I bumped into one expellee, an old pal, in the pub last week.
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After World War II, several expellee towns were built like Espelkamp, Neutraubling and Traunreut.
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But many others pointed out that the ageing expellee groups were beginning to lose influence.
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According to the Federal Expellee Law,"Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge" Par. 7/2. Retrieved 29 October 2017 "the spouse and the descendants" of an expellee are to be treated as if they were expellees themselves, regardless of whether they had been personally displaced. The Federation of Expellees has steadily lobbied to preserve the inheritability clause.
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48-50, In reality, the Potsdam Agreement took its place. The status of the expellees in post-war West Germany, which granted the right of return to the German diaspora, was legally defined in the Federal Expellee Law of 1953. Federal Expellee Law (Germany) at juris.de The deportation of Germans ended in 1950; from 1945–1950, nearly 3.2 million were removed.
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But it's hard to imagine a sixth-form expellee, editor only of his uncle's pet magazine, achieving high office in the Tory party from any other background.
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In other parts of the world, as I mentioned in my opening comments, the United Arab Emirates launched the world's first iris expellee tracking and border control system.
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Many representatives of expellee organizations support the erection of bilingual signs in all formerly German-speaking territory as a visible sign of the bilingual linguistic and cultural heritage of the region. The erection of bilingual signs is permitted if a minority constitutes 10% of the population.
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The commissioned gathered and used a large number of primary sources and Schieder also wanted the volumes produced to also include supposed political context of the events. Two out of the five volumes, about Romania, prepared by Broszat, and the one on Yugoslavia prepared by Wehler, included some form of analysis of collaboration by the local Germans during the war, Nazi plans and the atrocities of German occupation. At the center of the project were documents prepared by expellee organizations, German government, testimonies dictated in response to questions from officials of regional expellee interest groups, and personal diaries initially written as retrospective for the author or family. Together the volumes contained 4,300 densely printed pages.
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Bevölkerungsbilanzen für die deutschen > Vertreibungsgebiete 1939/50. Herausgeber: Statistisches Bundesamt - > Wiesbaden. - Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1958 Pages 38 and 45 Gerhard > Reichling, a researcher employed by West German government, put the figure > of Germans emigrating from Poland from 1951 to 1982 at 894,000; they are > also considered expellees under German Federal Expellee Law.Gerhard > Reichling.
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The All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights ( or GB/BHE) was a right-wing political party in West Germany, which acted as an advocacy group of the Germans fled and expelled in and after World War II. The German Federal Expellee Law is considered a major achievement of the GB/BHE.
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Between 1953, when the Federal Expellee Law was passed, and 1991, the West German government passed several laws dealing with German expellees. The most notable of these is the "Law of Return" which granted German citizenship to any ethnic German. Several additions were later made to these laws. The German Law of Return declared refugee status to be inheritable.
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By early 1959, Adenauer came under renewed pressure from his Western allies, to recognize the Oder-Neisse line, with the Americans being especially insistent. Adenauer gave his "explicit and unconditional approval" to the idea of non- aggression pacts in late January 1959, which effectively meant recognising the Oder-Neisse line, since realistically speaking Germany could only regain the lost territories through force. After Adenauer's intention to sign non- aggression pacts with Poland and Czechoslovakia became clear, the German expellee lobby swung into action and organized protests all over the Federal Republic while bombarding the offices of Adenauer and other members of the cabinet with thousands of letters, telegrams and telephone calls promising never to vote CDU again if the non-aggression pacts were signed. Faced with this pressure, Adenauer promptly capitulated to the expellee lobby.
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Elei Sinai was established in 1982 (Sukkot 5743) by a group who had been evicted from Yamit in the Sinai Peninsula. It was named for the yearning to return to the Sinai desert, where Yamit was located. Avi Farhan, a Yamit expellee, and Arik Herfez, whose daughter had been killed by Palestinian militants, were two of the most notable residents.
