David Gerlach

Between May 1945 and 1947, the Czechoslovak government expelled roughly three million Sudeten Germans from the country, many of whom had lived there for centuries. To date, scholarly studies of this and other cases of ethnic cleansing have focused on the historical, political, and ethnic aspects of such conflicts. However, economic concerns also played a key role in the planning and implementation of the expulsion and consequent settlement of borderland regions. My dissertation utilizes local government records to explore how Czech desires for confiscated German property and the need to reorganize local economies influenced decisions about the expulsion and settlement.