It may be concluded from these tensions between neighboring countries in East Central Europe that more research on the topic is pivotal for securing good international relations. The political importance of expulsions and genuine academic interest in filling blank pages of history has prompted a lot of research in East Central Europe since 1989. Several publications have recently appeared in the former Czechslovakia, Hungary, and also in Poland. However, because of language barriers these studies have received little attention outside their countries of origin. It is the merit of the Austrian Academy of Sciences to bring together some of the most prominent contemporary historians from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary in this collective volume.
Some articles contain sources unknown to western and sometimes even eastern readers.
In the introduction, Czech historian Jan Havranek pinpoints in an almost poetic way the difference between expulsion and the Holocaust by using the example of the Prague Jews and Prague Germans. As he points out, the journey of the German minority in Prague usually ended in 1945 after crossing the Bavarian or Saxon border in poverty. The distinction between expulsion and Holocaust is very important, if only to restrict the inflationary use of the term genocide. The primary goal of the states and nations that expelled people was to remove them from a certain territory. The primary goal of the Nazis was to extinguish people.