When World War 2 ended, a new classification of Europeans appeared: "displaced persons". This was what homeless people who belonged nowhere were called. Some of them were still classified as that 30 years after the war had ended. John Terraine, in his book The Mighty Continent, A View of Europe in the Twentieth Century, points out that displaced persons suffered this special punishment for the crime of being European in 1945. The book was published in 1974 and was complementary to the BBC television series of that title, broadcast in the same year. It covers the history of Europe in the 75 years from the heyday of the Habsburg Empire in 1900. The facts are known from many sources. In that period two world wars were fought, the old imperial dynasties of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia came to an end, and socialism, communism, the United Nations (UN) and the European Economic Union emerged. The 1970s student counterculture movement occurred in that time frame as well. During World...
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