Historical research into the experience of some twelve million German refugees from eastern Europe, uprooted by the turn of the tide in World War II and tossed into what would become West and East Germany, has made great strides over the past two decades, at least as far as German-language publications are concerned. The large body of literature on the flight and expulsion and their aftermath is not necessarily easily accessible to an English-language audience, however. Even if language does not pose a barrier, this scholarship is scattered in local and regional journals, edited collections, or specialty titles that North American college libraries do not always acquire. It is to Ian Connor's great credit to have provided an overview account of “the economic, social, and political integration of the refugees and expellees in postwar Germany” (p. 4) that synthesizes the scholarship on the matter.

Connor concentrates on the western zones during the immediate postwar period up to 1950, although he frequently moves beyond this time frame and concludes with a nod to the recent memory debates in the wake of Günter Grass's novel Crab Walk. His main focus lies on the “relationship between the refugees and political parties” (p. 4) in order to explain why the have-nots did not radicalize politically to a point where they could have threatened the new western state. First, to nip any radicalization in the bud, the British and American military governments banned the formation of a refugee party. Thus forced to find representation of their interests within the newly licensed parties, expellees enabled the SPD to make gains in many rural areas where it had previously had little support. The CDU could not count on the refugee vote yet because it regularly came across as the party of the native population. Ultimately, the refugees gave their vote to the party that promised to better their material condition, something that, however, by 1949, neither had achieved.

With the founding of the Federal Republic, the ban against refugee parties was lifted, leading to the founding and electoral success of the Bloc of Expellees and Dispossessed Persons (BHE) on the state level. The established parties now courted the expellee vote more systematically, and Adenauer's embrace proved especially effective, if not suffocating. By offering cabinet posts to leading BHE politicians, funneling “donations” to the party (p. 155), and implementing the crucial Equalization of Burden legislation, the CDU-led government gave expellees an incentive to rethink their view of the party. Expellees and the CDU were in any case drawn together by staunch anti-Communism. Adenauer's campaign slogan “No experiments!” resonated deeply with a constituency that blamed the Soviet Union for their plight. Connor makes sure to point out, however, that the expellees never voted as a unified bloc. While some drifted into right-wing parties, others turned to the SPD after the party adopted the Bad Godesberg program in 1959. They even stuck to it through the height of Ostpolitik, indicating, as Connor argues, that the expellees and refugees were “more willing to accept the territorial realities of World War II than many of their own politicians had predicted” (p. 159).

Several sections of Connor's study are dedicated to the expellees' housing, food, and employment situation as well as to the strained relations with native populations who were forced to share resources with the new arrivals. The reader gets a keen sense of the desperate situation of the expellees that underscores the conclusions of existing scholarship to the effect that integration of the newcomers went anything but smoothly. Connor's book, however, mostly narrates how the refugees were administered, less how they themselves experienced their situation. In view of the well-established literature on postwar gender relations, a gendered analysis of the expellees' situation could have offered an enriching perspective on the everyday struggles of the newcomers. The noticeable brevity of the introduction and conclusion (four pages each) reinforces the impression that the author did not intend to engage with recent trends in the historiography on postwar Germany beyond the immediate topic.

Of the book's seven chapters, six consider the situation in West Germany and one investigates the fate of those 2.5 million expellees whose journey halted in the Soviet occupation zone. The author explains the uneven allocation with the note that “serious research on these issues did not begin until after the collapse of the Berlin Wall” (p. 236). The high number of refugees posed the same logistical problems in the Soviet zone as in the western part of the country, and the newcomers found no more hospitable welcome by the natives. Although the SED tried at times to win them over politically, this was difficult for a party that the refugees identified with the Soviet Union, and hence with the loss of their homelands.

Although expellees in East Germany benefited disproportionately from land reform and received small farmsteads, any political gain for the SED was wiped out by the fact that only fifteen percent of the new expellee farms proved viable, and even these subsequently fell prey to collectivization. Similarly, the SED's growing hostility toward private business alienated craftsmen and artisans. By 1947/48, the party shifted to a policy of “forced integration” (P. Ther), simply declared the “resettler problem” to be solved and outlawed any organized representation of expellee interests and culture. With no illusions about the SED's attitude toward them, the expellees migrated farther west in high numbers. Eight hundred thousand fled to the Federal Republic of Germany until the Berlin Wall made exit impossible. Expellees thus constituted a third of the total who left the German Democratic Republic up to 1961 (pp. 209, 225).

Refugees and Expellees is written in accessible prose and offers a straightforward narrative for undergraduate teaching, although the publisher has not exactly priced the book to fit this audience. It offers a welcome addition to the English-language literature.