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“New Citizens” or “Community of Fate”? Early Discourses and Policies on “Flight and Expulsion” in the Two Postwar Germanys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2020

Peter N. Gengler
Peter N. Gengler*
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Abstract

The historiography of the postwar Germanys often examined the Nazi legacy and the remarkable efforts needed for economic and social recovery after 1945. In both the FRG and GDR, the consequences of the war and resulting “flight and expulsion” featured prominently in public discourse and were among the most pressing challenges in the early postwar years. Examining how the competing regimes in East and West Germany attempted to solve the humanitarian crisis caused by the forced migration of 10 to 12 million German refugees in the first years after World War II reveals that the discourses and policies started from common points of departure yet diverged into competing narratives underpinning the states’ political and social agendas. Reconstructing the evolution of how the forced migrations were discussed and leveraged in the neglected period immediately after the war opens new perspectives on how Germans shouldered the burdens of dictatorship and defeat.

Die Geschichtsschreibung zur deutschen Nachkriegszeit hat sich oft mit den „Altlasten“ des Nationalsozialismus und den außerordentlichen Anstrengungen beim wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Wiederaufbau nach 1945 befasst. Sowohl in der BRD als auch in der DDR nahmen die Auswirkungen des Krieges im öffentlichen Diskurs eine wichtige Rolle ein. Zu den zentralen Themen und dringlichsten Herausforderungen der frühen Nachkriegsjahre gehörten „Flucht und Vertreibung“. Dieser Beitrag untersucht die unterschiedlichen Strategien und Politiken, mit denen die konkurrierenden Regime in Ost- und Westdeutschland die humanitäre Krise der Zwangsmigration von 10 bis 12 Millionen Deutschen aus dem Osten Europas in den ersten Nachkriegsjahren zu bewältigen versuchten. Er zeigt, wie sich ost- und westdeutsche Diskurse und Politiken trotz eines ähnlichen Ausgangspunktes in unterschiedliche Richtungen entwickelten, die die jeweilige politische und soziale Agenda reflektierte. Die Untersuchung der Art und Weise, wie Flucht und Vertreibung in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit diskutiert und politisch benutzt wurden, eröffnet neue Perspektiven auf den Umgang der Deutschen mit der Bürde von NS-Diktatur und Niederlage.

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Central European History , Volume 53 , Special Issue 2: Burdens and Beginnings: Rebuilding East and West Germany after Nazism , June 2020, pp. 314 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association, 2020

In May 1952, a political flyer exhorted the “brothers and sisters from the German East” to support the West German Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union, CDU) by reminding expellees of the party's efforts to create a new homeland for the displaced millions, after their forced migration from eastern Europe after 1945. The leaflet also identified the source of Germany's continuing despair: It was “Stalin and his henchmen” who drove the 10 to 12 million expellees from “house and farm” in order to foment “our misery” and turn Germany into a “mass prison.” Several other publications in West Germany had a similar tenor.Footnote 1

In East Germany, meanwhile, the press decried “hardcore Nazis and German nationalists” among the expellees.Footnote 2 Das Neue Deutschland (ND), the newspaper of the governing Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED]), set the tone by arguing in 1949 that socialist remedies provided refugees with a new home and had completely solved the humanitarian crisis in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), while the “frivolous game” of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) sought to “rip the barely healed wounds open constantly and spread a dangerous ethnic hatred.”Footnote 3 For journalists of the ND, all members of the SED, the socialist Germany's stance on the refugees was superior because it opposed the plans of the West German “henchmen of the imperialists,” who desperately sought a new war in order to win back territories ceded to Poland after the Second World War and revise the postwar order.Footnote 4

The opposing anticommunist and antifascist discourses that framed interpretations of the recent past, including the causes of “flight and expulsion,” in both German states in the decade after their founding in 1949 are hardly surprising given the intense ideological struggle between the two successor states of the Third Reich. Although the realization that Cold War competition permeated historical understandings is nothing novel, one must note that diametrically opposed framings did not arise spontaneously. A reexamination of the construction and evolution of “flight and expulsion” narratives in postwar Germany is therefore necessary because it opens new perspectives on the reconstruction of the two German societies after 1945, which had to face the consequences of the largest compulsory migration in European history: roughly 12 million citizens of the collapsed German Empire and members of German minorities from other eastern and central European regions had to be integrated. Some 8 million of them ended up in the FRG, and 4 million in the GDR.

This article explores the early discourse on “flight and expulsion” and the ways it influenced collective memory of the Second World War in both Germanys. Its three main arguments and interventions in the scholarship are: First, before the two contradictory readings of the past crystalized, West and East German politicians and intellectuals initially wrestled with the legacy of Nazism and the expulsions with remarkably similar language. In both Germanys, commentators recognized wartime traumata and regarded them as among the most painful inheritances of the Third Reich. Furthermore, the democratic and socialist press pursued unexpectedly common strategies of fostering sympathy for refugees flooding into the occupation zones.

Second, the discourses diverged only around 1947, at a moment when concrete measures for the integration of the refugees developed. In the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR, the ruling SED maintained that only socialism could assuage the suffering of the “new citizens,” and leveraged their plight as arguments for radical economic reforms. Meanwhile in the FRG, hopes for successful integration lay with pointing out to Western Allies their culpability for the disaster and convincing them to intervene with aid and, ideally, a reversal of the expulsions. As a distinct group in the postwar German “community of fate” (Schicksalsgemeinschaft), the “refugees and expellees” evolved into the symbol of Germany's unjustified suffering and a main component in West German special pleading.

Lastly, the expellee issue offered both emerging states a necessary new beginning. Mastering the humanitarian disaster and developing political solutions for the integration of the refugees went hand in hand with the foundation of two contesting systems and their stability. The competing strategies responded to and drove developments across the Iron Curtain, and presaged the division of Germany, which culminated in the foundation of two states in 1949. While the GDR's treatment of resettlers laid the foundations for a socialist Germany, in the West the partially successful courting of Anglo-Americans contributed to the FRG's incorporation into the Western Alliance. In other words, beyond two distinct framings dictating how the regimes viewed and discussed the expulsions, the forced migrations lay at the nexus of crucial political challenges in both postwar states and drove German-German developments that ended with two opposing German states.

Refocusing on the early discourse and the ways it influenced collective memory is necessary despite a growing number of studies on “flight and expulsion” that have come out in the last decade.Footnote 5 Most of the existing literature explores the subject with a specific thematic focus and disconnected from the general development, thereby eliding how the GDR and FRG regarded the refugee crisis as a prime challenge for recovery. Exceptions of the latter are the 1998 monograph by Philipp Ther and the 2008 book by Andreas Kossert on flight and expulsion in post-1945 East and West Germany. Both emphasize the centrality of the integration of the large number of refugees and expellees for the state building, but their astute assessments fail to offer a truly integrated history of the German-German contestation, which show how the Cold War drove competing assimilation efforts that had impacts on both sides of the Iron Curtain.Footnote 6 In addition, there is still a need for greater empirical evidence in the research to fill lacunae and to substantiate initial observations, as many of the contributions in the German handbook on the memory of flight and expulsion in the West and East German media underline, which was published in 2015 and edited by Stephan Scholz, Maren Röger, and Bill Niven.Footnote 7

One major theme of the existing scholarship is the collective memory of the Second World War and “flight and expulsion.”Footnote 8 Here Hans Henning and Eva Hahn provided with their 2010 study a sweeping overview of the expulsion in German memory, covering the period from the Third Reich to the present. Their analysis, however, requires more nuance. The authors’ overly critical castigation of West German special pleading assumes a stagnant victimhood discourse and ignores earlier self-critical rhetoric.Footnote 9 Moreover, the insinuation that East German cultural memory revealed greater reflection in comparison to a West German selective reading of the past overlooks that the socialist state also politicized history. Before the West German selective remembering that privileged German suffering and obscured German war guilt, or East German triumphalist narratives of overcoming revanchist forces that relativized expellee misery, discourses in both Germanys possessed remarkable similarities and took both refugee misery and the role of the Third Reich seriously.

