the chancellor to have the trust of the parliament; some two weeks Chancellor Max von Baden declared the abdication of the emperor and ceded power illegally to the revolutionary Council of People’s Delegates. According to the Weimar Constitution of 1919, the chancellor was head of a collegial government; the chancellor was appointed and dismissed by the president, as were the ministers, upon proposal by the chancellor. The chancellor or any minister had to be dismissed; as today, the chancellor had the prerogative to determine the guidelines of government. In reality this power was limited by the president; when the Nazis came to power on 30 January 1933, the Weimar Constitution was de facto set aside.
After the death of President Hindenburg in 1934, Adolf Hitler, the dictatorial party leader and chancellor, took over the powers of the president. The new official title became Führer und Reichskanzler; the 1949 constitution gave the chancellor much greater powers than during the Weimar Republic, while diminishing the role of the president. Germany is today referred to as a "chancellor democracy", reflecting the role of the chancellor as the country's chief executive. Since 1867, 33 individuals have served as heads of government of Germany, West Germany, or Northern Germany, nearly all of them with the title of Chancellor. Due to his administrative tasks, the head of the clerics at the chapel of an imperial palace during the Carolingian Empire was called chancellor; the chapel's college acted as the Emperor's chancery issuing capitularies. Since the days of Louis the German, the archbishop of Mainz was ex officio German archchancellor, a position he held until the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, while de jure the archbishop of Cologne was chancellor of Italy and the archbishop of Trier of Burgundy.
These three prince-archbishops were prince-electors of the empire electing the King of the Romans. In medieval times, the German chancellor had political power like Archbishop Willigis or Rainald von Dassel under Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In 1559, Emperor Ferdinand I established the agency of an imperial chancellery at the Vienna Hofburg Palace, headed by a vice-chancellor under the nominal authority of the Mainz archbishop. Upon the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, Emperor Ferdinand II created the office of an Austrian court chancellor in charge of the internal and foreign affairs of the Habsburg Monarchy. From 1753 onwards, the office of an Austrian state chancellor was held by Prince Kaunitz; the imperial chancellery lost its importance, from the days of Maria Theresa and Joseph II existed on paper. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, Prince Metternich served as state chancellor of the Austrian Empire Prince Hardenberg acted as Prussian chancellor; the German
End of World War II in Europe
The final battles of the European Theatre of World War II as well as the German surrender to the Allies took place in late April and early May 1945. Allied forces begin to take large numbers of Axis prisoners: The total number of prisoners taken on the Western Front in April 1945 by the Western Allies was 1,500,000. April witnessed the capture of at least 120,000 German troops by the Western Allies in the last campaign of the war in Italy. In the three to four months up to the end of April, over 800,000 German soldiers surrendered on the Eastern Front. In early April, the first Allied-governed Rheinwiesenlagers were established in western Germany to hold hundreds of thousands of captured or surrendered Axis Forces personnel. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force reclassified all prisoners as Disarmed Enemy Forces, not POWs; the legal fiction circumvented provisions under the Geneva Convention of 1929 on the treatment of former combatants. By October, thousands had died in the camps from starvation and disease.
Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps and refugees: Allied forces began to discover the scale of the Holocaust. The advance into Germany forced labor facilities. Up to 60,000 prisoners were at Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated on 15 April 1945, by the British 11th Armoured Division. Four days troops from the American 42nd Infantry Division found Dachau. Allied troops forced the remaining SS guards to place them in mass graves. Due to the prisoners' poor physical condition, thousands continued to die after liberation. Captured SS guards were subsequently tried at Allied war crimes tribunals where many were sentenced to death. However, up to 10,000 Nazi war criminals fled Europe using ratlines such as ODESSA. German forces leave Finland: On 25 April 1945, the last German troops withdrew from Finnish Lapland and made their way into occupied Norway. On 27 April 1945, the Raising the Flag on the Three-Country Cairn photograph was taken. Mussolini's death: On 25 April 1945, Italian partisans liberated Milan and Turin.
On 27 April 1945, as Allied forces closed in on Milan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was captured by Italian partisans. It is disputed whether he was trying to flee from Italy to Switzerland, was traveling with a German anti-aircraft battalion. On 28 April, Mussolini was executed in Giulino; the bodies were taken to Milan and hung up on the Piazzale Loreto of the city. On 29 April, Rodolfo Graziani surrendered all Fascist Italian armed forces at Caserta; this included Army Group Liguria. Graziani was the Minister of Defence for Mussolini's Italian Social Republic. Hitler's death: On 30 April, as the Battle of Nuremberg and the Battle of Hamburg ended with American and British occupation, in addition to the Battle of Berlin raging above him with the Soviets surrounding the city, along with his escape route cut off by the Americans, realizing that all was lost and not wishing to suffer Mussolini's fate, German dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Führerbunker along with Eva Braun, his long-term partner whom he had married less than 40 hours before their joint suicide.
