Resettlers

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German map from 1939 on resettlements from northeast and southeast Europe to the Warthegau

Resettlers are people who are involved in a resettlement . This is a larger population group who is leaving their previous living space through state -controlled measures in a joint resettlement campaign . It can be a voluntary migration or a forced migration . Examples of the latter are the transmigrations ordered by the Austrian court chancellery in the 18th century . In the 20th century, major resettlements in Europe took place immediately before, during and after the Second World War .

Poland after the First World War

With the Peace Treaty of Versailles , the second Polish republic a . a. Parts of the provinces of West Prussia , Posen and Upper Silesia of the German Empire were struck. Germans ( optanten ) who had previously lived there had the choice of either taking on Polish citizenship or leaving the area and relocating. Immediately afterwards, 200,000 German resettlers left the areas assigned to the Republic of Poland.

Other states

In 1913 there were the first resettlement arrangements to the ceded Thrace in peace treaties between Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece . In 1923, under the Treaty of Lausanne, 1.5 million Greeks were relocated to Greece and half a million Turks to Turkey. There were other agreements, for example, between Romania and Bulgaria ( Treaty of Craiova ) in 1940 because of the Dobruja , Bulgaria and Greece (→ Thracian Bulgarians ), Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1946 with regard to Slovaks .

German Empire from 1933 to 1945

Trek of ethnic German resettlers from Cholm , Poland in 1940
NSV hands the resettlers in the Pinne camp pictures of Adolf Hitler for their apartments.
Resettlers from Lithuania in East Prussia (1941)
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During the time of National Socialism and the Second World War , many groups of ethnic Germans were affected by resettlement . Between 1939 and 1943 they were resettled from their non-German settlement areas (which had often been inhabited for many generations) to the conquered eastern areas under the slogan “ Heim ins Reich ”. It was about displacements of people from national ideologies on the initiative of the German Reich . In the case of friendly states or states dependent on the German Reich, bilateral agreements formed the basis for resettlement, for example the German-Soviet border and friendship treaty of September 28, 1939; in the case of militarily occupied states, this was not considered necessary. Resettlers were naturalized , making them compulsory and conscripted for the Reich Labor Service . There were exceptions to conscription for older resettlers.

The resettlement affected the following ethnic groups and areas:

The resettlement actions have their origins in Adolf Hitler's speech in the Reichstag of October 6, 1939 on the collapse of the Polish state as a result of the German occupation . In it he stated that in the "age of the nationality principle and the idea of ​​race" a "new order of ethnographic conditions" was necessary. He referred not only to the area of ​​Poland, but also spoke of the wider east and south-east of Europe, which was filled with "untenable splinters of German nationality". On the one hand, he promised himself that minority conflicts in the nation states would be prevented. On the other hand, the human potential to be resettled should settle the Poland conquered by Germany and the Polish corridor . This in turn required that the local population in the settlement areas was expelled or relocated. In the Warthegau alone, around 630,000 Polish and Jewish residents were affected between 1939 and 1944.

Most of the resettlers of German descent from northeast and southeastern Europe were settled in parts of Poland annexed by the German Empire , such as in the Warthegau and the Generalgouvernement . Therefore, in 1944/45 they got caught up in the process of flight and expulsion that encompassed all Germans living in the Prussian eastern provinces and eastern Europe . In the Federal Republic of Germany , the Nazi-specific term for resettlers remained important to denote a subgroup of expellees .

In the Holocaust , the term “resettlement”, similar to “ final solution ” and “ special treatment ”, also served as a euphemistic cover name for the transport of Jews to the extermination camps .

German Democratic Republic

After the end of World War II the Soviet occupation forces positioned in the autumn of 1945 for their occupation zone in, all German refugees or displaced persons to designate future officially called "settlers". This linguistic usage was only partially understood in society and especially among those affected, but in the official political and bureaucratic usage of language, "resettlers" or even "former resettlers" have since been spoken of in the GDR .

This referred to a large group of around 4.3 million people living in the Soviet Zone / GDR from 1947, which, however, should have decreased to around 3 to 3.5 million by 1961, especially due to an above-average participation in the flight to West Germany . There was a resettlement administration in the GDR , briefly headed by Friedrich Burmeister, and a socio-politically oriented resettlement law . By far the most important individual legal measure was an interest-free loan of 1,000 marks per family for the purchase of consumer goods. One-person households were entitled to 600 marks . In addition, the law provided for cheaper loans for the construction of residential and commercial buildings, a reduction in the delivery target for "resettled new farmers " by up to 50% and loans for displaced craftsmen and formerly displaced new farmers .