Of even greater relevance to the arguments presented here is the comparative 2007 study of opposing West and East German interpretations of “flight and expulsion” by Christian Lotz. While addressing similar concerns as this article, Lotz concentrates on the construction of histories that supported a revision or legitimization of the Oder-Neiße Line after 1948.Footnote 10 The new border to Poland indeed constituted a primary agenda of memory politics during the 1950s. But Lotz's focus results in a neglect of the early period. This article reveals an earlier instrumentalization of a discourse to aid integration of millions of expellees and underpin arguments for the creation of new political systems and societies. In general, the period before 1949 receives short shrift in the literature, thereby obscuring fundamental differences and similarities between East and West German discourses that predated foreign policy struggles at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. In order to understand how both German regimes discussed and politicized the forced migrations in this period, one must examine the trajectory of these narratives between 1945 and 1952.

Focusing on the early period, this article explores two major phases. Building on reports on the mass movements from before 1945, the first stage saw observers attempt to comprehend the crisis and raise sympathy for the millions of expellees suddenly streaming into devastated German communities. The first section will therefore examine the early perception of forced migration by the contemporaries. The second section analyzes how beginning in 1947–1948, when the forced migrations required concrete policies, the discourses diverged irreconcilably due to contrary expectations of how to finally achieve integration. The process culminated in two competing narratives of the expulsions that underpinned positions aimed at upholding the legitimacy of postwar states and denigrating the ideological rival.

Framing “Flight and Expulsion”: Conflicting Interpretations in the First Postwar Years

After twelve years of dictatorship, six years of a war of annihilation, and a disastrous defeat, journalists in occupied Germany had much to write about in the spring of 1945. Among the myriad subjects demanding investigation, the forced migrations that were still unfolding as writers put pen to paper confronted observers with a complex and difficult to comprehend phenomenon. No matter what their political worldview, contemporaries operated with a shared awareness informed by the sight of refugees, Nazi reporting, or accounts from individuals who experienced the calamity as they attempted to describe the dimensions of the catastrophe and find a path forward.

The first descriptions coincided with the waves of civilians fleeing the Red Army in the summer of 1944 and winter of 1945, the phase of the forced migrations referred to as “flight.” Reports of brutalities, such as those that unfolded in the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf in October 1944, enflamed German imaginations. “These atrocities are indeed dreadful,” Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels jotted in his diary before delighting in the potential for a “massive press campaign” warning of the consequences of Bolshevist victory.Footnote 11 On October 27, 1944, the Nazi Party organ Völkischer Beobachter shocked readers with news of “The Raging of the Soviet Beasts.”Footnote 12 Such a lurid and exaggerated imagery reverberated among postwar publics, as 1950s expellee testimonies demonstrate.Footnote 13 In the final state of World War II, these news stories instilled fear that drove many of the panicked civilians into headlong flight from a seemingly merciless foe. Refugees spread accounts and rumors of rape and murder that reinforced propaganda and left listeners debating whether to flee.Footnote 14 Ultimately, 5 million—50 percent of the population of the German East—joined the westward retreat.Footnote 15 Most never reached their destination, as the weather, congestion, and speed of the Soviet advance made escape nearly impossible.

Even those far removed caught glimpses of the conflagration in Nazi press reporting, which warned of the impending influx and called upon the “people's community” (Volksgemeinschaft) to help those “who have suffered the most terrible fate.”Footnote 16 The last Nazi finance minister, Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, took to the radio on May 2, 1945, to issue detailed descriptions of the “stream of desperate, starving people chased by dive bombers fleeing westward from unspeakable terror, from murder and defilement” unfolding behind an “iron curtain” that obscured the crimes from the world.Footnote 17 Refugees themselves gave more authentic descriptions that the scarcely believable official Nazi press elided. Oral accounts of what loomed on the horizon spread like wildfire in the last month of World War II. Already then, some contemporaries decried not Soviet savagery, but stubborn Nazi belief in final victory. In his diary, the Breslau priest Paul Peikert denounced this belief and the ensuing unnecessary suffering of women and children as “one of the worst acts of madness of National Socialism.”Footnote 18 The blend of rumor, experience, and propaganda that spread in Nazi Germany during the last month of the regime provided a powerful narrative and compelling images that remained imbedded in postwar German psyches.

Germany's surrender marked the next phase of “flight and expulsion,” equally affected by hearsay and uncertainty due to the destruction and disorganization of central Europe. The population that remained in their homeland now faced harsh repression at the hands of Czech and Polish militias, ranging from appropriation of property to public humiliations and abuse that sometimes culminated in mass executions.Footnote 19 Accounts such as those of Sudeten German socialists languishing in Czechoslovakian camps spread as far away as London.Footnote 20 Throughout the summer of 1945, German émigrés in Britain published testimonies of eyewitnesses in pamphlets and leftwing publications in order to compel the international public to condemn the excesses in Czechoslovakia and move the British and other foreign governments to intervene.Footnote 21

That the grim descriptions were not just German propaganda found confirmation from foreign journalists in devastated central Europe. In Berlin, Western correspondents covering the impending Potsdam Conference registered the alarm over the sudden arrival of “spectacularly overloaded trains . . . disgorging cargoes of the dead, the dying, the diseased, and the destitute” from the East.Footnote 22 These were the victims of the “wild expulsions,” the unsanctioned efforts of Polish and Czech authorities heeding Joseph Stalin's encouragement to “throw [the Germans] out” of their homelands that upcoming postwar deliberations would hopefully award to Poland and Czechoslovakia.Footnote 23 Packed onto cargo trains or forcibly driven to the German border in taxing marches at gunpoint, more than a million Germans spilled into occupied Germany before the conclusion of the Potsdam Conference in August 1945. This meeting of the three Allies started the official expulsion of citizens of the defeated German Empire from eastern Europe by stating: “The Three Governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.”Footnote 24

To influence the negotiations of the Allies in the summer of 1945, the expelling East European states attempted to create a fait accompli by setting as many people on the move as possible. As the Potsdam Agreement indicated, in principle the British and Americans acceded to territorial adjustments and complete removal of the German minority in eastern Europe as requested by the Soviets. Yet, violent excesses compelled them to insist on an “orderly and humane” transfer of the roughly 5 million Germans still in their homelands, a process largely concluded during the course of 1946 but lasting until 1949.Footnote 25 Despite improved conditions and a decrease in deaths, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times offered a damning summary of the expulsions of Germans from the East in February 1946: “No one seeing its horrors first-hand can doubt that it is a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible retribution.”Footnote 26

Few could deny that the humanitarian situation in Germany was grim, and expellees served as a constant reminder of the bitter peace. Although the postwar landscape in popular memory consists of devastated urban centers and “rubble women,” columns of refugees and dilapidated camps equally dominated the scene. Like many German and foreign journalists crisscrossing defeated Germany, McCormick found expellees “eager to talk, crowding around visitors to relate their experiences.”Footnote 27 Conversations about wartime suffering abounded. Snippets of personal travails in the dialects of the German East added to the buzz of conversations in public spaces of towns and villages.Footnote 28 For example, the ethnologist Hermann Bausinger noted in his 1952 dissertation on current storytelling in Swabian villages that “new citizen narratives,” revolving around the suffering endured in and after the war, constituted an unmistakable element of village talk.Footnote 29 Historian Theodor Schieder, head of an official West German commission documenting the forced migrations in the 1950s, observed in the journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte that exaggerated accounts of the expulsions spread remarkably quickly after 1945: “Nowhere does legend grow more uncontrollably than exactly here, and the horrific becomes ever more horrific when it is told from one to the other.”Footnote 30

Even as the forced migrations of ethnic Germans still unfolded, a cacophony of voices—Nazi propaganda, refugee accounts, and press commentary—turned “flight and expulsion” into an inextricable blend of experiences, rumor, fear, yearning, and ideology. It was against this backdrop that foreign and German journalists attempted to make sense of the ubiquitous columns of refugees and consequences of the war and communicate those interpretations to their compatriots. The refugee crisis embodied the catastrophic defeat and provided a powerful metaphor for pundits who sought to cajole Germans into drawing lessons from the past and embrace a democratic future. In Cologne, for example, future mayor Ernst Schwering, a member of the newly founded CDU, commissioned placards in 1945 to educate the population on the sources of their grievances. The long queues, limited food, and destruction were the “inheritance left by the Nazi pest.”Footnote 31 Concerning the refugees, he offered a biting epitaph: “Through the streets just as beggars we crawl, thanks to the Nazi Reich.”Footnote 32

