ABSTRACT
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, some members of ethnic German minorities living in Central and Eastern Europe were resettled in Germany at the request of the Nazi government while others, as a consequence of Stalinist policies, were deported from the European part of the Soviet Union to the Asian part. Altogether, this affected at least two million people. Between 1945 and 1948 the post-war expulsion of twelve million Germans led to what might be called the largest single state-organized ethnic cleansing in the history of the twentieth century.1 German citizens as well as ethnic Germans from other Central and Eastern European states were deported from their traditional areas of settlement mainly to the British, Soviet and US occupation zones of Germany. After 1950, the West German government decided to facilitate immigration for members of the remaining ethnic German minorities living in the communist countries of Europe. Officially, they were called resettlers (Aussiedler).2 In total, between 1950 and 1999 some four million people came as ethnically privileged migrants to Germany. This chapter discusses the ethnic German expellees and resettlers, their regions of origin, the most important periods of the primarily involuntary, but in recent times also voluntary migration, the magnitude of these migration flows and the legal regulations and their political context.