In his will, Hitler dismissed Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, his second-in-command and Interior minister Heinrich Himmler after each of them separately tried to seize control of the crumbling Third Reich. Hitler appointed his successors. However, Goebbels committed suicide the following day. German forces in Italy surrender: On 29 April, the day before Hitler died, Oberstleutnant Schweinitz and Sturmbannführer Wenner, plenipotentiaries for Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff and SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, signed a surrender document at Caserta after prolonged unauthorised secret negotiations with the Western Allies, which were viewed with great suspicion by the Soviet Union as trying to reach a separate peace. In the document, the Germans agreed to a ceasefire and surrender of all the forces under the command of Vietinghoff at 2pm on 2 May. Accordingly, after some bitter wrangling between Wolff and Albert Kesselring in the early hours of 2 May, nearly 1,000,000 men in Italy and Austria surrendered unconditionally to British Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander at 2pm on 2 May.
German forces in Berlin surrender: The Battle of Berlin ended on 2 May. On that date, General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defense Area, unconditionally surrendered the city to General Vasily Chuikov of the Soviet army. On the same day the officers commanding the two armies of Army Group Vistula north of Berlin, surrendered to the Western Allies. 2 May is believed to have been the day when Hitler's deputy Martin Bormann died, from the account of Artur Axmann who saw Bormann's corpse in Berlin near the Lehrter Bahnhof railway station after encountering a Soviet Red Army patrol. Lehrter Bahnhof is close to where the remains of Bormann, confirmed as his by a DNA test in 1998, were unearthed on 7 December 1972. German forces in North West Germany and the Netherlands surrender: On 4 May 1945, the British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery took the unconditional military surrender at Lüneburg from Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, General Eberhard Kinzel, of all German forces "in Holland, in northwest Germany including the Frisian Islands and Heligoland
Poles
The Poles referred to as the Polish people, are a nation and West Slavic ethnic group native to Poland in Central Europe who share a common ancestry, culture and are native speakers of the Polish language. The population of self-declared Poles in Poland is estimated at 37,394,000 out of an overall population of 38,538,000, of whom 36,522,000 declared Polish alone. A wide-ranging Polish diaspora exists throughout Europe, the Americas, in Australasia. Today the largest urban concentrations of Poles are within the Warsaw and Silesian metropolitan areas. Poland's history dates back over a thousand years, to c. 930–960 AD, when the Polans – an influential West Slavic tribe in the Greater Poland region, now home to such cities as Poznań, Kalisz and Września – united various Lechitic tribes under what became the Piast dynasty, thus creating the Polish state. The subsequent Christianization of Poland, in 966 CE, marked Poland's advent to the community of Western Christendom. Poles have made important contributions to the world in every major field of human endeavor.
Notable Polish émigrés – many of them forced from their homeland by historic vicissitudes – have included physicists Marie Skłodowska Curie and Joseph Rotblat, mathematician Stanisław Ulam, pianists Fryderyk Chopin and Arthur Rubinstein, actresses Helena Modjeska and Pola Negri, novelist Joseph Conrad, military leaders Tadeusz Kościuszko and Casimir Pulaski, U. S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, politician Rosa Luxemburg, filmmakers Samuel Goldwyn and the Warner Brothers, cartoonist Max Fleischer, cosmeticians Helena Rubinstein and Max Factor. Slavs have been in the territory of modern Poland for over 1500 years, they organized into tribal units, of which the larger ones were known as the Polish tribes. In the 9th and 10th centuries the tribes gave rise to developed regions along the upper Vistula, the Baltic Sea coast and in Greater Poland; the last tribal undertaking resulted in the 10th century in a lasting political structure and state, one of the West Slavic nations. The concept which has become known as the Piast Idea, the chief proponent of, Jan Ludwik Popławski, is based on the statement that the Piast homeland was inhabited by so-called "native" aboriginal Slavs and Slavonic Poles since time immemorial and only was "infiltrated" by "alien" Celts, Baltic peoples and others.
After 1945 the so-called "autochthonous" or "aboriginal" school of Polish prehistory received official backing in Poland and a considerable degree of popular support. According to this view, the Lusatian Culture which archaeologists have identified between the Oder and the Vistula in the early Iron Age, is said to be Slavonic. In contrast, the critics of this theory, such as Marija Gimbutas, regard it as an unproved hypothesis and for them the date and origin of the westward migration of the Slavs is uncharted. Polish people are the sixth largest national group in the European Union. Estimates vary depending on source, though available data suggest a total number of around 60 million people worldwide. There are 38 million Poles in Poland alone. There are Polish minorities in the surrounding countries including, indigenous minorities in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and eastern Lithuania, western Ukraine, western Belarus. There are some smaller indigenous minorities in nearby countries such as Moldova.
