Europe has a long history of state-led population displacement on ethnic grounds. The nationalist argument of ethnic homogeneity has been a crucial factor in the mapping of the continent. At no time has this been more the case than during and after the Second World War. Both under the aggressive expansionism of the Third Reich and after Germany's defeat, millions were brutally forced out of their homelands. Presenting a history from the top as well as the bottom, People on the Move reconstructs the complex map of forced population displacements that took place across Europe during and immediately after the Second World War.

Europe has a long history of state-led population displacement on ethnic grounds. The nationalist argument of ethnic homogeneity has been a crucial factor in the mapping of the continent. At no time has this been more the case than during and after the Second World War. Both under the aggressive expansionism of the Third Reich and after Germany's defeat, millions were brutally forced out of their homelands. Presenting a history from the top as well as the bottom, People on the Move reconstructs the complex map of forced population displacements that took place across Europe during and immediately after the Second World War.

In Deutschland bot im Jahr 2001 die 300-Jahrfeier der Erhebung Preussens zum Koenigreich Anlass fur eine vertiefte wissenschaftliche und oeffentliche Auseinandersetzung mit der preussischen Geschichte. In Italien blicken die Geisteswissenschaften auf eine lange Tradition der wissenschaftlichen Beschaftigung mit preussisch-deutschen Themen zuruck. Die Veranstaltung des Deutsch-Italienischen Zentrums Villa Vigoni zum Thema "Italien und Preussen" vom Oktober 2002, deren Beitrage hier zusammengestellt sind, gab Gelegenheit zu einem 'Dialog' der italienischen und der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung.

Gustavo Corni offers a balanced and comprehensive study of Nazi agricultural policies and German agriculture between 1930 and 1939. The author gives a full account of the decisive rural support for the Nazi party during this period and describes how the Nazi agrarian ideology was developed to gain mass support.

Hundreds of ghettos were created throughout eastern Europe by the Germans and their allies during World War II. Some were large - the one in Warsaw held almost half a million people in 1942 - others were very small. All had the purpose of holding the Jews separate from the rest of the population, almost invariably in extraordinarily deprived, squalid and crowded conditions. They became antechambers to the death camps but that purpose was not clear to most of their inhabitants. These cities within cities merit consideration then, not just as staging posts in the extermination of European Jewry, but as communities in their own right, with their own dynamics, in which elements of traditional pre-war Jewish society continued to exist. There have been some studies of the largest ghettos - Warsaw and Lodz - and a few accounts of some of the smaller ones; but very little examination of the ghettos as a whole. This history draws heavily on the testmonies of those who suffered in them, making use of a wide range of diaries and memoirs (and exploring the problems inherent in such sources). Other documentary sources - particularly German - are also used, but the intention is to look at the gh