A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This “territorial revisionism” came to include all manner of political and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the war itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period and East European national histories.

A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This “territorial revisionism” came to include all manner of political and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the war itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period and East European national histories.

Introduction: Contextualizing Territorial Revisionism: Goals, Expectations, Practices
Marina Cattaruzza and Dieter Langewiesche

• The European Scenario in the Interwar Period
• Revisionism in Practice
• The Minorities Issue
• The manifold problems of the heirs of the empires in East Central Europe
• An era of Revisionism?

Chapter 1. The Worst of Friends: Germany’s Allies in East Central Europe – Struggles for Regional Dominance and Ethnic Cleansing, 1938-1945
Istvan Deak

THE ROLE OF MINORITIES

Chapter 2. Minorities into majorities. Sudeten German and Transylvanian Hungarian political elites as actors of revisionism before and during the Second World War
Franz Horvath

• Introduction
• Some remarks on terminology (Minority groups, Revisionism, and Loyalty)
• Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians as Revisionist Minorities
• Dominating the others. Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians as Members of the Ruling Nation (1938/40-1944/45)
• Conclusion

Chapter 3. Germany turns eastwards: The “Volksdeutsche” in Central and Eastern Europe
Norbert Spannenberger

• Minority Politics and German “Volksgruppen” in the States of the South Eastern European Region
• A Sketch of National Socialist Volksgruppen Politics in Practice

REVISIONISM AS A DRIVING FORCE

Chapter 4. Revisionism in Regional Perspective
Holly Case

• Revisionism as Ideology
• Revisionist and Anti-Revisionist Solidarity: The Case of the Little Entente
• Lessons and Models in the Geopolitics of Revisionism: Bulgaria and Romania
• Revisionism and Domestic Policy
• Conclusion

Chapter 5. Hungarian Revisionism in Thought and Action, 1920-1941 (Plans, Expectations, Reality)
Ignác Romsics

• Hungarian Revisionist Conceptions after Trianon
• Hungarian Revisionist Politics by Negotiation and War

Chapter 6. Bulgarian Territorial Revisionism as the Driving Force for its Rapprochment with the Third Reich
Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk

• Postwar Revisionism and Postwar Alliances
• Germany as the Main Revisionist Power
• The Recovery of Southern Dobrudja
• Bulgaria’s Accession to the Pact of Three
• Conclusion

PRACTICES OF REVISIONISM

Chapter 7. Politics and Military Action of Ethnic Ukrainian Collaboration for the “New European Order”
Frank Grelka

• Political Collaboration
• Administrative Collaboration
• Military Collaboration
• Conclusion

Chapter 8. Civil War in Occupied Territories: The Polish-Ukrainian Conflict in the Interwar Years and in the Second World War
Frank Golczewski

• National Disappointment
• Hopes set on the Great Powers
• The Changes of 1941
• The Change of the Tide
• After the War

Chapter 9. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and Bulgarian Revisionism, 1923-1944
Stefan Troebst

• Vision turned into Politics: The Bulgarian Syndrome of San Stefano
• Peaceful Revisionism“: Official Bulgarian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period
• Militant Revisionism: Informal Bulgarian Interwar Balkan Policy
• Revision Achieved—And Lost Again: Bulgaria and IMRO in the Second World War
• Legacies: IMRO in Today’s Bulgarian and Macedonian Politics

Chapter 10. Romania in the Second World War: Revisionist Out of Necessity
Mariana Hausleitner

• Minorities Policies, Romanization and anti-Semitism in Romania 1918-1941
• The Redrawing of the Romanian Borders 1938-1940
• The so called "Purification" in the Bukovina, Bessarabia and Transnistria 1941-1944
• Who planned and organized the “national purification” of Romania
• Conclusion

Bibliography
Index