Such messages aligned with the victors’ goals of establishing democracy or socialism through opinion-forming institutions, which they vigilantly controlled. The editorial direction from the occupiers and zealousness of some German journalists to unveil the horrors of the fascist regime meant that readers could not escape references to the Nazi past when opening newspapers. In the Western zone, for example, newspapers like the liberal-conservative bimonthly Die Gegenwart in Freiburg and the liberal daily newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung in Mainz, both published under French license, consistently ran features on war crimes trials and investigative reports on the dictatorship into the late 1940s. The expulsions, and with them the potential for German self-pity or recriminations against the victors, appeared only sporadically in Western zone headlines prior to the foundation of the FRG and greater press independence.Footnote 33

Nevertheless, when Western-licensed papers addressed the forced migrations, they explicitly identified their root cause: the Third Reich and the lost war. The most striking case, and among the first overt references to the expulsions, appeared on the front page of Die Zeit, a center-left weekly founded in February 1946 in Hamburg under British license. In the second issue, the front page featured an illustration of bedraggled figures accompanied by the allegorical apparitions of hunger, misery, and sickness returning “home into the Reich.”Footnote 34 By invoking the Nazi rallying cry to bring all ethnic Germans into the borders of a unified state, the editors suggested that Nazi hubris had produced the disaster, which ironically fulfilled Hitler's vision of an ethnically homogenous nation. The caption acknowledged a “new milestone in the path of suffering of the German people . . . unequaled in history,” yet also called for introspection: “When from the dismal procession of human misery the dull and yet all-shattering denouncement against the war and its destruction rises to the heavens, we must remain silent. We have become less than beggars. Our guilt makes us voiceless.”Footnote 35 Another early example of early Western zone reporting comes from Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel, a daily newspaper published under American license. In June 1946, its editors declared expellees as the “poorest of the affected” and attributed their suffering to the “insanity” of the deceased dictator.Footnote 36 Despite nebulous references to guilt, the message hammered home the link between fascism and the expulsions.

Like their Western counterparts, Soviet authorities sought to influence press reporting in their zone. One would expect to see a desire to sweep German victimhood under the carpet, particularly since the Red Army featured prominently in such discussions. Indeed, in the later 1940s conscious efforts to refer to expellees as “resettlers” (Umsiedler) or “new citizens” (Neubürger) increased visibly in the press of the Soviet occupation zone (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, SBZ), relativizing allusions to violence or injustice implied in the terms “refugee” (Flüchtlinge) or “expellee” (Vertriebene), which circulated in the Western zones. But earlier, even communist newspapers did not shy away from discussions of “flight and expulsion” or deny the cruelty of expellee experiences. Far from it, as a commentator in the SED organization Neues Deutschland put it bluntly on June 6, 1946: “Resettlers, refugees, expellees—we may call them what we want, they are victims of Hitler's war.”Footnote 37

The papers in the early SBZ went even further in their explanations of how exactly the refugee crisis related to the Hitler regime. For instance, Wolfgang Parth of the Berliner Zeitung, produced in the Soviet sector of Berlin since May 1945, acknowledged in July 1945 the terrible misery wrought by defeat, but couched it as the same agony that the nation had inflicted upon its neighbors.Footnote 38 Under the headline “Refugees,” Parth argued that the expellees needed to serve as a reminder that displaced persons had existed since 1933: “Racial hatred” and political oppression drove thousands abroad, reaching their apex in Nazi resettlement of ethnic Germans and millions of slave laborers brought to the Reich. These were the sources of German misfortune, Parth explained, for the millions who now needed to “pay for the politics of predation of the war criminals.” Five months later, the Berliner Zeitung again contextualized the expulsion in the fascist “reordering of Europe” that produced “everywhere extermination, expulsion, or deportations.”Footnote 39 Although their suffering was indeed terrible, the “entire German people now reaps the terrible harvest of a twelve year-long politics of insanity.”Footnote 40

The general tone of publications in the East was that fascism needed to be atoned for. The vice president of the Central Administration for German Resettlers (Zentralverwaltung für deutsche Umsiedler im sowjetischen Okkupationsgebiet [ZfdU]) Michael Tschesnow succinctly made this demand in Neues Deutschland on June 6, 1945: “Like a boomerang the German people are struck by what they expected of other peoples through their support of the Hitlerian politics of predation.”Footnote 41 In contending with this reality, victims should not indulge in a “fruitless bemoaning of ‘fate,’ but instead constantly think of the guilty with a holy hatred” and recall what the “blood-soaked Nazi clique” wrought upon Germany.Footnote 42

Such ruminations over why refugees descended upon communities mattered little to the victims or their neighbors. Expellees faced hostility in all zones because their arrival added to the burdens of the aftermath of war and further disrupted postwar society, as Andreas Kossert demonstrated in his research.Footnote 43 This made Allied desires for a complete assimilation of the refugees and expellees appear illusory, particularly given that no general guiding principles for their integration existed. While British and American officials worked through a decentralized German bureaucracy, Soviet officials relied on the ZfdU, created in September 1945. Allied Control Council decrees sanctioning the appropriation of property for integration purposes existed, but in practice care for the refugees fell to overburdened German offices generally reluctant to support the newcomers against local interests.

In all four zones, those tasked with the care of the continuously arriving refugees bitterly noted how the unsympathetic demeanor of the local population stood in stark contrast to their former support for the vaunted German Volksgemeinschaft during the Third Reich. Fritz Ulrich, the social democratic interior minister of Württemberg-Baden in the American zone, observed in April 1946 that the most “inhumane” disposition came from exactly those “who could not scream ‘Heil Hitler’ loudly enough in the Third Reich.”Footnote 44 Two months later, in the SBZ, a spokesmen of the ZfdU remarked similarly that the Volksgemeinschaft lasted so long as it was at the expense of others, but now “precisely those fail who couldn't open their mouths enough.”Footnote 45

Despite different worldviews, in the early postwar years publications from the German West and the East used a remarkably common language in respect to flight and expulsion. Placards and pamphlets of parties and charitable organizations in all four zones pleaded to provide “help for all” refugees and to “accept them into your midst.”Footnote 46 Typical for much of the press tenor was an article published in the conservative South German Schwäbische Zeitung in January 1947. It asked its readers not to “close their heart and barricade their house door in the face of this suffering,” reminding the community that if it were to “remove the pain and barbs of misery . . . then it will be able to be borne by all.”Footnote 47 In the Soviet zone, resettlers too ranked as the primary early postwar victims. Throughout December 1945, Berlin's independent Soviet-appointed mayor Arthur Werner demanded donations in spite of the city's hardships, which nevertheless could not “alleviate even a portion of the suffering that these people are exposed to.”Footnote 48 The Central Administration for Public Health in the Soviet zone likewise called for generosity for refugees, victims “affected the most” by the war.Footnote 49 The SED also urged support and attempted to pressure participation in “resettler weeks,” donation drives that nevertheless yielded paltry results.Footnote 50

Another shared narrative in the early discourse on flight and expulsion in all four occupation zones revolved around the lost homeland. In directives to local leaders on how to process incoming expellees, the Christian Democrat Peter Paul Nahm, district administrator of the Hessian Reingau in the West, challenged his constituents to imagine “what it means to lose the homeland.”Footnote 51 Editorials in the SBZ did not shy away from notions of “lost home and hearth” either.Footnote 52 In 1947, Die neue Heimat, the newsletter of the ZfdU, explained to its readers that resettlers’ hardships eclipsed the misery of the victims of bombing, who retained their homeland.Footnote 53 Neue Zeit, the daily newspaper of the eastern CDU published in the SBZ, likewise noted in March 1946 that even though all Germans had their “lives turned upside down” since the end of the war, the fate of resettlers appeared far crueler because they had to “part with the earth of their homeland” that generations built up.Footnote 54

A third common strand of reporting was the effort to initiate a rapprochement between the estranged camps of local residents and expelled newcomers. Journalists attempted to acquaint readers with who these “strangers” were and what ordeals they had faced in order to dispel negative stereotypes. As late as 1951, radio plays in West Germany dramatized disagreements over the question of who had suffered the most before ending with mutual understanding and messages of reconciliation.Footnote 55 Socialist efforts took on similar forms. Profiles of resettlers’ culture and history aimed at familiarizing non-expellees with their new neighbors.Footnote 56 Before main feature films in SBZ cinemas in 1947, Augenzeuge (The Eye-Witness) series aired emotional reunions of parents and children separated by “the wild flight of millions,” reminding viewers of the pervasive “silently born, heavy suffering.”Footnote 57 Like many of their Western counterparts, SBZ papers described the “unbearable” conditions in which expellees continued to live with “bodies and spirit broken.”Footnote 58

Sometimes expellees themselves managed to have a voice in the public. In June 1946, Neues Deutschland reprinted an open letter of a refugee demanding to know “what we have done that we alone must bear the misfortune of the entire German people.” It would bring a “sigh of relief” if neighbors would simply show signs of understanding their plight.Footnote 59 A month later, Neue Zeit published excerpts of letters from expellees wishing to give an account of themselves; besides describing deplorable living conditions, the authors felt compelled to emphasize that they had not come voluntarily or been too “cowardly” to stay in the homeland. The victims yearned for “more democracy and more heart,” and the simplest “kind word or a handshake” would lift the spirits of the afflicted.Footnote 60 Giving expellees a human face constituted an important milestone in confirming their status as victims with claims to material support in East and West Germany.

