Refugee crises · 1956
Was West Germany’s expellee integration deliberate policy?
The seminar question: “How far was the integration of West Germany’s expellees the result of deliberate government policy?”
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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West Germany integrated its expellees, the Germans driven out of the east, because it had to and because they could vote. In 1950 one resident in six was an expellee, most of them crowded into the rural states of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Bavaria, living in barracks and farm attics far from industrial jobs, often amid open local hostility. The state responded with housing programmes, schemes that moved hundreds of thousands to the industrial west, the Federal Expellee Law of 1953, and the Equalisation of Burdens law of August 1952, the marker at Bonn, which levied half the value of surviving property to compensate those who had lost everything. Expellees organised too: their Charter, proclaimed at Stuttgart in August 1950, renounced “revenge and retaliation”, and their party won 5.9 percent of the vote in 1953 and joined the government of the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The boom of the 1950s, hungry for labour, did the rest, so integration was the joint work of policy, politics and growth.
The short answer
- Citizens with a vote. Unlike the stateless DPs, the expellees arriving in West Germany were German citizens who could vote, organise and stand for office. Their numbers, one voter in six, made them impossible to ignore, and their own party entered government in 1953. Integration was therefore driven by democratic pressure as much as by generosity, which explains why the Equalisation of Burdens law was passed in the hungry early years of the state.
- The economic miracle. West Germany’s output grew rapidly through the 1950s, and Marshall Plan aid, currency reform in 1948 and booming exports created a hunger for labour. The expellees, skilled and willing to move, filled that demand and helped create the boom itself. Growth turned a burden into an asset and made it possible to fund housing and compensation without crushing the rest of society.
- Repression in the Soviet bloc. Collectivisation, purges and the crushing of the East German uprising of June 1953 and the Hungarian revolution of 1956 gave millions reasons to leave. Each crackdown produced a wave of refugees, and the open border in Berlin and the brief gap on the Austrian frontier in 1956 gave them a way out. Repression created the flight, and geography decided where it could happen.
- Western interest in the East’s refugees. For Western governments people escaping communism were proof that their system was preferred. Generous treatment of Hungarians and East Germans was humanitarian and also a form of Cold War argument, which is why resettlement places appeared so fast in 1956 and why West Germany granted East Germans citizenship on arrival. The politics of asylum had become part of the struggle between the blocs.
THE TURNING POINT
The bridge at Andau, November 1956. The flight across the canal bridge at Andau is the hinge of this chapter because it showed the post-war refugee system working at speed for the first time. A neutral state of first asylum opened its border, UNHCR found a legal route around its own date limit, and 37 countries shared the burden within months, so that Austria was never left alone with the problem. That pattern of first asylum backed by guaranteed resettlement elsewhere was the formula the world would try to repeat for the Indochinese boat people in 1979, under very different conditions.
What it changed
A template for burden-sharing. The Hungarian operation established the formula that a front-line state keeps its border open if others promise to take the refugees off its hands. The Geneva meeting of July 1979 applied exactly this bargain to Southeast Asia, trading first asylum in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia for resettlement places in the West, as chapter 10 explains. The difference in 1979 was scale and sympathy, since the boat people were far more numerous and far less familiar to Western voters.
The Wall closes Europe’s door. The Berlin Wall of August 1961 ended mass flight from East Germany for 28 years, and with it Europe’s era of mass post-war displacement. Refugees from the bloc continued to arrive in smaller numbers, after Prague in 1968 for example, until the borders opened again in 1989, the year in which the epilogue’s map of reunited Germany begins. A sealed border solved the GDR’s problem by turning would-be refugees into prisoners.
UNHCR goes global. Having proved itself in Hungary, UNHCR expanded in the 1960s to help refugees from wars of independence in Africa and Asia, and the 1967 Protocol removed the Convention’s time and place limits. By 1975 the agency was ready to work in Southeast Asia, although the states there had not signed the treaty it administered, as chapter 7 shows. Its authority there would rest chiefly on money and diplomacy.
The expellees in politics. Expellee organisations remained a force in West German politics, opposing Willy Brandt’s recognition of the Oder–Neisse line in 1970 and shaping debates about memory into the twenty-first century. The epilogue follows that argument to the border treaty of 1990 and the documentation centre that opened in Berlin in 2021. Their story shows that integration can succeed economically while memory remains unsettled for generations.
The full answer, argued
Policy mattered: the Equalisation of Burdens law redistributed more than 130 billion marks over three decades, the Federal Expellee Law gave people a legal status, and housing and resettlement programmes moved hundreds of thousands from rural camps to industrial jobs. Yet policy alone cannot explain the speed of integration. The economic boom of the 1950s created the jobs that made housing and compensation affordable, and the expellees’ own work, organisation and votes forced politicians to act. Historians such as Andreas Kossert also remind us that local hostility slowed social acceptance for a generation, so “integration” meant economic success long before it meant belonging. A strong answer therefore treats policy as necessary but not sufficient, and growth and political pressure as its partners. The comparison with Indochina is telling, because Vietnamese refugees resettled abroad depended on the policies of foreign states in which they had, at first, no vote at all.
An interesting fact
World Refugee Year began with a magazine article. In 1958 four young British Conservatives, Christopher Chataway, Colin Jones, Trevor Philpott and Timothy Raison, proposed it in the journal Crossbow, and the UN General Assembly adopted the idea that December. Chataway was already famous as an athlete: on 6 May 1954 he had been one of the two pacemakers, with Chris Brasher, when Roger Bannister ran the first mile in under four minutes at Oxford. By UNHCR’s count the year raised about 90 million dollars from 97 countries and territories, some £9 million of it in Britain, and its four founders received the Nansen Medal in 1960.
This is the study layer of Expellee integration in West Germany, chapter 6 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990; the full index of the atlas is here.
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