Citizens in Name Only: The National Status of German Expellees, 1945–53

Abstract

Rogers Brubaker has argued that the German ethnic conception of citizenship, forged in a 1913 law, was ‘nourished’ after World War II, when ethnic German expellees and refugees entering the western occupation zones were given equal citizenship with those native to the west. This paper contends that the supposed straight line from 1913 to 1953 was in fact bent by the considerable events of the immediate postwar period. Postwar German citizenship laws cannot be understood without giving attention to the policies under military occupation, just as later German ethno-cultural self-identity must be qualified by first recognizing the extreme divisions within German society that resulted from the expulsion.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Karl Cordell, Vejas Liulevicius, Timothy McMahon, Roland Spickermann, Maria Todorova, Stefan Wolff, and those from my panel at the 2006 ASN conference for their perceptive comments on this paper.

Notes

1. Beforehand, Auslandsdeutsche could only retain citizenship for 10 years.

2. For the sake of concision, this study will remain restricted for the most part to the US occupation zone, although much of what occurred there applied to the British zone as well.

3. Brubaker largely neglected the immediate postwar period in his analysis, and traced his proof for continuity in German ethno-cultural self-understanding from the 1953 Bundesrepublik law on Expelled Persons and Refugees. Thus he never addressed the intervening legislation during the previous eight years, and consequently overlooked the fact that postwar jus sanguinis legislation had been instituted by foreign occupiers who viewed expellee integration as the only means of maintaining stability in their partition zones.

4. Although Brubaker was highly attentive to legal definitions of citizenship, he avoided sufficient examination of popular conceptions of citizenship and belonging. This, despite his admission that the nation-state, which creates citizenship laws, “is not only, or primarily, an ethnodemographic phenomenon, or a set of institutional arrangements. It is also, crucially, a way of thinking about and appraising political and social membership” (p. 188).

5. Estimates of the total number of Germans expelled from the East vary widely, from as high as 19 million to as low as 11 million. It is also uncertain how many died in the midst of their expulsion—these estimates range around two million.

6. Potsdam placed northern East Prussia (the vicinity of Königsberg) under Russian administration.

7. While many Volksdeutsche spoke German (albeit often heavily accented), not all had not been using it as their primary language. A US reporter noted: “In one refugee camp I visited the inhabitants speak 10 languages and come from 17 different countries. Yet they understand each other because common desperation is a good interpreter” (Meyer, 1951, p. 11). See also General Clay's observation (1950, pp. 315–316). Some Polish nationalists, eager to retain some of the ethnic Germans as ‘autochthonous’ populations, argued that their lack of familiarity with German could encourage a quick ‘return’ to Polish nationality (Seyda, 1942, pp. 20–21). However, most of these so-called autochthons ultimately chose to flee to West Germany.

8. The American zone received 1 330 000 Sudeten Germans; 168 000 Hungarian expellees; and 2 091 000 from other lands. This led to a total population increase of 3 589 000, or 20.3% above pre-war levels, a rate similar to the British Zone. The Soviet zone received appreciably fewer expellees, because many fled from there into the western zones. The French zone authorities protested that they had not been a party to the Potsdam Conference and managed to stave off significant expellee importation (Clay, 1950, pp. 314–315).

9. Heinz Sauermann was a professor of political science at the University of Frankfurt am Main and chair of the Scientific Committee of Economic Administration.

10. Friedrich was governmental affairs advisor to the Military Governor and Control Council in 1948, a special advisor to CAD, OMGUS and DMG from 1946 to 1947, and consultant to a select committee on foreign aid in the US Congress from 1947 to 1949.

11. OMGUS stands for the Office of Military Government of the United States for Germany.

12. All translations are those of the author unless otherwise noted.

13. See Stephen Lane's 1968 interview with Robert Creel, the US Consul-General (Lane, 1972, p. 83).

14. A prominent Weimar politician, Jänicke lost his seat in the Reichstag in 1932 and was badly wounded by the SS in 1945. Hence he knew from grim personal experience the consequences of radicalism.

