During the last months of the Second World War, the position of the Soviet side toward postwar displaced persons (DPs) and refugee camps seemed to be simple: there should be no need for them. Like the Western Allies, the Soviet Union had a clear plan for how to deal with the expected hundreds of thousands of DPs, refugees and expellees on the territory of the former "German Reich."1 During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies had agreed upon a secret additional agreement to the official decisions of the conference. Non-Germanspeaking DPs and refugees who were encountered in the occupied territories were to be repatriated as quickly as possible, on transports organized by Allied forces. For German-speaking expellees, mainly from regions in Eastern Europe, this would not be an option, as their countries of origin would consider them "collaborators" of the Nazi regime and "traitors," and would not take them back. The solution would thus be to transfer them to occupied Germany for resettle-ment.
Objective: Growing evidence suggests that psychosocial factors, particularly stress, contribute to the complex pathophysiology of cervical dystonia (CD). However, childhood maltreatment (CM) has not yet been investigated in CD. Thus, this case-control study explored whether CD is associated with CM. Methods: Thirty-eight patients with definite CD and 37 age-and sex-matched controls completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Results: CD patients in the present sample reported higher, but non-significant scores on all CTQ subscales apart from physical abuse than the control group. There were no significant associations between CM and CD severity, age at onset or tremor in this sample, except between sexual abuse and age at CD onset. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that CM does not represent an important psychosocial factor involved in the pathophysiology of CD. However, the small sample size and the single-center study design limit the interpretability of the results.
