Refugee crises · CHAPTER 6 ·
Expellee integration in West Germany
Chapter 6 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “Integration and the Cold War”
West Germany, home to 7.9 million expellees, treated them as citizens, and its 1952 Equalisation of Burdens law made owners of surviving property pay half its value into a fund for those who had lost everything. Refugees from communist states, among them East Germans leaving steadily for the West, became symbols of the Cold War.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Europe, November 1956 — Hungarians flee to Austria.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1960 · Europe in 1960.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
SHORT EXPLANATION
In 1950 West Germany had 7.9 million expellees, Germans driven from their homes in the east. They arrived having lost property, often among neighbors who had little room for them. But they were also citizens of the new state. They could vote, organize and demand a share in its recovery. In 1952 the Bundestag, West Germany's parliament, passed the Lastenausgleich, or Equalisation of Burdens law: owners of surviving property paid a levy equal to half its assessed value over thirty years into a fund for people who had lost assets. Housing programs and an expanding economy helped the newcomers build lives alongside that compensation.
At the same time, people were leaving communist states. About 2.7 million East Germans departed between 1949 and 1961, mostly through Berlin after the border marked by the dashed line was sealed. In 1956, after Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian revolution, about 200,000 Hungarians fled. Austria, shown in tan as their first country of asylum, received about 180,000. UNHCR found a way to apply a treaty limited to events before 1951, and 37 countries offered resettlement, helping Austria accommodate the arrivals. World Refugee Year in 1959–60 raised funds for people still in camps. Then the Berlin Wall, built in August 1961, closed the principal remaining route out of East Germany.
The full story
In 1950 one West German resident in six was an expellee. Many were crowded into barracks and farm attics in Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Bavaria. Industrial jobs lay elsewhere, and local people sometimes met the newcomers with open hostility. Citizenship gave the expellees a claim on the state, but it did not by itself give them a house or a livelihood.
The government built housing and moved hundreds of thousands toward the industrial west. At Bonn in August 1952 it adopted the Equalisation of Burdens law, whose levy on surviving property helped compensate people who had lost theirs; payments could be slow and modest. The Federal Expellee Law followed in 1953. Expellees also acted for themselves. Their Charter, proclaimed at Stuttgart in August 1950, renounced “revenge and retaliation”. Their party won 5.9 percent of the vote in 1953 and joined Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's government. The expanding economy needed workers, and expellees helped supply them. Government measures, political pressure and growth together made rebuilding possible, even though a payment could not replace a lost home.
East Germany had roughly four million expellees, whom its government called Umsiedler, “resettlers”. In the Görlitz treaty of July 1950 it recognized the Oder–Neisse line, the frontier with Poland along those rivers, as a “border of peace”. While the authorities settled that question officially, another movement was drawing people out of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as East Germany was officially called.
About 2.7 million left between 1949 and 1961. The regime called unauthorized departure Republikflucht, “flight from the republic”, and made it a crime from 1957. Departures peaked at about 331,000 in 1953, around the crushed June uprising. After the western border was sealed in May 1952, Berlin remained an opening: people crossed into the Western Allied sectors, registered at centers such as Marienfelde and flew west. Doctors, engineers and teachers were among those leaving for freedom or better wages. On 13 August 1961 the Wall closed the route, using force to stop the exodus.
Hungary's October 1956 revolution brought a different emergency. Soviet troops returned on 4 November, and about 200,000 Hungarians, one in fifty, crossed into Austria and Yugoslavia. Many used the small canal bridge at Andau until Soviet engineers destroyed it on 21 November. Austria had been neutral and free of occupation only since 1955; it opened camps such as Traiskirchen and asked other countries for help.
The Convention's date limit presented a problem: the revolution had occurred after 1951. UNHCR legal adviser Paul Weis argued that the flight followed from the earlier communist takeover. Hungarians were recognized as refugees as a group, and the first 100,000 were resettled within ten weeks. Austria's border and camps offered immediate safety; places abroad helped make that welcome sustainable. Cold War sympathy for people fleeing communism, a booming Western economy, refugees who looked like their hosts and a relatively brief mass flight all helped make the response possible. Those conditions would differ in 1979.
FULL EXPLANATION
The myth and the reality of integration
West Germans came to tell the absorption of the expellees as an “integration miracle” alongside the economic miracle. That account has a basis in the material progress people made, but it can make the experience of arrival disappear. In Kalte Heimat (2008), “cold homeland”, Andreas Kossert documents locals calling newcomers “Polacken” and “refugee rabble”, refusing them rooms, opposing mixed marriages and fighting billeting orders. Ian Connor's Refugees and Expellees in Post-war Germany (2007) examines the political radicalism officials feared in the early years. The Equalisation of Burdens law had paid more than 130 billion marks by 1986. Individual payments, however, were often slow and modest. Its meaning lay partly in the public promise that people whose property survived would share losses with those who had lost theirs. Pertti Ahonen's After the Expulsion (2003) follows another political legacy: expellee organizations kept claims to the lost east alive and helped delay recognition of the Oder–Neisse line until Willy Brandt's Warsaw Treaty of 1970. Material integration succeeded within about fifteen years. Social acceptance and an honest account of the past took longer.
