German settler colonists and their settler colonialism: Jacob Flaws, ‘Settlers of the Reich: The Germans of Hitler’s Frontier’, in Yan Mann, Olga Kucherenko (eds), The Eastern Front: War, Myth, and Memory, Routledge, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

German settler colonists and their settler colonialism: Jacob Flaws, ‘Settlers of the Reich: The Germans of Hitler’s Frontier’, in Yan Mann, Olga Kucherenko (eds), The Eastern Front: War, Myth, and Memory, Routledge, 2024

19Nov24

Abstract: This chapter examines Nazi imperialism in Poland and Eastern Europe from 1939 to 1941 but from the perspective of the individual resettler. Tasked with remaking and resettling the German frontier, individual resettlers comprising the Volksdeutsche were far from passive gears in the massive Nazi bureaucracies and apparatuses in charge of resettling the East. The individual resettlers had agency in their resettlement, and most were enthusiastic about their mission. Common threads in their testimonies include a sense of adventure, adapting and thriving amidst adversity, and a willingness to uproot and dispossess Poles and Jews living in these spaces. This vital new look at ethnic cleansing as it occurred reveals the processes of empire-building, erasure, and genocide to be the products of both high-level ideology and the actions of everyday historical actors tasked with bringing that ideology to fruition.

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