There is a Polish minority in Russia which includes indigenous Poles as well as those forcibly deported during and after World War II. The term "Polonia" is used in Poland to refer to people of Polish origin who live outside Polish borders estimated at around 10 to 20 million. There is a notable Polish diaspora in the United States and Canada. France has a historic relationship with Poland and has a large Polish-descendant population. Poles have lived in France since the 18th century. In the early 20th century, over a million Polish people settled in France during world wars, among them Polish émigrés fleeing either Nazi occupation or Soviet rule. In the United States, a significant number of Polish immigrants settled in Chicago, Detroit, New Jersey, New York City, Pittsburgh and New England; the highest concentration of Polish Americans in a single New England municipality is in New Britain, Connecticut. The majority of Polish Canadians have arrived in Canada since World War II; the number of Polish immigrants increased between 1945 and 1970, again after the end of Communism in Poland in 1989.
In Brazil the majority of Polish immigrants settled in Paraná State. Smaller, but significant numbers settled in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Espírito Santo and São Paulo; the city of Curitiba has the second largest Polish diaspora in the world and Polish music and culture are quite common in the region. A recent large migration of Poles took place followi
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial and/or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous. The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration, intimidation, as well as genocide and genocidal rape. Ethnic cleansing is accompanied with efforts to remove physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group in the territory through the destruction of homes, social centers and infrastructure, by the desecration of monuments and places of worship. Used by the perpetrators during the Yugoslav Wars and cited in this context as a euphemism akin to that of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution", by the 1990s, the term gained widespread acceptance due to journalism and the media's heightened use of the term in its generic meaning. An antecedent to the term is the Greek word andrapodismos, used in ancient texts to describe atrocities that accompanied Alexander the Great's conquest of Thebes in 335 BC.
In the early 1900s, regional variants of the term could be found among the Czechs, the Poles, the French and the Germans. A 1913 Carnegie Endowment report condemning the actions of all participants in the Balkan Wars contained various new terms to describe brutalities committed toward ethnic groups. During World War II, the euphemism čišćenje terena was used by the Croatian Ustaše to describe military actions in which non-Croats were purposely killed or otherwise uprooted from their homes. Viktor Gutić, a senior Ustaše leader, was one of the first Croatian nationalists on record to use the term as a euphemism for committing atrocities against Serbs; the term was used in the internal memorandums of Serbian Chetniks in reference to a number of retaliatory massacres they committed against Bosniaks and Croats between 1941 and 1945. The Russian phrase очистка границ was used in Soviet documents of the early 1930s to refer to the forced resettlement of Polish people from the 22-kilometre border zone in the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs.
This process was repeated on an larger scale in 1939–41, involving many other groups suspected of disloyalty towards the Soviet Union. During The Holocaust, Nazi Germany pursued a policy of ensuring that Europe was "cleansed of Jews". In its complete form, the term appeared for the first time in the Romanian language in an address by Vice Prime Minister Mihai Antonescu to cabinet members in July 1941. After the beginning of the invasion of the USSR, he concluded: “I do not know when the Romanians will have such chance for ethnic cleansing." In the 1980s, the Soviets used the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe the inter-ethnic violence in Nagorno-Karabakh. At around the same time, the Yugoslav media used it to describe what they alleged was an Albanian nationalist plot to force all Serbs to leave Kosovo, it was popularized by the Western media during the Bosnian War. The first recorded mention of its use in the Western media can be traced back to an article in The New York Times dated 15 April 1992, in a quote by an anonymous Western diplomat.
Synonyms include ethnic purification. The Final Report of the Commission of Experts established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 defined ethnic cleansing as "a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas". In its previous, first interim report it noted, "ased on the many reports describing the policy and practices conducted in the former Yugoslavia,'ethnic cleansing' has been carried out by means of murder, arbitrary arrest and detention, extra-judicial executions and sexual assaults, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, wanton destruction of property; those practices can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention."The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group".
As a category, ethnic cleansing encompasses a spectrum of policies. In the words of Andrew Bell-Fialkoff:thnic cleansing defies easy definition. At one end it is indistinguishable from forced emigration and population exchange while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide. At the most general level, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of a population from a given territory. Terry Martin has defined ethnic cleansing as "the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory" and as "occupying the central part of a continuum between genocide on one end and nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration on the other end". In reviewing the International Court of Justice Bosnian Genocide Case in the judgement of Jorgic v. Germany on July 12, 2007 the European Court of Human Rights quoted from the ICJ ruling on the Bosnian Genocide Case to draw a distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide: The term'ethnic cleansing' has been employed to refer to the events in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are the subject of this case...
General Assembly resolution 47/121 referred in its Preamble to'the abhorrent polic