Hungary 1956 and the stretching of the Convention
The 1956 flight posed an immediate legal difficulty for UNHCR. The Convention applied to events before 1 January 1951, but the Hungarian revolution happened afterward. Legal adviser Paul Weis connected the flight to the postwar communist takeover, allowing the agency to treat the Hungarians as refugees under the Convention. It recognized them as a group without examining every individual story. This practice was later called prima facie recognition, or recognition “at first sight”. High Commissioner Auguste Lindt coordinated aid to Austria while 37 countries resettled about 180,000 people. The United States admitted about 38,000, processing more than 32,000 at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, under presidential authority to admit people outside normal quotas. Britain, Canada, Switzerland and others accepted tens of thousands more. Gil Loescher sees the operation as proof of UNHCR's value to Western donors and the beginning of a pattern of rapid, generous resettlement for people fleeing communism. That pattern shaped responses to Indochina in 1975 and 1979.
Flight or desertion: leaving the GDR
A departure from East Germany could look like escape to one government and desertion to the other. West Germany called arrivals “Sowjetzonenflüchtlinge”, refugees from the Soviet zone. Its emergency procedure screened them for spies before granting residence and help. The GDR called them deserters and from 1957 made unauthorized departure a crime. Why did people leave? Patrick Major's Behind the Berlin Wall (2010) describes mixed motives: political repression, farm collectivisation, pressure on churches and private businesses, and the attraction of higher Western wages. Their departure cost the GDR young and skilled workers, including doctors, engineers and teachers. In August 1961 the government built the Wall to stop the flow. The two governments' descriptions served their positions in the Cold War: departure could be treated as disloyalty at home and as a judgment on a rival abroad. Similar patterns appeared in Indochina. Hanoi called boat people traitors, while the United States long treated flight from communism as grounds for refugee status.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Citizens with a vote. Expellees in West Germany had a political resource stateless DPs lacked: citizenship. They could vote, organize and stand for office. About one voter in six was an expellee, and their party joined the government in 1953. Their pressure helped bring measures such as the Equalisation of Burdens law during the new state's difficult early years.
The economic miracle. Recovery gave integration room to work. West German output grew rapidly in the 1950s, with Marshall Plan aid, the 1948 currency reform and booming exports among its elements. Employers needed workers; expellees filled jobs and helped create growth. That growth in turn made housing and compensation easier to finance.
Repression in the Soviet bloc. People had reasons to leave the Soviet bloc, among them collectivisation, purges and the suppression of the East German uprising in June 1953 and the Hungarian revolution in 1956. The routes depended on geography and border controls. Berlin remained an opening from East Germany until 1961; in 1956 Hungarians crossed into Austria and Yugoslavia.
Western interest in the East’s refugees. Western governments saw escape from communism as evidence against their rivals. Help for those arriving could serve a humanitarian purpose and make a Cold War argument at the same time. West Germany granted East Germans citizenship on arrival, and resettlement places for Hungarians appeared quickly in 1956.
THE TURNING POINT
The bridge at Andau, November 1956. The small bridge over the canal at Andau carried people fleeing Hungary until Soviet engineers destroyed it on 21 November 1956. Their journey illustrates a response made up of several decisions. Austria offered first asylum, UNHCR found a legal route through the Convention's date limit, and 37 countries offered places elsewhere. An open border brought immediate safety; offers of homes abroad helped Austria receive the arrivals. In 1979 states sought a similar combination for Indochinese boat people under different conditions.
What it changed
A template for burden-sharing. Austria's reception of Hungarians and other countries' offers of permanent homes formed a model for sharing responsibility. The July 1979 Geneva meeting used a comparable bargain in Southeast Asia, linking asylum in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia to Western resettlement places. Chapter 10 examines the different scale and sympathy surrounding the boat people, who were more numerous and less familiar to Western voters.
The Wall closes Europe’s door. After August 1961 the Berlin Wall sharply reduced mass departures from East Germany, closing the main escape route for 28 years. Smaller numbers continued to flee communist states, including after Prague in 1968. Borders opened again in 1989, followed by German reunification. The GDR had stopped the exodus by preventing would-be refugees from leaving.
UNHCR goes global. Hungary helped establish UNHCR's role in emergencies beyond its expected closing date. In the 1960s it expanded its work to refugees from conflicts and wars of independence in Africa and Asia; the 1967 Protocol changed the Convention's original time and geographic limits. By 1975 the agency was working in Southeast Asia, where many states had not joined the treaty and cooperation, money and diplomacy mattered.
The expellees in politics. Economic integration did not end disputes over the lost homes. Expellee organizations opposed Willy Brandt's recognition of the Oder–Neisse line in 1970 and influenced debates about memory into the twenty-first century. The epilogue follows those debates to the 1990 border treaty and the Berlin documentation center opened in 2021.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — How far was the integration of West Germany’s expellees the result of deliberate government policy?
Government policy gave expellees means to rebuild: the Equalisation of Burdens law paid more than 130 billion marks over decades, the Federal Expellee Law established legal status, and housing and relocation programs moved hundreds of thousands closer to industrial jobs. But these measures depended on a wider recovery. The boom supplied jobs and resources, while expellees' own work, organization and votes pressed politicians to act. Andreas Kossert's account of local hostility also shows that economic progress did not immediately bring social acceptance. Policy was necessary but not sufficient; growth and political pressure were its partners. Vietnamese refugees resettled abroad later depended initially on decisions in foreign countries where they had no vote.
An interesting fact
World Refugee Year began with a proposal in Crossbow. In 1958 four young British Conservatives, Christopher Chataway, Colin Jones, Trevor Philpott and Timothy Raison, made their case in the journal; the UN General Assembly adopted the idea that December. Chataway was already known as an athlete. With Chris Brasher, he had paced Roger Bannister's first sub-four-minute mile at Oxford on 6 May 1954. UNHCR reports that the year raised about 90 million dollars from 97 countries and territories, including some £9 million in Britain. The four founders received the Nansen Medal in 1960.
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