Originally, the legal category of ‘Aussiedler’ referred to those who arrived later than the mass exodus and post-war displacement of the German population from Central-Eastern, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe, who were permitted to resettle in the Federal Republic of Germany from the early 1950s onwards as part of humanitarian family reunification schemes. Through a broad interpretation of the existing laws and guidelines, the generations born following the ‘general expulsion measures’ were also included in this category over time, meaning that Aussiedler migration continued into the 1990s and, to a limited extent, right up to the present day. In total, by 2012, approximately 4.5 million people had been admitted to the Federal Republic of Germany as ‘Aussiedler’ or ‘Spätaussiedler’. Approximately 1.3 million of them arrived between 1950 and the relaxation of the emigration restrictions in 1987.^[2] During the same period, the GDR accepted 125,000–150,000 migrants.^[3]

The history of resettler migration can be divided into four phases, which differ in terms of the groups of people affected and the emigration and immigration regimes of the countries involved. The first phase covers the period from 1950 to the end of the 1960s. The resettlers at that time predominantly belonged to the generation that had experienced war, flight and expulsion and had been directly affected by their consequences. Although the Federal Republic of Germany had already taken in the majority of resettlers by this time (over 600,000), the number of people resettling in the GDR – particularly from Poland – was also significant (over 100,000). The second phase (from around 1970 to 1987) was characterised by generational change: many of those now seeking resettlement had been born after the war and could not simply be regarded as ‘latecomers’ to the expulsion. However, the Federal Republic also included this new generation of resettlers under the BVFG and, in the context of the social-liberal ‘New Ostpolitik’ and the CSCE process, successfully advocated for their facilitated departure from the Eastern Bloc states. The influx of resettlers during this period was not constant, but brought an average of over 40,000 people per year to the Federal Republic. Resettlement to the GDR, by contrast, hardly took place at all. The emigration regimes of the countries of origin (with the exception of Yugoslavia) were fundamentally restrictive during both phases and permitted resettlement only in exceptional cases – the number of which varied over time.

The third phase (1987–1992) differed from the previous two due to the radical change in the emigration regimes of the countries of origin. As the Eastern Bloc states almost completely liberalised emigration and the Federal Republic, for its part, had not yet implemented any entry restrictions, resettlement migration took place largely unchecked during this phase. The result was a sharp rise in the number of resettlers, driven, amongst other things, by the ‘pull effect’ of mass emigration from certain regions, the ongoing economic collapse of the countries of origin and generally uncertain prospects for the future. In this short period, approximately 1.5 million people from Poland, the Soviet Union and Romania arrived in Germany – more resettlers than had come in the previous nearly four decades combined. The Federal Republic responded by gradually tightening the immigration regime, which had until then been almost entirely liberal; this reached its provisional peak with the reform of the BVFG through the Act on the Settlement of Consequences of the War (KfbG) of 21 December 1992. This Act thus marks the beginning of the fourth phase, which continues to this day and was characterised initially by a stabilisation and subsequently by a continuous restriction of resettler immigration. Until 1995, in accordance with the annual quota set by the KfbG, over 200,000 late repatriates were still arriving in Germany each year; the language tests introduced in 1996 restricted this influx, causing the figures to fall below 100,000 per year into the new millennium. By 2012, a further 1.6 million people had arrived in the Federal Republic; since 2006, however, the figure has been only a few thousand per year.

Over the course of the post-war decades, the repatriates were drawn, at various times, primarily from different countries and historical German or German-speaking population groups. Until the end of the 1980s, Poland (throughout this period) and Romania (since the 1970s) were the main countries of origin. Since the 1990s, (late) resettlers have come almost exclusively from the former Soviet Union, which had previously allowed very little admission of Germans. During the first two post-war decades, several tens of thousands of Germans also resettled from Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Hungary played virtually no role as a country of emigration throughout this entire period.

