From the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Poznań in western Poland was at the center of the Polish-German national struggle that culminated in the ethnic cleansing of East Central Europe after 1945. The chief causes of ethnic cleansing were the rapacity of German imperialism and the etermination of the Grand Alliance to cut through the Gordian knot of entangling ethnographic and political frontiers that so constrained politics in interwar Europe. Yet Polish society embraced the Grand Alliance's diktat to expel its German minority with enthusiasm. The Poles of Poznań took a leading role in rallying their countrymen to this task and in settling the former eastern territories of the Reich that the Grand Alliance awarded Poland at the end of the war. How and why did Poznań became the crucible for the creation of a new Poland and the destruction of eastern Germany?

Poznań was an unlikely graveyard for German colonial hopes in Eastern Europe, and Poznaniaks were unlikely gravediggers for Germandom in Poland. One of the ironies of the national conflict in Wielkopolska is that many Poles outside the region viewed Poznaniaks as barely distin-guishable from the Schwabs whom the Poles of Poznań would come to hate so deeply.