Overall survey

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The “General Survey to Clarify the Fate of the German Population in the Displacement Areas” was the second of three large-scale studies carried out on behalf of the German Bundestag to document the expulsion of Germans from East Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1948.

The approach of the overall survey was the complete registration of names of all Germans who were resident at the beginning of 1945 in the eastern areas of the German Reich , in the Sudetenland or in other German settlement areas in east-central and south-east Europe. The aim of the survey was to clarify the fates of missing persons, to reunite families and to at least approximate the German expulsion losses.

The work of the overall survey was based on a resolution of the German Bundestag from 1957. The most important database of the survey was the address inventory of the home town directories of the church tracing service. This database was extensively expanded in the following years by evaluating old address books and other preserved personal registers, surveys and interviews with the group of expellees and emigrants from the GDR , evaluating lists of the Red Cross, etc. By 1964, the address list in the total survey had grown to over 18 million people.

This enabled the German population residing in the displaced areas at the beginning of 1945 to be recorded almost completely. In addition, the overall survey succeeded in reuniting tens of thousands of separate families and in solving the fates of tens of thousands of missing persons. Nevertheless, the work, which was largely carried out by volunteers, remained unfinished on important points.

The overall survey was completed in 1964, and the most important results were published in a three-volume report in 1965 ("Overall survey to clarify the fate of the German population in the expulsion areas", Munich 1965, publisher: Kirchlicher Suchdienst .)

The main problems of the overall survey were:

  1. The measured relatively low financial resources (around 900,000 DM to clarify the fate of almost one million missing civilians).
  2. The inaccessibility of Polish, Czech, Soviet and Yugoslav archives and the unwillingness of these countries to cooperate.
  3. The lack of willingness to cooperate on the part of the GDR government. The knowledge of the displaced people living in the GDR could be used very fragmentarily.
  4. In the Federal Republic of Germany too, political support for the overall survey finally seemed to wane. An indication of this is not least the small number of copies in which the final report finally appeared. This report is also not available in many large libraries; the work is unknown to a number of historians who later published on the expulsion and even on the question of expulsion losses.
  5. Whether the work of the overall survey was hindered by the eastern secret services remains to be speculated. In view of the extent of the influence exerted by the “ Headquarters Enlightenment ” (HVA) of the GDR Ministry for State Security, however, this assumption is entirely plausible. The infiltration of the expellees' associations by eastern secret services until 1989 has meanwhile been documented, at least in individual cases.

Despite these inadequacies and problems, the overall survey represents the most comprehensive documentation of the fate of the German expellees to date. It followed the five-volume “Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe”, Bonn 1953–1961, edited by Theodor Schieder , which was also commissioned by Bundestag or the federal government and preceded the documentation of the Federal Archives on the eviction crimes (created from 1967 to 1973, released for publication only in 1982).