‘Looking back, converted though we cannot be to the ancien régime, to the ‘system Metternich’ or to Tsarism, we no longer exult over the age of nationality and democracy and its victories. All past social superiorities have been wiped out behind the Iron Curtain, and most of the cultural values which the educated classes had created. Anti-Socialist, clerical peasant communities may yet arise in States now satellites of Russia. But a reinstatement of the dispossessed upper and middle classes is impossible. And it is even more idle to think of a reconquest of territories once held on the basis of those vanished supremacies. Now territories in Europe can only be regained with “vacant possession”: that is, radically cleared of their present inhabitants. The process of transfers or exchanges of population was started in the Balkans and Asia Minor at the end of the First World War. It was applied by Hitler where it suited him to withdraw German, or expel non-German, populations; and it was planned on an infinitely greater scale by the Germans had they won the war. As they lost it, the process was carried through against them. Hence their wrath.’
—Sir Lewis Namier, 1955