The deportees, the resettled and party politics: details on the Hungarian coalition parties' standpoint on the population movements between 1944 and 1948.

At the end of the Second World War, the Hungarian peasantry-like the whole of the domestic society--had to virtually restart their life in a changing, often dangerous environment. The population of the countryside had not been hit by the Anglo-Saxon air raids as badly as for instance the population of the capital, but the Hungarian villagers provided the metropolitan citizens as well as the withdrawing German and the raiding Russian troops with food and forage. The latter took away or drove away the animals of the peasants, and they also frequently destroyed their production equipment. The military campaigns and deportations taking place in the country during 1944/45 caused the death of about 900 000 people, (1) and as a result of the requisition and looting by the armies, 44 percent of the bovine, 56 percent of the horse, 79 percent of the swine and 80 percent of the sheep stock was destroyed. (2) Due to the autumn battles the peasantry failed to carry out field-work and to harvest certain crops. Subsequent to the departure of the front, public security was hardly any better in the countryside than in the cities: looting Soviet soldiers and gangs comprised of--often armed--civilians terrorized the population.

However, the slow normalization of the public states and the establishment of the national assemblies taking over the tasks of the local governments could not solve the numerous problems of the village population. The land question--that had been postponed for decades--was to be arranged, and besides that, it was expected that the looming land distribution would go hand in hand with certain inner deportations. Hungary had some territories--for example Viharsarok and some North-Eastern regions--where there was not sufficient amount of available land, so a part of the agrarian population living there was directed somewhere else. Besides, there was something to be done about the ex-Bukovinian Szeklers, who escaped from Bacska County to the Trans-Danubia as well as about the Hungarians driven away from the Uplands from the beginning of 1945 on the basis of the Benes decrees. The statements of the victorious Great Powers and certain signals by the Hungarian Allied Control Commission (3) led by Marshall Kirill Vorosilov suggested that the fate of the domestic German population--whose majority were agricultural workers--would dramatically change. The Potsdam Conference between July 17 and August 2, 1945 made this question clear: a decision was made about the deportation of the Eastern-European Germans to Germany.

In the summer of 1945, a couple of months after the end of WWII and more than a year after the mass deportation of the Jewish population, another population movement was looming in the Carpathian Basin and in Hungary. Bukovinian Szekler families appeared in the Schwab villages of the Valley (Volgyseg), and the Slovakian neighbours of the ousted Uplands Hungarians had already moved into their houses, and the settlement of the agrarian proletarians of Eastern-Hungary slowly began as well. A little bit later, in January 1946, the first railway carriages carrying the deported Germans set off from around Budapest towards the occupied Mother Land.

All these created immense tension in the territories involved in the deportations, and these serious conflicts needed to be solved as soon as possible. The question among others was: what kind of organisations, institutions would assume the task of eliminating these problems?

The parties of the 1945-1948 coalition period were not merely political groups, but they all had at different degrees serious economic/ social influence through their delegates to the national committees as well as the land-claiming and production commissions. In jurisdiction and law enforcement, they--especially the left-wing parties--also had a high member representation, thus these political organisations had a broad instrument reservoir to solve this serious conflict.

How did the deportation and resettlement go? What kind of conflicts did it cause? What was the standpoint of the coalition parties (4) on this? Did they sense at all the resulting tensions, and if yes, did they attempt to resolve them? Did they try to reap political--perhaps economic--benefits from all this? Hereafter, we are making an attempt to find answers to these and to other questions, since--although quite a few studies deal with the deportation of the Germans and the allocation of homes to settlers of Hungarian origin (mainly Bukovinian Szeklers) within and beyond the boundaries of historical science (5)--the scientific literature so far has not examined thoroughly the attitude of the coalition parties towards the deportations and settlings. Thus the present work might contribute some novelty to this tiny, but important piece of Hungarian history.

SETTLEMENT AND THE ACCOMPANYING CONFLICTS