The media played a crucial role in augmenting these pleas in the early postwar years. Reporting in all occupation zones combined disappointment over outstanding sympathy with the necessity of action to overcome the crisis. Above all, pleading for a humane disposition toward refugees and expellees not only underpinned moral arguments for a harmonious society, but also provided justifications for imminent sweeping reforms and the allocation of limited resources. It was precisely in the details of these policies that the two Germanys diverged, and with it the narrative of “flight and expulsion.”

Socialist Utopias and Special Pleading: Diverging Integration Strategies in the Two Germanys

Fundamental political differences in the discourse of flight and expulsion between the East and the West developed in the context of the rising Cold War. Since 1947, the question of the integration of the expellees increasingly became a tangible policy issue intimately tied to the agenda of state building and society reconstruction. All parties recognized the pressing need to finally provide concrete measures to deal with a crisis of terrifying proportions: in the three Western zones, more than 8 million expellees (17 percent of the population) had to be integrated, and in the Soviet zone more than 3 million (24 percent its population).Footnote 61 Alleviating their situation was regarded as one of the greatest obstacles preventing a meaningful recovery, or, as the West German paper Das Parlament warned as late as 1952, “Germany's No. 1 Question.”Footnote 62 But how to go about solving it?

The visions of how to absorb the refugees and expellees increasingly diverged in the Western and Soviet zones after 1947. Appeals in the East stressed now that only socialism could create an egalitarian “New Germany” that would be a homeland for all Germans. “Resettlers” therefore emerged as a crucial component in arguments for comprehensive reforms and, ultimately, the creation of a socialist state and society. This stood in stark contrast to the integration agenda in the West, which initially sought the key to solving the crisis in convincing the victors of the expulsions’ injustice and need for a revision of the postwar order. The distinct approaches to mastering the refugee crisis were reflected and intertwined with opposite strategies of state building in the East and the West.

The SBZ progressed more rapidly with its policy of integration than the Western zones.Footnote 63 Already in the fall of 1946, Soviet authorities directed the governing SED in the SBZ to issue payments totaling 400 million marks to needy refugees and those unable to work.Footnote 64 By the end of 1947, officials successfully moved 80 percent of refugee camp inhabitants into permanent housing, though these accommodations often were overcrowded and dilapidated.Footnote 65 These measures were insufficient, as the Minister for Resettler Questions Paul Merker admitted in a 1947 brochure vowing an increase in housing, aid, and involvement of refugees in political and cultural activities.Footnote 66 At the heart of Merker's argument, however, was the proposition that the assimilation of the resettlers constituted a central challenge for the construction of a socialist Germany.Footnote 67 For a SED regime seeking a fundamental leveling and egalitarian social order, the refugee problem represented both a challenge and an opportunity, as Merker formulated it in a September 1947 editorial in Neues Deutschland, to “construct equality” through an “equalization in living standards” between expellees and non-expellees.Footnote 68

The socialist response to West German discussions about an “equalization of burdens” entailed the construction of a true socialist society. Indeed, the alleviation of the refugees’ misery was, as Neue Zeit wrote, the “touchstone for the good spirit and lively force of our inner German solidarity, without which a reconstruction of our fatherland cannot be achieved.”Footnote 69 The crisis offered a chance to initiate a “fundamental transformation” that would lead to “settlement and provide work and bread” for resettlers and all Germans.Footnote 70 Especially on the issue of land reform, the expellees served the regime with convenient justifications.Footnote 71 Only through land seizures and eventual collectivization could “pauperized agricultural workers” and “homeless refugees” become the backbone of revitalized industry and agriculture.Footnote 72 Thus the resettlers stood at the center of building socialism. Their fate and renewed prosperity demonstrated the superiority of socialism.Footnote 73

The press reporting in the SBZ therefore lionized resettlers, who embodied the “New Germany”: a farmer who lost everything now farmed the land of an expropriated estate owner, a weaver's craftsmanship and work ethic saw him rise to the position of master, and a priest found a new parish to invigorate with the “hope and strength of the ancestors when they cleared the forests and plowed the fields” in the German East.Footnote 74 Through their industriousness, the new citizens forged “blooming landscapes.”Footnote 75 Films such as Freies Land (Free Land, 1946) and Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1949) featured refugees who rebuilt their shattered lives, finding mutual understanding with their neighbors in a new and better homeland, thereby delivering an “illustrated lecture” and “socialist lesson” to audiences.Footnote 76

The SED's policy of the integration of refugees and expellees, however, came at enormous costs. Into the late 1940s, almost the entire housing budget went toward carving out farmsteads for “resettlers,” thereby hampering reconstruction of cities.Footnote 77 Through collectivization, most of the 200,000 “new farmers” eventually lost their properties, a process many understood as a “second expulsion.” Nevertheless, the SED's aggressive denazification of professions gave particularly young expellees, who disproportionately filled vacancies, new life chances. Moreover, by 1947 the SED managed to move 80 percent of refugee camp inhabitants into stable accommodations, and by 1950 the GDR closed these institutions entirely.Footnote 78 The SED achieved these results in part by shuffling resettlers into overcrowded housing, yet their initiatives eclipsed efforts in West Germany, where hundreds of thousands remained in “temporary” accommodations as late as 1965.Footnote 79

Already in 1949, the SED concluded that it had solved the refugee crisis and disbanded its resettler administration. Problems nevertheless continued to linger in the newly founded GDR. A year later, the Soviet Union urged the SED to pass the propagandistically named “Law for the Further Improvement of the Situation of the Former Resettlers,” a measure designed to further reduce unequal living conditions of resettlers through interest-free credits of 1,000 DM per household. The law served as more of a palliative than as a generous subsidy: in July 1950, the USSR pressured the GDR to recognize the Oder-Neisse line as its eastern border through the Agreement Concerning the Demarcation of the Established and the Existing Polish-German State Frontier, the so-called Görlitz Agreement. This affirmed the communist bloc's commitment to the settlement of 1945, but psychologically devastated resettlers, who only received paltry financial compensation for the loss of their homeland, now officially declared as irreversible.

Up until 1950 the East German remedies were more comprehensive than in West Germany, where legislative measures continued to remain in limbo. Nevertheless, a discernable shift in the discourse emerged around 1947 there as well. As Robert G. Moeller demonstrated, West German war memories increasingly shifted toward a privileging of German suffering and the cultivation of an aggrieved victimhood.Footnote 80 This development must in large part be attributed to Western occupation governments lifting coalition bans on organizations propagating nationalist ideas, partially intended to allow refugees to form associations in order to advocate for their political rights and accelerate assimilation. At the same time, the Allies eased their control over editorial boards. It is no coincidence that at precisely the moment that the Allies granted broader autonomy, the discourse in the Western zones took on new forms that oscillated “between self-pity and denouncement” of the draconian peace terms of the victors.Footnote 81 The “community of fate,” ostensibly the greatest victims of the catastrophic defeat and potent symbol of Germany's plight, constituted a central pillar in the new way in which West Germans contemplated their past and future.