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This latter article was extensively applied to effect the de- Nazification of public institutions and economic enterprises at all levels of German society, to extract reparations; and also in the Soviet zone to effect a major programme of land reform, redistributing expropriated rural land from large pre-war landed estates to the ownership of surviving tenant occupiers and expellee farmers from former eastern parts of Germany.
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Since many of the expelled pro-Danish "optants" had emigrated to the United States, the net result of this extension was a slight increase for the German results, and it was much more likely for a pro-German emigrant living in Germany to return to the region for the plebiscite than for a pro-Danish expellee who had emigrated to the United States to do the same.
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Their children gained German citizenship by jus sanguinis (RuStAG § 4). Those Aussiedler of foreign citizenship but descending from ancestors holding German citizenship before 1918 (regardless of ethnicity) were granted German citizenship by the Federal Expellee Law (BVFG § 6 (2)), while those Aussiedler without such German descent but of German ethnicity (to be evidenced by German culture, language, traditions, etc.) received German citizenship also (see BVFG § 1 (1) No. 1).
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After World War II Albertz moved to Celle, where the British occupation authorities entrusted him with the reception of expellees and displaced persons. He joined the SPD and in 1946 became a member of the Landtag of Lower Saxony. In 1948 he was appointed minister for expellee affairs in the Lower Saxon state cabinet under Minister- President Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf; in 1951 he became state minister of social affairs. Since 1950 he was also a member of the SPD federal board.
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Cf. Federal Expellee Law, § 1 (2) No. 3. In a document signed in 1950 the Heimatvertriebene organisations recognised the plight of the different groups of people living in today's Poland who were resettled there by force. The Heimatvertriebene are just one (but by far the largest) of the groups of millions of other people, from many different countries, who all found refuge in today's Germany. Some of the expellees are active in politics and belong to the political right wing.
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German expellee organizations who did not accept the post-war territorial and population changes fueled Communist propaganda dismissing them as far-right revanchists. In the first years after the war, the bishop of Katowice Stanisław Adamski criticized the expulsion of Germans as inhumane. According to Philipp Ther, pre-1989 Polish historiography has in general either underestimated or concealed the role of force during the expulsions.Philipp Ther, Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene: Gesellschaft und Vertriebenenpolitik in SBZ/DDR und in Polen 1945-1956, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998, p.
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Steinbach was a member of the CDU national board from 2000 to September 2010, when she chose to resign from the position following a controversy over comments about the German invasion of Poland. Steinbach, in support of other members of her expellee organization, said that the German attack on Poland was just a response to Poland's mobilization, resulting in criticism of her. Steinbach's resignation was met with mixed feelings within the CDU/CSU. Some members were worried that her departure could cause a split, and a formation of a new right wing party in Germany.
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In Austria the concept was equally needed, but in a multi-ethnic monarchy. Thus in the 1976 National Minorities Act the term "Volksgruppe" served approximately as a synonym for national minority, according to the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities of the Council of Europe. Section 6 in the German Federal Expellee Law also used the expression.§ 6 Bundesvertriebenengesetz The legislature of Switzerland explained Volkstum, at the time of ratification of the Framework Convention, as "inspired by the desire [...] to together preserve what relates to their common identity, including their culture, their traditions, their religion or their language".
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In 1931 Rosenfeld was one of six left wing SPD members of parliament excluded from the SPD group in the Reichstag following a "breach of party discipline". At the heart of the disagreement was the decision of the party leadership under Otto Wels to "tolerate" the Brüning government, in a desperate - and with the benefit of hindsight unsuccessful - attempt to "stabilize the tottering state" and avert a Nazi take-over. Rosenfeld and fellow-expellee Max Seydewitz now founded the Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SAPD). Rosenfeld and Seydewitz became co-chairmen of the new party serving in the post, in Rosenfeld's case, till the early part of 1933.
