Hugo Service, Germans to Poles: Communism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ix + 378 pp. $99.00

The expulsion of the German population of central and southeast Europe during the five years after the Second World War is at last beginning to attract the attention it deserves from anglophone scholars. Much work, however, remains to be done. Although more than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the opening of many of the relevant state archives in the principal expelling countries (Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary), it is hard to think of any episode of comparable importance in respect of which English-speaking historians of modern Europe have displayed such a striking incuriosity. This is all the more remarkable inasmuch as so many aspects of the expulsions remain to be fully explicated. In particular, delineating the logistical elements of what proved to be a massive multinational operation, accomplished at breakneck speed and with little or no advance planning, is a task whose surface has barely been...