The leveraging of German victimhood for material and political gains required a mitigation of German guilt and transformation of expellees from an abstract mass into relatable subjects. The press depictions of the suffering of the people “from the East” became even more graphic since 1947. One example is a report on the condition of expellees arriving from Poland in West Germany in Der Spiegel, a left-liberal weekly magazine founded in Hanover in the British zone in 1947. Photos of emaciated and dying expellees confronted the public with the harrowing reality of the forced migrations.Footnote 82 This trend culminated in the spring 1949 in a series by Jürgen Thorwald titled “East German Fate” and published in Christ und Welt, a conservative Protestant weekly founded in Stuttgart one year before.Footnote 83 The author's journalistic career had begun as a propagandist of the Wehrmacht before 1945. Gripping illustrations of treks, sinking ships, and destroyed cities graced the paper's cover, while vividly blended news reports, testimonies, and fictionalized accounts created a narrative of helpless civilians caught between the obtuseness of Nazi ideologues and a savage Soviet juggernaut that a heroic Wehrmacht attempted to thwart. The chronicle struck a chord: sales of Christ und Welt tripled in the first weeks of the series’ debut.Footnote 84 Responding to the acclaim, Thorwald expanded the series into a two-volume book that appeared in 1950.Footnote 85

Perfecting the blend of creatively narrated and fictionalized reports into a compelling popular history, Thorwald's emphasis on civilian suffering and attention to ghastly details blatantly intended to balance the scales of guilt by proposing that Germany had suffered at the very least as much as its victims. The narrative of the series and the two books contributed to the constitution of a West German political identity as victims of the war, in which the expellees were a particular “community of fate.”Footnote 86 The influence of Thorwald should not be underestimated—up to 1980 his bestsellers sold more than 14 million copies.Footnote 87 His lucrative and gripping docudrama genre found immediate emulation.Footnote 88 Already at the time, commentators noted the “conspicuous abundance” of expulsion novels.Footnote 89 Into the 1950s, illustrated tabloids with readership in the millions likewise used the forced migrations as a backdrop for sensational Tatsachenberichte (reports supposedly based on facts) and serialized novels.Footnote 90 Their narrow focus on German victimhood and relativizing of war guilt left expellees appearing as unquestioned victims of a seemingly incomprehensible calamity.

Such a decontextualized narrative lent itself for political uses and formed the argumentative foundation of expellee leaders who attempted to mobilize their constituencies since 1947–48 with increasingly belligerent rhetoric. For instance, the “Father of the Homeland Expellees,” the Bavarian Catholic cleric Emmanuel Reichenberger in American exile since 1938, took up the expellee cause by vociferously rejecting German collective guilt and condemning atrocities committed against Germans.Footnote 91 On a speaking tour in West Germany in the summer of 1949, Reichenberger equated Germany's suffering to the Holocaust and accused the victors of orchestrating an intentional genocide before tens of thousands of listeners.Footnote 92 In a February 1950 open letter to US High Commissioner John McCloy, expellee representatives decried the “secret agreements” of the Allies and condemned Western silence over an alleged 5 million refugee deaths, an injustice not even perpetrated against the “uncivilized tribes of inner Africa.”Footnote 93

Downplaying of German guilt and criticism of Allied responsibility featured prominently in the statements of West German parties as well. For instance, in a 1948 pamphlet intended to convince expellees to vote for the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands [SPD]), the Sudeten German Richard Reitzner argued that partial responsibility for the “screams of tortured people in the horror reports” included in the brochure lay with the West, which hypocritically abandoned the “truly innocent . . . misled fellow travelers or exploited idealists” constituting the expellees.Footnote 94 Not to be outdone, expellees within the CDU translated and published in the same year Land of the Dead, a booklet originally created by a group of American progressives criticizing the expulsions, thereby turning Western condemnations into an implicit indictment of Allied policy.Footnote 95

With the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949, the attacks became even more explicit. In his first government declaration on September 20, 1949, CDU chancellor Konrad Adenauer assured the nation that he struggled to “speak with the necessary passionless restraint . . . when I think of the fate of the expellees, who have perished in the millions.”Footnote 96 Without dwelling on the war or Nazi barbarism, Adenauer decried the truncation of Germany as the source of the FRG's misery. Behind closed doors, he boasted that he would happily “run the risk of being a nationalist” for pointing out that 6 million expellees perished, a crime that “can stand equally next to the National Socialist misdeeds.”Footnote 97 Adenauer spoke for many when he pondered on the floor of the West German parliament, the Bundestag, in 1950 whether ever in history a “people had been sentenced with such chilling heartlessness to misery and misfortune” with wanton decrees.Footnote 98 The strategy of underlining German victimhood and attacking Western hypocrisy found its fullest expression, however, in the August 1950 “Charta of the Homeland Expellees,” in which thirty expellee representatives publicly “relinquished vengeance and retaliation.” Just as the signatories generously forgave their oppressors, the responsible parties needed to acknowledge “the joint responsibility for the fate of the expellees as those most affected by the misery of these times.”Footnote 99

What did such maudlin pronouncements hope to gain? The bemoaning of fate reflected how many felt about the Nazi past, but they also revealed how many saw the future. The insistence that German suffering be recognized, and that now the victors should grapple with questions of collective guilt and accountability, reflected widespread expectations that the Allies needed to help solve the refugee crisis. Expellee leaders delivered appeals to the “conscience of the world,” circulating testimonies and reports that framed “flight and expulsion” as unrelated to the twelve years of Nazi rule, but rather as an irrational crime resulting from East European brutality and Western cruel indifference or naiveté.Footnote 100 Whereas the Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc would expectedly refuse to come to the aid, the Anglo-Americans might be convinced by the argument that the refugee crisis was an international issue of their doing, requiring financial assistance and, hopefully, a return of the lost territories.

Prominent Western critics decrying Allied expulsion policy and calling for greater intervention gave expellees hope that their faith was not misplaced. Already in February 1946, US Senator Homer Capehart (R, IN) issued a scathing denouncement of the attempt to “draw and quarter a nation,” a policy driven by “a sadistic and fanatical hatred” of Germans. Quoting from letters chronicling the excesses of the expulsions, Capehart also shared missives of American Jewish soldiers who lost family in the Holocaust yet did not want Germany turned into a “vast extermination camp.”Footnote 101 Senator William Langer (R, ND) likewise took up the cause of expellees in 1946, sharing accounts of “wanton cruelty unknown to civilized nations” his German contacts sent him on the Senate floor.Footnote 102

One year later, the Committee Against Mass Expulsions (CAME), a collective of progressives that included John Dewey, Dorothy Thompson, Varian Fry, and Roger Nash Baldwin, started to campaign against the harsh peace foisted upon Germany as well.Footnote 103 Circulating eyewitness reports from European contacts and expellees, CAME emphasized the injustice of the transfers and argued for a reversal and economic restitution. The Committee forwarded its proposals to politicians, universities, and more than 1,500 journalists.Footnote 104 Their campaign culminated in May 1949, when Langer spoke before 9,000 protestors of American policy toward Germany in New York's Carnegie Hall, which ended with the singing of the German national anthem.Footnote 105

Fears of mass starvation and political instability in Europe were enough for President Harry S. Truman to dispatch former president Herbert Hoover to Europe in 1946 in order to observe conditions and formulate proposals for their alleviation. Hoover was chosen because of his international reputation as a humanitarian. He had led international relief efforts in Belgium during World War I and became the head of the US Food Administration with charge of much of the nation's food supply when the United States entered the war in 1917. Hoover traveled to most European countries after World War II, documented food needs, located surpluses, and arranged food shipments. In his report to the US Congress and President Truman in April 1948, he described the state of Germany as especially disastrous and urged immediate action.Footnote 106 He suggested to increase aid and foodstuffs, develop economic initiatives until German export industries could sustain the country, and consider emigration as a safety valve.Footnote 107 There can be no doubt the fate of expellees swayed American policy substantially by 1948–49. American funding of Government and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA), Cooperative for American Remittance to Everywhere (CARE), and the Council of Relief Agencies Licensed for Operation in Germany (CRALOG) made a real difference in the first postwar years. Subsequent amendments to the 1948 Displaced Persons Act also permitted 12,000 Germans to emigrate annually; as a result some expellees managed to start new lives in the United States. Furthermore, American prodding pushed the newly formed Bundestag to pass the “Immediate Aid Law” in August 1949, allocating 100 to 200 marks per household.