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By origin, the West German expellee population consisted of about 5.5 million people from post-war Poland, primarily the former German East/new Polish West, two million from the former Sudetenland, and the rest primarily from Southeast Europe, the Baltic states and Russia. German children at the refugee camp, Western Germany, 31 December 1944 According to estimates made in West Germany, in the Soviet zone the number rose to 4.2 million by 1948 (24.2% of the population) and 4.4 million by 1950,Philipp Ther, Geglückte Integration?: Spezifika und Vergleichbarkeiten der Vertriebenen-Eingliederung in der SBZ/DDR by Dierk Hoffmann & Michael Schwartz, Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1999, pp. 140seq; Google.de; accessed 26 MAy 2015.
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According to the statistical yearbook, in 1971 in West Germany there were 8.96 million "expellees" under the law, who could apply for a document certifying this classification (German: Bundesvertriebenenausweis; i.e. Federal Expellee Card). The law also recognises as refugees and expellees entitled to German citizenship refugees from Germany, who emigrated or were expelled after 30 January 1933 to flee factual or impending persecution on the grounds of their political opposition, their racial classification, their religion or philosophy of life (Weltanschauung). The persons entitled to German citizenship also include (former) foreign citizens of states of the Eastern Bloc, who themselves - or whose ancestors - were persecuted or discriminated between 1945 and 1990 for their German or alleged German ethnicity by their respective governments.
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They took advantage of the German law of return, a policy that grants citizenship to all those who can prove to be a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such a person. (Greece had a similar law for the ethnic Greek minority from the former Soviet Union). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the independence of the Baltic states, some Russian ethnic Germans began to return to the area of the Kaliningrad Oblast (formerly part of East Prussia), especially Volga Germans from other parts of Russia and Kazakhstan, as well as to the Volga Germans' old territory in southern Russia near Volgograd. This tempo increased after Germany stopped granting the free right of return to ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union.
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There are up to one million Germans in the former Soviet Union, mostly in a band from southwestern Russia and the Volga valley, through Omsk and Altai Krai (597,212 Germans in Russia, 2002 Russian census) to Kazakhstan (353,441 Germans in Kazakhstan, 1999 Kazakhstan census). Germany admitted approximately 1.63 million ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union between 1990 and 1999. These Auslandsdeutsche, as they are now generally known, have been streaming out of the former Eastern Bloc since the early 1990s. For example, many ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union have taken advantage of the German Law of Return, a policy which grants citizenship to all those who can prove to be a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or the spouse or descendant of such a person.
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As the capacity of air raid shelters was limited to the regular populace, many refugees were killed at the spa gardens. The motor vessel Andros, carrying about 2,000 refugees, had just arrived at the harbour and was sunk with the loss of about 570 people. Das geplante Inferno Der Spiegel 1 April 2003 About 500 victims of the raid were identified and buried close to the entrance of the cemetery and the remaining dead were buried in mass graves. The estimated number of victims, including residents of Swinemünde who were also encompassed by the expulsions, varies from about 5,000 to 23,000. 1958 the West German Government demographic study of expellee deaths estimated the total civilian dead in the East Pommerian region due to Anglo-American air raids after 1/31/45 at 8,000.
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Directly after the war the reactivation of tourism was tried, however as most holiday homes in the valley were occupied by new settlers and the touristic infrastructure was in a sorry state these attempts failed. The parks, the excellent hiking trail network and erstwhile viewpoints run to seed, while most of the art collections were either destroyed or dissolved and spread all over Poland. After the collapse of communism in Poland a rediscovery of the cultural landscape began, which is increasingly accepted and appreciated by the descendants of the Polish settlers. Today many private and governmental initiatives, as well as German expellee organisations and family members of former owners, work together to revitalize the touristic infrastructure and cultural heritage, and academics work on the acceptance of the valley as a World Heritage Site.
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With the existence of a socialist German state in East Germany now a reality of the post-war world, the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was never reestablished. The land area is now mostly part of Saratov Oblast, except for a small area in northern Volgograd Oblast. Beginning in the early 1980s and accelerating after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Volga Germans have emigrated to Germany by taking advantage of the German law of return, a policy which grants citizenship to all those who can prove to be a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such a person.Barbara Dietz, "German and Jewish migration from the former Soviet Union to Germany: Background, Trends and Implications", Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 26, No. 4 (October 2000): 635-652.