15. Franz J. Bauer (1985, p. 161) agreed with Carey's perspective.

16. This is from Gesetz Nr 59 über die Aufnahme und Eingliederung deutscher Flüchtlinge.

17. See Dettmer (1983) and Kleinert (1990).

18. The literature on the political, social, cultural and economic aspects of integration is vast. While English-language publications were common in the early years after the war, these later dwindled into near-oblivion. By contrast, German-language studies have predominated both in the early years and more recently. Economic studies are by far the most common, followed by sociological–psychological examinations, and then nostalgic investigations into some of the expellee cultural peculiarities. A good bibliography of studies on this subject before 1950 can be found in Simon and Möhring (1950). The most recent bibliography is Kiefl (1996).

19. Marion Frantzioch (1989) has identified three phases in integration. Natives briefly sympathized with expellees, because they believed that their stay in the West would be a brief one. Almost as soon as the war was over and it became clear that matters were not temporary, natives and newcomers entered into a mutually hostile Fremdheit phase, only gradually overcome in the coming decades as political, social and economic integration started to take root.

20. Betty Barton observed that few Volksdeutsche identified themselves as Germans. For instance, she raised the example of many Volga German communities, who, in the 18th century, had originally been Dutch Mennonites, then refugees in Prussia, and finally settlers in Russia, through invitation by Catherine II (1949, pp. 8–12).

21. Franz L. Neumann (1950) agreed with this assessment in (p. 9). However, Friedrich Edding (1951), a contemporary German scholar of the Vertriebene, disagreed with Clay's assessment that emigration could ameliorate the situation. Analysing age distribution of the expellee and war-devastated German populations, he concluded that emigration would actually devastate the German economy, because there the ratio between active labourers and the aged was already much too small: “60 per cent of expellees are economically non-productive persons” (p. 33).

22. See also the assessment of the American Friends Service Committee (1946, pp. 8–9).

23. These researchers employed questionnaires and personal interviews to collect their data.

24. This was in the US Department of State (1950, p. 131) as ‘Constitution of the International Refugee Organization’, Annex 1, Part II: 4. In 1947 the military government budgeted 307 700 000 marks to the Refugee Office (Jänicke, 1948, p. 110).

25. Betty Barton, a professional social worker, held various administrative posts for relief organizations in postwar Germany. At the time she published this work she was the head of the American Friends Service Committee in the British zone.

26. Bouman et al. (1950) contended in The Refugee Problem in Western Germany that this exemplified a pessimistic view of the problem, which had gained the upper hand as a result of massive expellee disillusionment, but that perhaps international interest might counteract it (p. 24).

27. For an introduction to the varied literature, see Reichling and Betz (1949), Sonne (1951), Edding (1951), Arndt (1954), Ellwein (1987), and Ackerman (1990).

28. “Wir riefen Arbeitskräfte, und es kamen Menschen.”

29. The term ‘Re-settler ‘(Aussiedler) refers specifically to those Germans who left Communist Eastern Europe after 1950.

30. Those parents who were citizens of European Economic Area states or Switzerland were considered to hold permanent resident permits. Those seeking to retain their citizenship had to apply between the ages of 18 and 23, and were normally required to prove they did not hold any foreign citizenship (although this latter stipulation was relaxed in the new law, as well).

31. These conditions include proving adequate knowledge of Germany, possessing a clean record and commitment to the tenets of the Basic Law, and being able to pay for one's own maintenance.

32. See the German Foreign Ministry website (Das deutsche auswärtige Amt) for a useful summary at: http://www.auswaertiges—amt.de/www/de/willkommen/staatsangehoerigkeitsrecht/index_html, accessed 31 January 2006. The full text of the law is available online at the Bundesministerium der Justiz, at http://bundesrecht.juris.de/rustag/, accessed 31 January 2006.