The problem remained because these were halfhearted remedies. Although the Economic Recovery Act of April 1948 of the United States, known as the Marshall Plan, started the road to recovery in the Western zones, expellees arguably faced worse circumstances than before. The currency reform in the tri-zone in June 1948, which disproportionately hurt those whose assets consisted predominantly of cash, wiped out their remaining paltry savings.Footnote 108 Given the high unemployment, expellees faced indefinite destitution. West German politicians nevertheless remained adamant that they could not solve the problem and needed the help of the Western Allies, an argument they made far into the 1950s. On at least six tours to the United States between 1949 and 1959, an official of the FRG Refugee Ministry, Walter Middelmann, met policymakers, public figures, academics, and journalists and gave dozens of presentations on the peril of the refugee crisis and need for American involvement. Middelmann convinced Congressman Francis E. Walter (D, PA) to conduct a fact-finding mission in Germany in the fall of 1949, followed by Christian Sonne of the Economic Cooperation Administration, which administered Marshall Plan funds, in 1951.Footnote 109 Sonne's conclusions, submitted to Chancellor Adenauer, unmistakably reiterated that the issue remained a challenge of the FRG and urged its government to implement an ambitious public spending program quadrupling federal expenditures.Footnote 110

The situation in postwar West Germany alarmed American politicians. Expellee fury, now politically organized in several associations, had increased since 1948. Strikes, accompanied by violence and demagoguery, erupted in refugee camps.Footnote 111 Frustrated expellees assaulted speakers at election rallies and clashed with police.Footnote 112 In October 1948, 35,000 refugees took to the streets to demand relief.Footnote 113 The press, which regularly reported on the abysmal camp conditions, frustrating bureaucratic hurdles, and hopelessness among refugees, castigated the government's intransigence.Footnote 114 Democracy in West Germany seemed in doubt before it could plant roots, with expellees serving as a nefarious “social atomic bomb,” which was also realized by FRG politicians, including the FRG's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer.Footnote 115

For Christian conservatives like him, the fear that Bolshevism could exploit the anxieties of the refugees seemed much more frightening than pressure from the nationalist right. Observers attributed the “downright terror” of disgruntled expellees to “functionaries with a schooling in tactics with origins in Moscow.”Footnote 116 Suspicions grew once expellees demanded agricultural reforms implemented in the SBZ/GDR.Footnote 117 Clearly, apparent GDR successes created a point of comparison between a recalcitrant West German government and a socialist state that seemingly mastered its refugee crisis. The East German press noted these developments with glee. While the antifascist Germany provided remedies and created new homes, the capitalist rival continued to flounder and offer empty promises that amounted to a mere “farce” and protection of “monopoly capitalism and the Junkers.”Footnote 118 West German politicians had “sabotaged” integration and only shed “crocodile tears.”Footnote 119 Some Americans concurred with these sentiments. Unnamed officials started accusing Bonn of deliberately stalling integration in the hopes that “the surplus population . . . would bolster the argument for German ‘living space’” and return of the territories.Footnote 120 Alarmed by the social and political turmoil, American patience with West German foot dragging wore thin. In the end, the combination of unrest, communist competition, and American unease finally motivated the Bundestag to pass the 1952 “Equalization of Burdens Law.” Combining monetary compensation for lost property, generous loans to help homeownership, pensions, and support for vocational training, the law dispensed nearly 9 billion DMs to expellees by 1954.Footnote 121 It was followed in 1953 by the “Federal Expellee Law,” which enshrined the designation of “expellee” and defined their rights as well as guaranteed public funding for their associations.

Conclusion

Cold War competition proved a decisive catalyst in competing West and East German integration schemes, as well as a further divergence of “flight and expulsion” narratives. However, this generalization overlooks several important aspects: First, the rhetoric addressing the expulsions, their causes, and the nature of German victimhood shared remarkable overlap in the first few postwar years. Contrary to popular assumptions of “taboos”—of a West German reluctance to engage with the Nazi past or East German refusal to acknowledge the forced migrations—in every zone of occupied Germany, public discourse framed the expulsions and the ostensible severity of the peace as a consequence of fascism. Explaining the catastrophic defeat to the population, or what lessons to draw from it in order to overcome the burdens of Nazism, was regarded in West and East Germany as a step toward recovery and a new beginning.

Second, the discourse shifted only around 1947/48, in the context of the developing Cold War, when it aimed to support concrete goals of integration and competing visions of the nature of that new start in the respective Germanys. In the East, the SED claimed that only socialism could create an egalitarian “New Germany” able to provide bounties that would create a new homeland to the “new citizens.” As one of the greatest challenges in the postwar period, “resettlers” consequently emerged as a crucial component in arguments for sweeping reforms and, ultimately, the creation of a socialist society. This stood in stark contrast to the integration agenda in the West, which saw the key for alleviating the crisis in convincing the victors of the expulsions’ injustice and leveraging the “community of fate” to revise the postwar order. Although the return of the homeland never materialized, expellee plight ultimately forced the American government to provide aid and push West Germany to pass comprehensive legislation in order to finally integrate millions of refugees and thereby guarantee a stable partner on the frontline of the Cold War.

Third, the expellees played a central role in the creation of postwar states because their integration strategies were intertwined in a struggle for legitimacy. The SED recognized the propagandistic value of the expellees before the West German parties did, seeing in them an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of socialism. But the SED's measures also came at enormous costs. The socialist Germany's earnest attempts made, despite all shortcomings, real differences in the lives of expellees, and their prospects initially looked much brighter than those of their brethren in the West, who continued to wait on comprehensive integration policies.

By placing immense pressure on the Federal Republic, the progress across the Iron Curtain provided a major impetus for dramatic legislative solutions. Combined with a strengthening economy, West Germany's measures provided the means for millions of expellees to piece together a new life after nearly a decade of loss and hardship, and represented a central pillar of the West German welfare system. In its struggle for legitimacy, the FRG managed to finally present an integration model that greatly diminished the communist alternative in the eyes of resettlers in the GDR. Drawn by the attractive laws that also extended to expellees who resided in the SBZ and GDR, more than 800,000 resettlers, close to one-third of all East German emigrants to the FRG, sought their fortunes in West Germany before the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. This suggests that, despite coming late in the game, the FRG set a benchmark and eclipsed the GDR, where the SED had confidently concluded that resettlers found a new and better homeland, resolving to “gloss over the integration problem and solve it through denial” or statistical window dressing.Footnote 122

Finally, when examining the early treatment of “flight and expulsion” in the two Germanys, one must acknowledge the often neglected centrality of the expellee question in the long-term success of the GDR and FRG. Astonishingly, the Vertreibung or “expulsion” habitually receives fleeting reference in grand narratives of the postwar period. Not only did both states exert tremendous resources and energy toward mastering the crises, they viewed the consequences of the forced migrations as a crucial political economic, social, and political challenge. Absorbing destitute millions lay at the heart of creating a socialist East Germany and stable communist satellite state. The West German pursuit of Western support not only provided material aid to jumpstart the path to recovery, it helped make eventual cooperation with the United States attractive and paved the way for the integration of the Federal Republic into the Western community of values.

To put it more succinctly: understanding the evolution and competing dynamism of the “flight and expulsion” discourses between 1945 and 1952 helps to comprehend how Germans overcame the colossal burdens of Nazism and a destructive war, and forged contesting paths and identities that culminated in two opposing political and social systems. The expellees were a central aspect of the birth as well as permanent division of the two Germanys.

Footnotes

1 Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische Politik (ACDP), 07-001-3439, Union in Deutschland Flyer, May 1952.

2 Wilhelm Girnus, “Die Marschroute des Neofaschismus,” Neues Deutschland, March 3, 1950, 2.

3 “Sie haben eine neue Heimat gefunden: Im Ostsektor gibt es kein Umsiedlerproblem mehr/Frivoles Spiel mit ‘Landsmannschaften,’” Neues Deutschland, August 21, 1949, 6.

4 “Was Herr Reuter zu sagen vergaß,” Neues Deutschland, November 12, 1949, 2; “Die Bonner Revanchepolitiker—Todfeinde aller Völker Europas,” Neues Deutschland, September 4, 1952.

5 For an overview, see Röger, Maren, “Ereignis- und Erinnerungsgeschichte von ‘Flucht und Vertreibung’: Ein Literaturbericht,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 62, no. 1 (2014): 49–64.

6 Ther, Philipp, Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene: Gesellschaft und Vertriebenenpolitik in der SBZ/DDR und in Polen, 1945–1956 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), and “Expellee Policy in the Soviet-Occupied Zone and the GDR: 1945–1953,” in Coming Home to Germany?: The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic, ed. David Rock and Stefan Wolff (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 56–76; Kossert, Andreas, Kalte Heimat: die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2008).