The population groups concerned were very heterogeneous and their main common feature was that they were, or could be, identified as German on the basis of their citizenship or their ‘ethnic affiliation’, defined primarily by language. Resettlers from Poland were primarily so-called ‘autochthons’ from the former German eastern territories (e.g. Opole Silesia andWarmia/Masuria) and from territories annexed by Germany during the Second World War (e.g. Eastern Upper Silesia). The former had been citizens of the German Reich before the war and, in the view of the Federal Republic of Germany, remained so; the latter were, in many cases, naturalised into the German Reich during the war via the‘German People’s List’. After the war, the ‘autochthonous’ population were ‘verified’ as Poles by the Polish authorities, but in later years and decades many sought to leave Poland, and they and their descendants were granted permission to do so at various times to both German states (primarily 1956–59, 1971–72, 1976–81; specifically to the GDR, also in 1964–71). During the first two phases, some 800,000 resettlers came from Poland to the Federal Republic of Germany, with a further 600,000 arriving in the third phase. From Romania, Banat Swabians and Transylvanian Saxons immigrated; the vast majority of whom had remained in their original settlement areas after the war or had returned there following their deportation to the Soviet Union. From the mid-1970s onwards, over 10,000 of them were ‘bought out’ by the Federal Government each year; following Ceauşescu’s overthrow in 1989, almost all of those who had remained emigrated (over 100,000 in 1990 alone). German resettlers from Yugoslavia were predominantly Danube Swabians who, after the end of the war, had not been expelled but interned, and who were able to leave the country relatively freely from 1951 onwards. Their resettlement was largely completed by the end of the 1960s (approx. 80,000 people). Little is known about resettlers from Czechoslovakia, who moved to the Federal Republic in significant numbers most recently during the years 1967–1969 (approximately 40,000 out of a total of almost 100,000 over the entire period).

Resettlers from the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s were primarily residents who had remained in the Soviet half of East Prussia (‘Reichsdeutsche’) as well as‘contract resettlers’from the Baltic states, Volhynia, Bessarabia and Bukovina, who had been granted German citizenship under the resettlement treaties betweenNazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941. From the 1970s onwards, there was an increasing influx of former Ukrainians and Black Sea Germans, many of whom had been in Germany during the war as ‘administrative resettlers’ and had relatives there who could serve as a point of contact for family reunification. In the Soviet Union, following their forced repatriation after the war, they lived predominantly in Siberia and Central Asia, to where the Volga Germans had already been deported in 1941. This group of Russian Germans – formed only through deportation and exile from the descendants of colonists who had previously lived in isolation from one another – ultimately constituted the vast majority of the ‘late resettlers’ in the third and fourth resettlement phases (approx. 2 million).

A particular – albeit not separately registered – group of resettlers consisted of German-speaking Jews who immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany during the post-war decades and were granted resettler status there. This group comprised several thousand people from historical regions of Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe, such as Transylvania, Galicia, Bukovina and the Baltic states, where German served as the lingua franca . Many of them had emigrated from their home countries to Israel and then moved on to Germany, where they sought recognition as German repatriates. This process was often fraught with conflict, as the authorities, in many cases, regarded them – despite their belonging to the ‘German linguistic and cultural sphere’ – as Jews in an ethno-national sense due to their Jewish religion, and thus not as Germans. The introduction of the category of ‘Jewish quota refugee’ in 1990/1991 ultimately enabled the immigration of larger numbers of Russian-speaking Jews, who now had to prove their ‘Jewishness’ rather than their ‘Germanness’ in order to be admitted.

Under the BVFG, resettlers were defined by their geographical origin and (ethno-)national affiliation. An ‘Aussiedler’ had to come from the so-called ‘expulsion areas’, defined on the basis of political criteria – that is, from communist-ruled Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe (including Albania, where there had never been a German minority ) – and be either a German national or a person of ‘German ethnic affiliation’ in accordance with Section 6 of the BVFG. ‘German ethnic affiliation’ primarily required a ‘commitment to German ethnicity’, which had to be confirmed by ‘certain characteristics such as language, ancestry, upbringing and culture’. This definition stemmed from a circular issued by the Nazi Reich Ministry of the Interior in March 1939, which had regulated the nationality of the population in the annexed or occupied parts of Czechoslovakia.

A recognised resettler of foreign nationality was deemed to be a German (‘Statusdeutscher’) in accordance with Article 116(1) of the Basic Law and, pursuant to Section 6 of the First Nationality Regulation Act (1. StAngRegG) of 1955. The 1. StAngRegG also recognised as lawful the naturalisations carried out during the war by the Nazi authorities, for example through the‘German People’s List’in Poland and Ukraine. Upper Silesian ‘autochthons’ or Ukrainian Germans who could provide evidence of an entry on the ‘Volksliste’, as well as their descendants, were therefore regarded as German nationals from the Federal German perspective and were thus entitled to enter the Federal Republic.

