Bücher der Reihe Publications of the Research Group for European Migration Problems

Some years ago the N etherlands Research Committee for European Refugee Problems commissioned an investigation into the adjustment problems of foreigners who for various reasons have taken refuge in the Netherlands.

The saga of Jewish flight, suffering and death has been investi gated from different points of view, and various aspects of this sad chapter of Jewish history have been carefully studied.

Many migrate voluntarily, or under compulsion, to build up new existences in other parts of the country or in other parts of the world. Born and bred in another part of the world they embarked in groups to the N ether lands, which they had never seen before, when the country they lived in became independent.

This first publication of the Research Group for European Migration Problems is devoted to the importance of migration in Western Europe.

The plans for this study were formulated between I956 and I958. While a graduate student at Columbia University at that time, I was also affiliated with a multidisciplinary research group at Cornell University Medical Colleges studying the reactions of people of various cultural and social backgrounds to situations of stress.

It amounts to a truism to say that amongst the great problems left by the Second Great War very few called for national and international planning so urgently as the problem of human migrations.

Dr de Gadolin's study calls attention to a country, a people, and a problem about which in general much too little is known outside Finland.

This brief study of the 1945 expulsion of German populations from Eastern-Central and Eastern Europe does not by any means pretend to be a complete and exhaustive analysis of a subject so massive, complex and controversial.

The publications of the Research Group for European mi gration problems represent studies by independent writers. Dr Wander has stressed the present demographic trends in the more important Western European countries, and the possibility of the absorption of an ever increasing number of workers into the economy of Europe itself.

The study by Dr Friedrich Edding is, as far as I can see, the first paper to treat the economic side of the Refugee problem in Western Germany in an impartial form, showing, on the basis of new figures, its positive as well as its negative aspect and effect.