7 Scholz, Stephan, Röger, Maren, and Niven, Bill, ed., Die Erinnerung an Flucht und Vertreibung: Ein Handbuch der Medien und Praktiken (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2015).

8 See for example, Moeller, Robert G., War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Zehfuss, Maja, Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Prince, K. Michael, War and German Memory: Excavating the Significance of the Second World War in German Cultural Consciousness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009); Wolfgram, Mark, Getting History Right: East and West German Collective Memories of the Holocaust and War (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011).

9 Hahn, Hans Henning and Hahn, Eva, Die Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern: Legenden, Mythos, Geschichte (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010).

10 Christian Lotz, Die Deutung des Verlusts: Erinnerungspolitische Kontroversen im geteilten Deutschland um Flucht, Vertreibung und die Ostgebiete, 1948–1972 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007).

11 Elke Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, vol. 15 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1993), 110.

12 “Das Wüten der Sowjetischen Bestien,” Völkischer Beobachter, October 27, 1944, 1.

13 See the testimonies in Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BArch), Ost-Dok 1/19.

14 Gerhard Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year: A Priest's Experience in a Russian Work Camp (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958), 2.

15 Mathias Beer, Flucht und Vertreibung der Deutschen: Voraussetzungen, Verlauf, Folgen, 1st ed. (Munich: Beck, 2011), 70.

16 Cited in Walter Kempowski, Fuga Furiosa. Ein Kollektives Tagebuch (29.1–5.2.1945), vol. 3 (Munich: btb Verlag, 2004), 402–03.

17 Quoted in Hahn and Hahn, Die Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern, 391.

18 Paul Peikert, Festung Breslau in den Berichten eines Pfarrers, ed. Karol Jonca and Alfred Konieczny (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 2005), 226.

19 On a more detailed discussion of the expulsion phase of the forced migrations, see R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

20 BArch Ost-Dok 2/240, 123–29.

21 See, for example, “Peace Through Terror: An Appeal to all Friends of Justice in the Free World by the Parliamentary Delegation of Sudeten Labor,” in Der Sozialdemokrat, May 31, 1945, 1087; Wenzel Jaksch, Evidence on the Reign of Racialism in Czecho-Slovakia (London: Sudeten German Social Democratic Party, 1945); and Wenzel Jaksch, Deportation Drama in Czecho-Slovakia (London: Sudeten German Social Democratic Party, 1945).

22 Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 89.

23 Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 109.

24 Protocol of the Proceedings of the Berlin Conference, Berlin, August 1, 1945 (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945Berlinv02/d1383); Beer, Flucht und Vertreibung der Deutschen, 82.

25 Hahn and Hahn, e Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern, 692.

26 Anne O'Hare McCormick, “Wiesbaden Plans Portentous Exhibition,” New York Times, October 23, 1946, 25.

27 Anne O'Hare McCormick, “Problem of Places for the Refugees,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1946, 24.

28 Ilse K. Bembé, “Im D-Zug. Sommer 1946, nachts,” Die Gegenwart, September 24, 1946, 31–33.

29 Hermann Bausinger, “Lebendiges Erzählen. Volkskundliche Gegenwartsuntersuchungen im schwäbischen Dorf” (PhD diss., University of Tübingen, 1952), 71.

30 Theodor Schieder, “Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten als wissenschaftliches Problem,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 8, no. 1 (1960): 1–16, 9. Schieder, along with project collaborator Werner Conze, was a prominent historian during the Third Reich whose research helped justify German claims to “living space” in the East. See Michael Fahlbusch and Ingo Haar, German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).

31 For examples of the placards, see “museenkoeln.de | Bild der Woche: ‘Drängeln, Stossen, Schimpfen, Schlagen…,’” (https://www.museenkoeln.de/portal/bild-der-woche.aspx?bdw=1998_47). Emphasis in the text.

32 “Durch die Straßen Bettlern gleich, ziehn wir Dank dem NAZI-Reich.” For a reproduction of the refugee placard, see Gabriele Brodmann, Die Bewältigung der deutschen Vergangenheit aus deutscher und ausländischer Sicht (Munich: Grin Verlag, 2005), 8.

33 See, for example, “Flucht über das Frische Haff,” Die Gegenwart, March 24, 1946, 27–28; “Die Tragödie des Ostens,” Die Gegenwart, May 24, 1946, 15; Horst Lange, “Wie damals in Bethlehem,” Allgemeine Zeitung, December 25, 1948.

34 “Heim ins Reich,” Die Zeit, February 28, 1946, 1.

35 “Heim ins Reich.”

36 “Durch Hitlers Schuld,” Der Tagesspiegel, June 9, 1946, 3.

37 “Mit Herz und Kopf,” Neues Deutschland, June 6, 1946, 2.

38 Wolfgang Parth, “Flüchtlinge,” Berliner Zeitung, July 29, 1945, 3.

39 “Die Wanderung der Millionen. Der letzte Akt der von Hitler verbrecherisch eingeleiteten Völkerwanderung,” Berliner Zeitung, October 25, 1945.

40 “Helft den Umsiedlern,” Berliner Zeitung, December 29, 1945, 2.

41 “Mit Herz und Kopf.”

42 Parth, “Flüchtlinge.”

43 Kossert, Kalte Heimat.

44 Quoted in Thomas Grosser, Die Integration der Heimatvertriebenen in Württemberg-Baden, 1945–1961 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2006), 328.

45 “Mit Herz und Kopf.”

46 See examples in Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 65.

47 Willi Rössler, “Schicksalsjahre der Heimatvertriebenen: Eine Dokumentation über Flucht, Vertreibung und Eingliederung der Heimatvertriebenen, die im Altkreis Sigmaringen eine neue Heimat gefunden haben,” Zeitschrift für Hohenzollerische Geschichte 47/48 (2011–12): 305–54, esp. 332.

48 “Helft den Flüchtlingen!” Berliner Zeitung, December 7, 1945, 2.

49 “Helft den Umsiedlern!”

50 Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 322.

51 Quoted in Hans Jandl, Flüchtlinge und Heimatvertriebene im Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis. Flucht und Vertreibung, Aufnahme und Unterbringung, Prozeß der Eingliederung (Bad Schwalbach: Bund der Vertriebenen, 1991), 135.

52 “Helft den Umsiedlern!”

53 Quoted in Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 199.

54 “Die Große Wanderung,” Neue Zeit, March 5, 1946, 1.

55 BArch Koblenz 150–3340, script of program of Bayerischer Rundfunk's “Für die alten und neuen Landsleute,” June 20, 1951.

56 “Schlesier bie uns . . . ,” Neue Zeit, September 1, 1946, 3.

57 “Kinder suchen ihre Eltern. Schicksale im Strom der Zeit—Ein Griff in das Archiv des ‘Augenzeugen,’” Berliner Zeitung, March 12, 1947, 3.

58 “Leid und Epoche der Fülle,” Neue Zeit, March 23, 1946.

59 “Ein Notruf von Millionen. Wir appellieren an die Solidarität des ganzen Volkes,” Neues Deutschland, June 25, 1946, 2.

60 “Sorgen und Nöte der Umsiedler,” Neue Zeit, July 14, 1946, 3.

61 Hans Neuhoff and Kulturstiftung der Deutschen Vertriebenen, Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen (Bonn: Osmipress, 1977), 19; Michael Schwartz, Vertriebene und “Umsiedlerpolitik”: Integrationskonflikte in den deutschen Nachkriegs-Gesellschaften und die Assimilationsstrategien in der SBZ/DDR 1945–1961 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004), 54.

62 “Deutschlands Frage Nr. 1,” Das Parlament, March 12, 1952, 1.

63 See Michael L Hughes, Shouldering the Burdens of Defeat: West Germany and the Reconstruction of Social Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Rüdiger Wenzel, Die große Verschiebung?: Das Ringen um den Lastenausgleich im Nachkriegsdeutschland von den ersten Vorarbeiten bis zur Verabschiedung des Gesetzes 1952 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008).

64 Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 198.

65 Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 200.

66 Paul Merker, Die nächsten Schritte zur Lösung des Umsiedlerproblems (Berlin: Dietz, 1947).

67 Merker, Die nächsten Schritte zur Lösung des Umsiedlerproblems, 7.

68 Paul Merker, “Die Partei und die Umsiedler,” Neues Deutschland, September 17, 1947, 2.

69 “Die Grosse Wanderung,” Neue Zeit, March 5, 1946, 1.