After 1953 there was no longer such a socio-politically motivated resettlement policy in the GDR. The novella by Anna Seghers and the drama by Heiner Müller , both titled Die Umsiedlerin , refer to this GDR language policy . After the unification of Germany , Bernhard Fisch and like-minded people founded the "Association of Resettlers of the GDR", which was merged into the Association of Expellees .

The integration of refugees and displaced persons in the GDR historiography has largely not been considered as a research topic .

Federal Republic of Germany

The spatial distribution of refugees and displaced persons after 1945 had made rural regions in Schleswig-Holstein , Lower Saxony and Bavaria , in particular , the focus of the displaced population in the West German occupation zones . To relieve the overcrowded countries, the early Federal Republic developed a statutory distribution key with the Federal Expellees Act , which aimed to appropriately distribute the expellees and refugees from the Soviet zone for the purpose of their economic integration as part of a general population balance, and also aimed at family reunification through resettlement (Section 26 BVFG in the 1953 version ). Participation in the resettlement was voluntary. Arno Schmidt refers to these processes in his short novel "Die Umsiedler", published in 1953.

Regardless of the consequences of the Second World War, there were spatially very limited resettlements in the Federal Republic of Germany, most of which had economic reasons, for example in lignite areas such as the Rhenish lignite district , when the Hamburg port was expanded (→ Altenwerder ) or the planning of the Berlin Brandenburg airport (→ Diepensee ).

Russian usage

Outside of this German language policy, an equivalent of the term “resettler” was also used in Russian in the 1930s to 1950s to denote various internal Soviet deportations in the context of the Stalinist purges . It is likely that this Russian use of the language influenced the language policy of the Soviet occupation zone and GDR. To what extent it is related to the Nazi language use described (the Soviet Union was an important contractual partner for Hitler's “resettlements”) remains to be seen.

Resettlement in the European Union

The resettlement of third country nationals of an EU Member State to another EU Member State based on the emergency clause of Article 78, paragraph 3 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union :

"If one or more Member States are in an emergency due to a sudden influx of third-country nationals, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may adopt provisional measures in favor of the Member States concerned."

In 2014 a total of 6,380 people were resettled to an EU member state or to Iceland, Norway or Liechtenstein, most of them to Sweden (2,045 people), Norway (1,285 people) and Finland (1,090 people).

In accordance with the emergency clause, the European Commission presented a relocation program in September 2015 to relocate 40,000 vulnerable people who have arrived in Italy or Greece to other EU countries. In the same month the EU states decided to distribute another 120,000 refugees from Italy and Greece across the EU. In practice, it is mainly people who come from Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Syria or Somalia who are resettled. The target group of the relocation program is people who have already applied for asylum in Italy or Greece and who have good prospects of protection in Germany. The Switzerland participated in the relocation program of the European Commission. The relocation programs are carried out in cooperation between the national contact points and asylum authorities and the European Asylum Support Office (EASO).

In August 2016, Pro Asyl reported that only a fraction of the planned resettlements had been implemented. According to the plan, 160,000 refugees should be relocated. With reference to the ongoing statistics of the European Commission, Pro Asyl pointed out that by August 2016 Germany had actually accepted only 62 people out of around 27,500 confirmed places.

In September 2017, Slovakia and Hungary failed  before the European Court of Justice with a lawsuit against the binding relocation of refugees within the EU.

Resettlement of third country nationals in a member state is not referred to as resettlement, but as " resettlement ".

Relocation because of power plants

Power plant construction can cause resettlement. In the case of open-cast lignite mining , the population must be relocated to the open-cast mining area; The Chinese Three Gorges Project relocated around 8.4 million people. In the event of nuclear disasters caused by nuclear power plants, the population had to be resettled from contaminated areas. Examples of this are the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters .

International initiatives and agreements

In 2012, the Nansen Initiative was launched to better protect individuals and groups who have been forced to leave their homes due to natural disasters or climate change and have therefore moved within their country or abroad. As a result of this initiative, a protection agenda supported by 109 countries, the Protection Agenda , was published in 2015 . Among other things, it provides for measures to reduce the risk and strengthen resilience to natural disasters on site, migration opportunities, planned resettlement from endangered zones and the protection of internally displaced persons. The Platform on Disaster Displacement was later used to continue the work started with the Nansen Initiative and to implement the recommendations of the Protection Agenda.

