ON THIS DAY ·
Marienfelde reception centre
14 Apr 1953 — West Berlin opens an emergency reception centre for refugees from East Germany. Refugees were registered, screened and flown out to West Germany; about 1.35 million people had passed through it by 1990.
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The moment in context
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.
From Expellee integration in West Germany, chapter 6 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990 (1956).
The place: Marienfelde reception centre — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — 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,…
- The turn — 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…
- 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.…
Then ask the room: How far was the integration of West Germany’s expellees the result of deliberate government policy? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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