Since the reform of the Federal Law on the Resettlement of Ethnic Germans (BVFG) at the end of 1992, late resettlers, in accordance with Section 4(1), ‘as a rule’ come only from the former Soviet Union. Germans from the states of Eastern Central and South-Eastern Europe can only be recognised as late repatriates if they can provide evidence of individual disadvantages suffered on account of their ethnic affiliation. The definition of ‘German ethnic affiliation’ has been amended several times since then, particularly with regard to the importance of German language skills. The language tests carried out since 1996 required German language skills acquired through ‘family teaching’. Since 2013, admission has been granted to knowledge acquired by other means, which has allowed the pool of potential late repatriates to grow once again.

Up until 1987, the immigration of resettlers was largely uncontroversial in West German politics and public discourse, at least as long as the number of new arrivals remained within narrow limits. There were critical discussions within the state apparatus regarding the resettlement of ethnic Germans from Yugoslavia in the 1960s, prompted by the high number of mixed marriages and the resettlers’ lack of German language skills. However, such internal controversies had no impact on resettlement policy at that time. There is also evidence of an increasingly negative public perception of resettlers during the surge in arrivals from Poland in the 1970s, although systematic findings on this are lacking. For example, in his 1976 Christmas address (the year with the highest influx since the major wave of resettlement from Poland in 1958), Federal President Walter Scheel urged the population “not to regard the Germans coming to the Federal Republic from the Polish sphere of influence and from other Eastern European states as foreigners, simply because many of them did not speak German.”^[4] In 1983, Guido Zurhausen, a civil servant in the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry, also lamented that “the German public […] no longer distinguishes clearly enough that a repatriate is not, in fact, a foreigner”, but countered this tendency with ‘official administrative practice’, which ‘consistently adheres to the principle of assessing and regulating the circumstances of resettlers separately from those of foreign immigrants.’^[5]

In the wake of the rise in the number of repatriates after 1987 and the associated difficulties with reception and accommodation, the issue was debated more controversially than before in political, public and academic circles. In large sections of the public, resettlers were regarded as just one immigrant group among many (‘guest workers’, asylum seekers) and viewed critically. The Federal Government, on the one hand, emphasised that the ‘door remained open’ and that repatriates were ‘an asset to our country’; on the other hand, however, it sought to regulate and curb the influx, for example through the Residence Allocation Act (1989) and the Resettlers’ Reception Act (1990), which compelled those wishing to resettle to remain in their country of origin until their entry was granted. The opposition criticised, above all, the fact that resettlers were granted privileged access to German citizenship on the basis of their ethnic origin and by reference to legal provisions dating from the Nazi era, whilst ‘guest workers’ who had already been living in the country for decades and their descendants, who had been living in the country for decades, were denied under the legislation in force at the time. The integration assistance granted to the new arrivals, as well as the full crediting of years of employment abroad under the Foreign Pensions Act, met with a lack of understanding within society. At the same time, the ‘German identity’ of the repatriates was increasingly called into question due to their declining language skills.

Against this backdrop of public scepticism, fuelled by various motives, state integration assistance and pension benefits were already being cut back as early as 1990–1991. The KfbG, which was passed at the end of 1992 as part of a broader compromise on migration policy (‘Asylum Compromise’) and came into force in early 1993, introduced an annual quota of a maximum of 220,000 people and set a prospective end date for resettler migration, as those born after 1992 can no longer acquire independent ‘late resettler’ status. In the years that followed, integration support and legal privileges for late repatriates were further reduced.

In retrospect, the integration of the Aussiedler who immigrated up to 1987 is regarded as having proceeded largely without difficulty. However, in contemporary media reports – which have not been systematically researched – as well as in academic research on Aussiedler conducted since the 1970s, there are clear indications of difficulties with professional integration, sociocultural adjustment difficulties (particularly amongst children and young people) and negative public perceptions of the second-wave Aussiedler. As early as 1971, the *FAZ* noted that the children of repatriates from Poland ‘did not have it much easier than “guest worker children”’; in the same year, *Der Spiegel* reported on the new arrivals from Poland: ‘Some make it through, others break down.’^[6] The Federal Government responded to the increased integration challenges resulting from the heightened influx from Poland from 1976 onwards with a special programme centred on the provision of housing, language support, the simplified recognition of qualifications and special support for young resettlers. These measures are likely to have contributed to the fact that the integration of this wave of repatriates is now regarded as a success.