70 Parth, “Flüchtlinge.”

71 “Boden für die Flüchtlinge. Pfarrer für die Aufteilung des Großgrundbesitzes,” Neue Zeit, September 9, 1945, 2.

72 Johannes Rudolf, “Deutschland auf neuen Wegen. Die historische Bedeutung der Bodenreform,” Berliner Zeitung, September 7, 1945.

73 “Forced Migration,” The Times, August 13, 1945, 38.

74 “Menschen um Uns,” Neue Zeit, January 22, 1947, 3.

75 “Vom Flüchtling zum Bauern. Mecklenburg als neues Siedlungsgebiet,” Neue Zeit, September 13, 1945, 2.

76 Bill Niven, “Film und Fernsehen in der DDR,” in Die Erinnerung an Flucht und Vertreibung: ein Handbuch der Medien und Praktiken, ed. Stephan Scholz, Maren Röger, and Bill Niven (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2015), 143–45.

77 Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 324.

78 Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 200.

79 Brenda Melendy, “Expellees on Strike: Competing Victimization Discourses and the Dachau Refugee Camp Protest Movement, 1948–1949,” German Studies Review 28, no. 1 (2005): 107–26.

80 Moeller, War Stories.

81 Hahn and Hahn, Die Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern, 390.

82 “Die 65. Tote: Ein Kälte-Experiment,” Der Spiegel, January 25, 1947, 5.

83 Jürgen Thorwald, “Ostdeutsches Schicksal,” Christ und Welt, March 24, 1949, 1.

84 David Oels, “‘Dieses Buch ist kein Roman’. Jürgen Thorwalds ‘Die große Flucht’ zwischen Zeitgeschichte und Erinnerungspolitik,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 6, no. 3 (2009): 367–90, esp. 384.

85 Jürgen Thorwald, Es begann an der Weichsel (Stuttgart: Steingrüben, 1950); Jürgen Thorwald, Das Ende an der Elbe (Stuttgart: Steingrüben, 1950).

86 For a more detailed analysis of Thorwald and his writings, see Oels, “Dieses Buch ist kein Roman.”

87 Oels, “Dieses Buch ist kein Roman,” 375.

88 See, for example, Günter Karweina, Der Grosse Treck. Dokumentarbericht über die Flucht und Austreibung von 14 Millionen Deutschen (Stuttgart: Eduard Wancura Verlag, 1958).

89 Georg Gehrmann, “Versuche der literarischen Bewältigung,” in Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland, ed. Eugen Lemberg and Friedrich Edding, vol. 3 (Kiel: F. Hirt, 1959), 276. On an analysis of “flight and expulsion” in West German fiction, see Louis Ferdinand Helbig, Der ungeheure Verlust: Flucht und Vertreibung in der deutschsprachigen Belletristik der Nachkriegszeit (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1996).

90 For an example, see “Flucht über das Haff,” Stern, no. 4, 1950, 7. See also “Das nackte Leben,” Stern, no. 10, March 7, 1959. For a detailed analysis, see Jan Albroscheit, “Die Flucht und Vertreibung der Deutschen aus den ehemaligen Ostgebieten in der deutschen Belletristik, Illustrierten und der Geschichtswissenschaft der 1950er Jahre” (unpublished Staatsexamensarbeit, University of Hamburg, 2006).

91 Emmanuel Johann Reichenberger, Ostdeutsche Passion (Munich: Europa-Buchhandlung, 1948), 266.

92 Emmanuel Johann Reichenberger, Appell an das Weltgewissen. Ansprache bei den Großkundgebungen in verschiedenen deutschen Städten (Munich: Veritas-Verlag, 1949), 8.

93 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (BayHstA), Sudetendeutsches Archiv (SdA), Sprecherregistratur Lodgman v. Auen 262, Open Letter of the Landsmannschaften der Vertriebenen für das Land Hessen to American High Commissioner McCloy, February 3, 1950.

94 Richard Reitzner, Vom Ostwind verweht . . . Das Schicksal von Millionen (Munich: n.p., 1948), 29.

95 Komitee gegen Massenvertreibung, Das Land der Toten: Studie der Deportationen aus dem Osten Deutschlands. (Hannover: Zonenausschuß der CDU der britischen Zone, 1948).

96 German Bundestag No. 01/5 (1st Legislative Period, 5th Session), September 20, 1949, 29.

97 ACDP 07-001-3436, Protocol of the Summit of the CDU Refugee Subcommittee of the British Zone, April 1–2, 1949, 13–14.

98 German Bundestag No. 01/94 (1st Legislative Period, 94th Session), October 26, 1950, 3495–96.

99 “Charta der Heimatvertriebenen | Bund der Vertriebenen e.V.” (http://www.bdv-bayern.de/de/Wir-ueber-uns/Charta).

100 See, for instance, Wenzel Jaksch, A Petition to the Signatory Powers of the Potsdam Agreement and to the General Secretary of the United Nations on Behalf of the Non-Nazi Sudeten Population by the Parliamentary Delegation of Sudeten Labour in Great Britain (London: The Parliamentary Delegation of Sudeten Labour in Great Britain, 1947).

101 Senator Capehart (IN), “Starvation and the Food Problem in Europe,” Congressional Record 92, pt. 12 (February 5, 1946), 876-79.

102 Senator Langer (ND), “Amendment of Fair Labor Standards Act,” Congressional Record 92, pt. 12 (March 29, 1946), 2806.

103 See Committee Against Mass Expulsion, The Land of the Dead: Study of the Deportations from Eastern Germany (New York: Committee Against Mass Expulsion, 1947); Christopher Emmet and Roger Baldwin, Men without the Rights of Man: A Report on the Expulsion and Extermination of the German Speaking Minority Groups in the Balkans and Prewar Poland (New York: Committee Against Mass Expulsions, 1947).

104 Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 294.

105 Stöver, Bernd, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus: Amerikanische Liberation Policy im Kalten Krieg, 1947–1991 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 349.

106 Hoover, Herbert, No Reconstruction without Food: A Remedy for Near Starvation in Germany (New York: Common Cause Inc., 1948).

107 Schoenberg, Hans W., Germans from the East: A Study of Their Migration, Resettlement, and Subsequent Group History Since 1945 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 47. See also Lucius D. Clay, “Chapter in Humane Relations,” New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1954.

108 Hughes, Shouldering the Burdens of Defeat, 69–70.

109 See files in BArch B 150–590 and BArch B 150–591 vol. 1; BArch B150 591, “Denkschrift Be: Zweck und Erfolg der Auslandsreisen des Abeilungsleiters II (Middelmann), November 7, 1952.”

110 Sonne, Hans Christian, The Integration of Refugees into German Life: A Report of the ECA Technical Assistance Commission on the Integration of Refugees in the German Republic: Submitted to the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, March 21, 1951 (Washington, DC: National Planning Association, 1951).

111 Melendy, “Expellees on Strike.”

112 Connor, Ian, Refugees and Expellees in Post-War Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 179.

113 Demshuk, Andrew, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970, reprint edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 60.

114 For a typical example, see “Sie Warten,” Allgemeine Zeitung, June 30, 1949, 1.

115 Moeller, War Stories, 108.

116 “Flüchtlings-Sorgen in Bayern,” Allgemeine Zeitung, September 30, 1948, 4. See also “Kommunistische Drahtzieher am Werk,” Deutschland Union Dienst (DUD), September 13, 1948, 1–2; “KPD-Funktionäre in Flüchtlingslagern,” DUD, September 30, 1948, 1; AdsD, Seliger Archiv VII, 2086, Flier “Zur Aufklärung! An alle Flüchtlinge und Heimatvertriebene! An alle Bayern,” undated [c. 1948].

117 Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 201.

118 “Westdeutsches Flüchtlingsgesetz eine Farce,” Neues Deutschland, October 14, 1949, 5.

119 “Bayern und die Umsiedler. Ernste Kritik der CSU,” Neue Zeit, January 22, 1947, 2; “Die Lage der Flüchtlinge in Bayern,” Neue Zeit, February 1, 1947, 2; “Worüber man spricht,” Berliner Zeitung, September 10, 1950, 2.

120 Jack Raymond, “West Scores Bonn on Refugee Issue,” New York Times, January 11, 1950, 8.

121 For more on the law, see Hughes, Shouldering the Burdens.

122 Philipp Ther, “Expellee Policy in the Soviet-Occupied Zone and the GDR, 1945–1953,” 56–76.