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Occupational functionaries and other German expatriates, who had moved to German-annexed or German-occupied foreign territory only due to the war were not considered expellees by law unless they showed circumstances (such as marrying a resident of the respective area) providing for the intention to settle abroad also for the time after the war.Cf. Federal Expellee Law, § 1 (4). Besides the narrow legal definition for the Heimatvertriebene, there were also other groups accepted as Vertriebene (expellees) such as the Aussiedler. These comprised refugees and emigrants either originally of foreign citizenship but of German ethnicity, or who themselves or whose ancestors had involuntarily lost German citizenship, coming from the above-mentioned uniform territory of expulsion or from Albania, Bulgaria, China, Romania, the Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia, and arriving only after the end of general expulsions but not later as 31 December 1992.
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Cf. the report of the Central State Archive of Rhineland- Palatinate on the first expellees arriving in that state in 1950 from other German states in the former British or American zone: "Beyond that [the fact, that until France took control of her zone west only few eastern war refugees had made it into her zone] already since summer 1945 France refused to absorb expellee transports in her zone. France, who had not participated in the Potsdam Conference, where the expulsions of eastern Germans had been decided, and who therefore did not feel responsible for the ramifications, feared an unbearable burden for its zone anyway strongly smarting from the consequences of the war." N.N., "Vor 50 Jahren: Der 15. April 1950. Vertriebene finden eine neue Heimat in Rheinland-Pfalz" , on: Rheinland-Pfalz Landesarchivverwaltung, retrieved on 4 March 2013.
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The German historian Martin Broszat (former head of Institute of Contemporary History in Munich) described Nawratil's writings as "polemics with a nationalist-rightist point of view", and that Nawratil "exaggerates in an absurd manner the scale of 'expulsion crimes'".Ursprünge, Arten und Folgen des Konstrukts "Bevölkerung" vor, im und nach dem "Dritten Reich" Zur Geschichte der deutschen Bevölkerungswissensch: Ingo Haar Die deutschen ›Vertreibungsverluste‹ – Forschungsstand, Kontexte und Probleme, in Ursprünge, Arten und Folgen des Konstrukts "Bevölkerung" vor, im und nach dem "Dritten Reich" Springer 2009: Page 373 The Federation of Expellees has represented the interests of Germans from Eastern Europe. Erika Steinbach, the current President of the Federation, provoked outrage when she supported the statements of other members of the expellee organization claiming that Hitler's attack on Poland was a response to Poland's policy. The Federation of Expellees initiated the formation of the Center Against Expulsions.
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By the definition of the West German Federal Expellee Law, enacted on 19 May 1953, refugees of German citizenship or German ethnicity, whose return to their home places was denied, were treated like expellees, thus the frequent general usage of the term expellees for refugees alike. Distinguished are refugees and expellees who had neither German citizenship nor German ethnicity but as a matter of fact had fled or been expelled from their former domiciles and stranded in West Germany or West Berlin before 1951. They were taken care of – as part of the displaced persons – by international refugee organisations until 1951 and then by West German authorities granting them the extra status of heimatloser Ausländer with preferential naturalisation rules, distinct from other legal aliens or stateless people.Cf. the Gesetz über die Rechtsstellung heimatloser Ausländer im Bundesgebiet (shorthand: HAuslG; literally: law on the legal status of homeless foreigners in the federal territory).
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German law allows (1) people descending from German nationals of any ethnicity or (2) people of ethnic German descent (Volksdeutsche) and living in countries of the former Warsaw Pact (as well as Yugoslavia) the right to "return" to Germany and ("re")claim German citizenship (Aussiedler/Spätaussiedler "late emigrants"). After legislative changes in late 1992 this right is de facto restricted to ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union. As with many legal implementations of the Right of Return, the "return" to Germany of individuals who may never have lived in Germany based on their ethnic origin or their descent from German nationals has been controversial. The law is codified in paragraph 1 of Article 116 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, which provides access to German citizenship for anyone "who has been admitted to the territory of the German Reich within the boundaries of December 31, 1937 as a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such person".
