Forced migrations do not turn into a concluded occurrence once the last expellee or refugee has reached his or her new place of residence. Such events leave an indelible mark on an individual's biography and moreover raise the question of how to deal with these events in everyone involved - in the instigators of the forced migrations, the people affected and the people in the new home country.

Problems emerge at quite different levels - be it individual, local, national, or international.

The very first concerns are the survival of the people affected, alleviation of the most pressing hardships and the task of organizing the new beginning. Some derive political claims from the event. And last but not least, there are the important questions of how to remember the events and their victims in an adequate way while at the same time creating a better future in which the forced resettlement of human beings is not hailed as a political panacea.

This section offers short introductions to the following topics:

• Reception and integration of the expellees in the Federal Republic of Germany (arrival, emergence of the expellees' associations, role in West German domestic policy, significance of the topic of expulsion in West German foreign policy). One subsection is dedicated to the "Charter of the German Expellees", the central programmatic document published by the German expellees' associations in the post-war period.
• West German historiography on the expulsion of the German population from Eastern Europe
• Policy on Expellees in the German Democratic Republic
• How the issue was dealt with in Poland and Czechoslovakia
• The current debates on a memorial against expulsions and the contribution made by the "European Network: Forced Migrations and Expulsions in Europe"

Link to Source texts

Source Texts on the Current Debates

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