This chapter examines the first systematic efforts to eliminate the Heimat concept. The chapter shows how they emerged in the early 1960s amidst a period of Cold War crisis. Expellee claims to a right to Heimat in the East lurched to the centre of the greatest foreign policy debate of the period and represented a major barrier to rapprochement with the Eastern bloc. Supporters of rapprochement took up two conflicting strategies in confronting expellee Heimat rhetoric. The first challenged how the expellee societies understood the concept, while the second involved arguing that desire for Heimat was inherently fascist. The chapter shows how other generational, demographic, and economic developments also shaped the anti-Heimat movement. While earlier focus on Heimat had been tied to its loss, long-term economic growth, completed reconstruction, and decline in mobility rates led earlier preoccupation with Heimat to ebb. A number of activists on the extra-parliamentary left, many of whom sought re-engagement in the 1970s, also described attachment to local Heimat as inherently exclusionary, reactionary, overly emotional, militarist, or a blockage to international revolutionary change.

The chapter examines the relationship between the size and diversity of the expellee population and entrepreneurship and occupational change in West Germany. Using statistical data at the municipal and county levels, it documents a reversal of fortune: although expellee presence presented economic challenges in the immediate postwar period, in the long run, it increased entrepreneurship rates, education, and household incomes. The more regionally diverse the expellee population, the better the long-run economic performance in receiving communities.

The chapter examines the role of forced displacement in increasing the demand for state intervention and expanding the size of the state bureaucracy in West Germany. It discusses the government elites’ strategies for dealing with the needs of expellees and receiving communities and reviews expellees’ ability to influence government policy. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that counties with a greater proportion of expellees to population had more civil servants per capita.

This chapter examines the reception of expellees in West Germany. I show that expellees were perceived as foreigners, despite sharing ethnicity and language with the locals. I then document expellees’ exclusion from local voluntary associations and the formation of new associations based on migration status and region of origin. I conclude by analyzing contributions to public goods provision in Bavarian municipalities. I show that the more expellees a given community received, the lower the rates at which it taxed the locals’ property and business.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

This is the first of two snapshots – of Germany in 1945, when it became the hub of the largest migration movement of modern European times. The short snapshots consist of direct quotations from representatives of the key transmigrant, migrant, and immigrant groups and set the tone for the chapters that follow. In 1945 these were nearly 3 million soldiers of the Allied armies (Britain, France, United States, USSR); demobilized Wehrmacht soldiers; millions of ethnic German expellees from Eastern Europe who fled the advancing Red Army; 10 million Displaced Persons, especially liberated Allied POWs and forced laborers, mainly from Eastern Europe or the USSR, as well as survivors of the Nazi extermination and concentration camps; and 9 million German civilian evacuees who returned from the countryside to the urban centers. The snapshot highlights the conflicts between these groups, which brought perpetrators and victims in close contact; the fight for limited resources like food and housing in a largely destroyed Germany; and the pervasive sense of a devastated continent on the move.

Twelve million ethnic Germans immigrated between 1944 and 1950, 4.5 million of these to East Germany. This chapter tracks the complex prehistory, in particular the Nazi aggression, that predated their flight from Eastern Europe and their hostile reception in Germany. Contrary to today’s myth of easy integration, the expellees were perceived as wholly Other. The racism of the Nazi era was applied to them – they were thought to look and smell differently and were called a “mulatto race.” Surprisingly, because of their importance as voters, around 1950 the state started to configure them in a way that foreshadowed the salad bowl model: they were allowed to retain their particularist Silesian etc. cultural backgrounds while being seen as unequivocally belonging to the German nation. This chapter suggests that contemporary German society remember their migration differently: as one of many waves, no more “natural” or important than that of Eritrean asylum seekers or Soviet Jews, and as quintessentially modern by foreshadowing the salad bowl model avant la lettre.

Britain in 1972 was different in many ways to the Britain of 1956. The post-war years of full employment were gone; poverty had been ‘rediscovered’; unemployment was rising; the 1960s had simultaneously seen the emergence of ‘affluence’ and countercultural challenges to it; racism and anti-immigration sentiments were a visible and endemic part of daily life and were slipping into the political mainstream; and Britain had lost most of its empire. And yet the anti-racist politics and radicalism of the 1960s and Britain’s increasingly established Black and Asian populations were showing that there were new ways of being British. This chapter explores how these shifts affected the reception and resettlement of the Ugandan Asians. It shows that the expellees – sometimes treated as ‘refugees’, sometimes as ‘immigrants’ – while welcomed by the government-led Ugandan Resettlement Board and a diverse and energetic voluntary initiative, often faced a Britain experienced by its poorest inhabitants. A place of slum housing, rack-renting landlords, a byzantine welfare system and low pay, intensified for the expellees by institutionalised and casual racism. At the same time grassroots activists, race relations workers and the sustained efforts of the expellees themselves to establish new lives in Britain demonstrated that Britain was also being re-worked from within.

This essay examines the impact of the mass arrival of forced migrants in three post-World War II European polities: West Germany, East Germany, and Finland. All three states faced similar challenges in dealing with the legacies of defeat, territorial loss, and large-scale forced migration while forging new postwar social structures and adapting to the developing Cold War international order. The first was to become a key member of the Western alliance; the second an integral part of the Eastern bloc; and the third a neutral entity. It offers a comparative analysis of refugee reception and integration process in the three states between ca. 1945 and 1970. It placesparticular emphasis on identity-building processes, detailing how the postwar forced migrants, many of whom were initially seen as unwelcome intruders, came to be portrayed in the national narratives of all three states as co-nationals and members of an ethnically homogeneous national community.