People move at times of war. Violence and the threat of violence cause people to move. Civilians try to escape attack, flee to hinterlands, are persecuted and uprooted or are driven to move in order to avoid economic destitution. This has always been the case through history. But the sheer scale of population displacement during the 1940s was something distinctive and epic. Displacement and the threat of uprooting from old homelands became, for many, the norm rather than the exception. In Europe, some 30 million were on the move, in China 90 million fled from the effects of war. Whole regions became completely repopulated. The role of the state as arbiter and executioner of these plans was unprecedented. It was the intention of Hitler – but not only Hitler – to mastermind a new ethnographic landscape. In many places, from Poland to Pakistan, states and especially their borderlands were engineered or re-engineered to fit with ideas of national homogeneity. This happened over a longue durée – and is part of the longer history of the twentieth century's ethnic conflict and creation of nation states, which began with the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and has had legacies in the recent past, most notably in the Balkan Wars. The sheer magnitude of the movement astonished even those who had anticipated some movement. Refugee upheavals interlink with the history of ethnic cleansing and genocide, post-war reconstruction in the wake of global war and the emergence of internationalist ideas about development and international responsibilities toward refugees. The global ‘exchange of population’ People were simply on the move everywhere in the 1940s, trying to find a place of safety far away from violence, trying to find a secure way of life for their families. It's difficult to grasp the dimensions of this phenomenon.