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The propagandist aims of the German government at the time were to utilize the commission's work to keep the question of the territories lost by Germany as a result of World War II open. Adolf Diestelkamp, another member of the commission, expressed the hope that the work of the commission would be a "decisive factor in our fight to win back the German east", that is, territories which Germany ceded to Poland after World War II. The commission relied heavily on interest groups, including expellee organizations, to collect their sources. Some of the witness accounts gathered by the commission reflected Nazi propagandaMoeller 65-66 Rothfels was the one who had originally proposed Schieder as head of the editorial staff, having been his teacher and a key intellectual influence during the Nazi period. Younger historians, such as Martin Broszat (who researched Yugoslavia) and Hans-Ulrich Wehler (who helped research Romania), who were later to break with the tradition of Schieder and Conze, served as research assistants (see also Historikerstreit).
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Altogether, around 8 million ethnic German refugees and expellees from across Europe eventually settled in West Germany, with a further 3 million in East Germany. In West Germany these represented a major voting block; maintaining a strong culture of grievance and victimhood against Soviet Power, pressing for a continued commitment to full German reunification, claiming compensation, pursuing the right of return to lost property in the East, and opposing any recognition of the postwar extension of Poland and the Soviet Union into former German lands. Owing to the Cold War rhetoric and successful political machinations of Konrad Adenauer, this block eventually became substantially aligned with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany; although in practice 'westward-looking' CDU policies favouring the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union worked against the possibility of achieving the objectives of the expellee population from the east through negotiation with the Soviet Union. But for Adenauer, fostering and encouraging unrealistic demands and uncompromising expectations amongst the expellees would serve his "Policy of Strength" by which West Germany contrived to inhibit consideration of unification or a final Peace Treaty until the West was strong enough to face the Soviets on equal terms.
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Consequently, the Federal Republic in the 1950s adopted much of the symbolism of expellee groups; especially in appropriating and subverting the terminology and imagery of the Holocaust; applying this to post-war German experience instead. Eventually in 1990, following the Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany, the unified Germany indeed confirmed in treaties with Poland and the Soviet Union that the transfer of sovereignty over the former German eastern territories in 1945 had been permanent and irreversible; Germany now undertaking never again to make territorial claims in respect of these lands. The intended governing body of Germany was called the Allied Control Council, consisting of the commanders-in-chief in Germany of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union; who exercised supreme authority in their respective zones, while supposedly acting in concert on questions affecting the whole country. In actuality however, the French consistently blocked any progress towards re-establishing all-German governing institutions; substantially in pursuit of French aspirations for a dismembered Germany, but also as a response to the exclusion of France from the Yalta and Potsdam conferences.
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Between 1961 and 1989 several thousand East German citizens emigrated by obtaining temporary exit visas and subsequently failing to return, or by engaging in dangerous attempts to cross the Berlin Wall, the Inner German border, or the borders of other Eastern Bloc countries. Those who fled across the fortified borders did so at considerable personal risk of injury or death (see: List of deaths at the Berlin Wall), with several hundred Republikflüchtlinge dying in accidents or by being shot by the GDR Border Troops, while some 75,000 were caught and imprisoned. West Germany allowed refugees from the Soviet sector of Berlin, the Soviet zone, or East Germany to apply to be accepted as Vertriebene (expellees) of the sub-group of Soviet Zone Refugees (Sowjetzonenflüchtlinge) under the Federal Expellee Law (BVFG § 3), and thus receive support from the West German government. They had to have fled before 1 July 1990 in an attempt to rescue themselves from an emergency situation – especially one posing a threat to health, life, personal freedom, or freedom of conscience – created by the political conditions imposed by the regime in the territory from which they had escaped (BVFG § 3).
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