• Klaus J. Bade, Jochen Oltmer (eds.): Aussiedler: German immigrants from Eastern Europe. Osnabrück 1999 (IMIS Publications 8).
• Christoph Bergner, Matthias Weber (eds.): Resettlement and Minority Policy in Germany: Assessment and Prospects. Munich 2009 (Publications of the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe 38).
• Barbara Dietz: Aussiedler/Spätaussiedler in Germany since 1950. In: Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen, Jochen Oltmer (eds.): Encyclopaedia of Migration in Europe. From the 17th Century to the Present Day. 3rd, revised edition. Paderborn et al. 2010, pp. 397–404.
• Sabine Ipsen-Peitzmeier, Markus Kaiser (eds.): ‘Strangers in Their Own Land – Russian-Germans between Russia and Germany’. Bielefeld 2006 (Bibliotheca Eurasica 3), Open Access PDF available at: www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-89942-308-2/zuhause-fremd/.
• Markus Kaiser, Michael Schönhuth (eds.): Home? Foreign? Migration and Settlement Strategies between Germany and Eurasia. Bielefeld 2015 (Bibliotheca Eurasica 8).
• Rainer Münz, Rainer Ohliger (eds.): Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants. Germany, Israel and Post-Soviet Successor States in Comparative Perspective. London 2003.
• Marius Otto: Between Local Integration and Regional Belonging. Transnational Social Spaces of Resettlers of Upper Silesian Origin in North Rhine-Westphalia. Bielefeld 2015.
• Jannis Panagiotidis: What is the German’s Fatherland? The GDR and the Resettlement of Ethnic Germans from Socialist Countries (1949–1989). In: East European Politics & Societies and Cultures 29 (2015), No. 1, pp. 120–146.
• Waldemar Vogelgesang: Young Resettlers. Between Uprooting, Marginalisation and Integration. Weinheim 2008.
• Lothar Weiß (ed.): Russian-German Migration and Protestant Churches. Göttingen 2013 (Bensheimer Hefte 115).
• Susanne Worbs, Eva Bund, Martin Kohls, Christian Babka von Gostomski: (Late) Repatriates in Germany. An analysis of current data and research findings. Nuremberg 2013 (Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, research report 20).

• Federal Office of Administration: www.bva.bund.de/DE/Home/home_node.html (The Federal Office of Administration is responsible for administering the resettlement procedure. The website contains relevant guidance, forms and statistics.)
• Federal Government Commissioner for Matters Relating to Ethnic German Resettlers and National Minorities: www.aussiedlerbeauftragter.de/AUSB/DE/Home/startseite_node.html (The Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Ethnic German Resettlers was established in 1988 at the start of the large wave of resettlement from Eastern Europe to coordinate the integration of these resettlers. Its remit now also includes German minorities in Europe and national minorities in Germany.)
• Federal Office for Migration and Refugees: www.bamf.de (The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, which has borne this name since 2005, deals with all forms of immigration to Germany, including that of late repatriates and Jews from the former Soviet Union.)

[1] Claudia Schneider: A German amongst Germans? ‘Immigrants from the People’s Republic of Poland’ in the GDR from 1964 onwards. In: Kim Christian Priemel (ed.): Transit – Transfer: The Politics and Practice of Immigration in the GDR 1945–1990. Berlin 2001, pp. 51–74.

[2] These and the following figures relating to the Federal Republic of Germany are taken from: Worbs et al.: (Late) Resettlers in Germany, pp. 31–33.

[3] Panagiotidis: ‘What is the German’s Fatherland’, p. 122.

[4] Scheel calls for greater understanding of resettlers. In: Die Welt, 24 December 1976.

[5] Guido Zurhausen: The role and responsibility of the federal government, the Länder and local authorities in the reception and integration of resettlers. In: Hans Harmsen (ed.): Resettlers in the Federal Republic of Germany: Research by the AWR, German Section; 2nd Report on Findings: Adaptation, Transition, Integration, Vienna 1983, pp. 13–25, here p. 24.

[6] Key L. Ulrich: The Germans from Poland. In: FAZ, 30 April/1 May 1971; ‘Some make it through, others break down’ – Spiegel report on repatriates from the East and their naturalisation in the West. In: Der Spiegel, No. 50/1971.

[7] Worbs et al.: (Late) Resettlers in Germany, pp. 197–198.

Jannis Panagiotidis: Aussiedler/Spätaussiedler. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2015. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32717 (as at 31 August 2020).