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Abstract

This table documents population movement out of the East and into the Federal Republic. In 1950, expellees from various Eastern European countries accounted for one third of the population of Schleswig-Holstein and more than one quarter of the population of Lower Saxony. (Both of these states had suffered comparably little wartime destruction.) On Federal territory of as a whole, expellees made up 16.1% of the population in 1950. That percentage changed very little over the course of the decade – in 1961, expellees accounted for 15.9% of the population. (Please note: the term “expellee” does not include individuals who fled to Federal territory from the Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR. They are defined as refugees.)

Expellees in the Federal States of West Germany (1950 and 1961)

Source

1950

1961

States

Expellees in
thousands

%

Expellees in
thousands

%

Schleswig-Holstein

857

33.0

630

27.2

Hamburg

116

7.2

206

11.3

Lower Saxony

1,852

27.2

1,612

24.3

Bremen

48

8.6

98

13.9

North Rhine-Westphalia

1,332

10.1

2,298

14.5

Hesse

721

16.7

818

17.0

Rhineland-Palatinate

152

5.1

276

8.1

Baden-Württemberg

862

13.4

1,205

15.5

Bavaria

1,937

21.1

1,645

17.3

Saarland

–

–

18

1.7

Berlin (West)

148

6.9

151

6.9

Federal territory

8,025

16.1

8,956

15.9

Expellees are persons of German nationality or ethnicity who, on September 1, 1939, were permanently domiciled abroad or in the eastern territories of Germany that are currently under foreign administration (territorial borders as of December 31, 1937). This category also includes any children born to them after this time. Any persons from abroad who wanted to be recognized as expellees needed to prove that German was their mother tongue. The classification of children followed that of the father; the classification of children born out of wedlock, or those whose fathers had died, followed that of the mother. For the 1950 census, the category expellees also included Germans living in the Saarland as of September 1, 1939. For the 1961 census, however, the only persons counted as expellees were those who had applied for a Federal Expellee Identification Card (A or B). This did not include all those who were eligible. Because of this difference in counting methods, official estimates suggest that the increase in refugee and expellee numbers was actually twice as high as reported.

Source: Gerhard A. Ritter and Merith Niehuss, Wahlen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Bundestags- und Landtagswahlen 1946–1987. Munich: Beck, 1987, p. 31.