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Michael Schwartz
Expellees in Twofold Germany
Keywords: Vertriebene, Vertriebenenintegration, Vertriebene in der Erinnerungspolitik
To be qualified as a German “refugee” or “expellee” in Germany after 1945 was never an honorary title. The long-established inhabitants of Western or Central Germany resented the 12 million newcomers who had been driven out of their own home regions in East Germany or Eastern Europe by Allied force. Also, both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic tried to control the economically deprived and psychologically shocked refugees by creating new interpretative notions: The term “resettler” (Umsiedler), which had been superimposed by the Soviet Military Administration for communist East Germany as early as 1945, played down the violence and terror aspects of the real flight and expulsion acts, emphasized the National Socialist causes of the “resettlement” and stipulated that the fast integration into a “new homeland” west of the Oder-Neisse border was inevitable. Diametrically opposed to this communist interpretation was the notion of the West German term “expellee” (Vertriebener), which focused on the events of 1944/45 (and not their Nazi prehistory) and the forcible aspects of the expulsion. While the communist SED regime terminated its integrative social policy for the “resettlers” as early as 1952/53, the West German “Vertriebenenpolitik” established a long-term social policy by means of “Lastenausgleich”. Core elements of a new interpretation – pushed by leftist intellectuals, but even from within the Christian churches – superseded the older revisionist notion of Vertriebenenpolitik, but also marginalised “Vertriebenen”-identity.
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag
Print ISSN: 0042-5702
Volume: 56, 01/2008
Pages: 101 - 151