Scrapyard Politics: Dismantling the Ruins of Nazi War Infrastructure to Industrialize Poland, 1945-1948

• In Event: Scrapping, Repurposing, and Reappraising in East Central Europe's Industrial Centers

Abstract

The paper examines the material effects of Nazi Germany’s defeat and Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe for the economic and political reconfiguration of Poland. The presentation focuses on the area around Stettin, a Baltic port-city which in the 1940s became a Polish-Soviet-German transit zone for people and materials. Its local economy centered on recovering and appropriating the scraps of war, in particular the metallic debris left over from the bombed-out carcass of the Wehrmacht’s largest synthetic fuel factory. Examining conflicts over the piles of scrap, the paper argues that it was not ideology, but the logistics of salvage that defined the politics of reconstruction and shaped the structure of local governance.

Author

• Karolina Partyga, Columbia U