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Documents - German Expellees and their New Neighbors
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1.   Report by the Central Administration for German Resettlers [Umsiedler] in the Soviet Occupation Area (December 23, 1945)
In the months immediately after the end of the war, it was not yet possible to establish a central infrastructure to deal with the flood of refugees from the former German territories of Eastern....
2.   Annual Report of the Work of the Office for Resettlers within the Provincial Administration of Brandenburg (End of 1946)
It was only after the start of 1946 that authorities in the Soviet occupation zone were able to receive, attend to, and redistribute refugees and resettlers from the former German territories in....
3.   From the Report of a Housing Allocator in Bielefeld: Problems in the Resettlement of Refugees from Camps to Confiscated Housing (1946)
One of the greatest social problems in postwar Germany was providing the population with housing. The German authorities assigned refugees to excess rooms in undestroyed apartments and houses. As....
4.   The Tägliche Rundschau on the Equalization of Burdens (February 15, 1947)
The destruction and losses of World War II did not affect the German population equally. Millions of people who had been bombed out of their homes and refugees who had lost everything lived alongside....
5.   August Mayer, President of the Tracing Service for Missing Germans: People’s Solidarity and the Tracing Service (1947)
In the Western occupation zones, the search for missing persons was carried out by the German Red Cross; in the Soviet zone, the search was led by the “Tracing Service for Missing Germans” [Suchdienst....
6.   Request for Permission to Move In (1948)
This request illustrates both the social difficulties and the bureaucratic obstacles faced by refugees from the East.
7.   "Equalization of Burdens Means Equalization of Wealth" (1948)
The equalization of burdens was a topic of much debate. At the end of the 1940s, West Germans discussed models that relied not on confiscations and the redistribution of existing wealth, but rather....
8.   A Sudeten German Expellee Writes to the Resettlers Department of the State Government of Saxony (January 8, 1949)
The official policy of the SED in the Soviet occupation zone was to integrate resettlers into East German society as quickly as possible. The official line was that the state was providing them with....
9.   Comments on the Resettler Problem: The Organization Department of the Central Secretariat of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (February 24, 1949)
It still had not been possible to fully integrate resettlers into East German society by 1949. An internal report by the Central Secretariat of the SED was particularly critical of the fact that....
10.   Marion Gräfin Dönhoff: "Homeland in the East" (1950)
The West German government strove to integrate resettlers into society to the greatest extent possible. At the same time, however, it did not try to prevent them from banding together in the Organization....
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