literature

  • Heike Amos: The SED's policy of expellees from 1949 to 1990 (=  series of quarterly issues for contemporary history . Special no.). Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-486-59139-2 .
  • Maria Fiebrandt: Selection for the Settler Society. The inclusion of ethnic Germans in the Nazi genetic health policy in the context of resettlements 1939–1945 (= writings of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism . Vol. 55). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-525-36967-8 .
  • Hellmuth Hecker (Ed.): The resettlement agreements of the German Reich during the Second World War (=  workbooks of the Research Center for International Law and Foreign Public Law of the University of Hamburg. H. 17). Research center for international law and foreign public law at the University of Hamburg, Hamburg 1971, ISBN 3-7875-2117-8 .
  • Dierk Hoffmann, Marita Krauss , Michael Schwartz (eds.): Displaced persons in Germany. Interdisciplinary results and research perspectives (=  series of the quarterly books for contemporary history. Special no.). Oldenbourg, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-486-64505-6 .
  • Heike van Hoorn: New home in socialism. The resettlement and integration of Sudeten German Antifa resettlers in the Soviet Zone / GDR. Klartext, Essen 2004, ISBN 3-89861-241-4 (also: Münster, Univ., Diss., 2002).
  • Stefan Nagelstutz: “Resettlers” in the Soviet Zone / GDR. Integration of expellees in the Soviet occupation zone / GDR 1945–1953. VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken 2008, ISBN 978-3-8364-6077-4 .
  • Alexander von Plato , Wolfgang Meinicke: Old Home - New Time. Refugees, resettled people, displaced persons in the Soviet occupation zone and in the GDR. Verlags-Anstalt Union, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-372-00404-3 .
  • Michael Schwartz : Displaced Persons and “Resettlement Policy”. Integration conflicts in the German post-war societies and assimilation strategies in the Soviet Zone / GDR 1945–1961 (=  sources and representations on contemporary history. Vol. 61). Oldenbourg, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-486-56845-0 (also: Münster, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2001).
  • Manfred Wille (Ed.): You had lost everything. Refugees and displaced persons in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany (=  studies by the Research Center for East Central Europe at the University of Dortmund. Vol. 13). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1993, ISBN 3-447-03404-1 .

Movie

  • Jacek Kubiak, Klaus Salge (Director): A blonde province - Poland and the German racial madness. Documentation, Germany 2009, 52 min. (In western Poland the Nazi regime planned a “blonde province” by settling ethnic Germans, some from Soviet areas. Based on, among other things, the biographies of three affected Poles from Poznan. The ones from the occupiers So-called transitional camps for Poles were similar to concentration camps: hunger, disease and murder were everyday life there.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Der Volks-Brockhaus, 10th edition, Leipzig 1943, p. 541.
  2. ↑ Uta Bretschneider: Resettlers (SBZ / GDR) online encyclopedia on the culture and history of Germans in Eastern Europe , 2013
  3. ^ Andreas Thüsing, Wolfgang Tischner, Notker Schrammek: Resettlers in Saxony. Admission and integration of refugees and displaced persons 1945-1952. A collection of sources. Leipzig, 2005. ISBN 3-933816-27-0 . Review for H-Soz-Kult by Esther Neblich, April 28, 2006.
  4. ↑ Michael Schwartz: Mirjam Seils: The Stranger Half Review, sehepunkte 20124, No. 12.
  5. ↑ Law for the further improvement of the situation of the former resettlers in the German Democratic Republic of September 8, 1950, Law Gazette of the German Democratic Republic No. 104 of September 14, 1950.
  6. ↑ Philipp Ther: Displaced Persons Policy in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR 1945 to 1953 Website of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation , accessed on November 11, 2017.
  7. ↑ Bernhard Fisch : "We need staying power". The German expellees 1990–1999. An inside view . Verlag Neue Literatur, Jena u. a. 2001, ISBN 3-934141-13-7 .
  8. ↑ Torsten Mehlhase: First efforts to integrate refugees and displaced persons in Saxony-Anhalt 1945-1949 with special consideration of the Sudetendeutschen Bohemia 1992, pp. 338–353.
  9. ^ Arno Schmidt: The resettlers. Short novel perlentaucher.de , accessed on November 11, 2017.
  10. ↑ EU member states recognized over 185,000 asylum seekers as entitled to protection in 2014. Eurostat, 12 May 2015, accessed 14 September 2017 . P. 3.
  11. ↑ Issio Ehrich: EU presents new refugee policy: An emergency plan for Rome and Athens. n-tv, May 27, 2015, accessed December 13, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Florian Tempel: Asylum seekers: 1000 refugees are supposed to come to Erding per month by charter flight. www.sueddeutsche.de, November 8, 2016, accessed November 15, 2016 .
  13. ↑ Switzerland is participating in the first EU program for the relocation of refugees and is increasing its local aid. Swiss Confederation, September 18, 2015, accessed on December 13, 2015 .
  14. ↑ Relocation: Relocation of asylum seekers from Greece and Italy to other EU countries. In: resettlement.de. German Caritas Association V. and Caritasverband für die Diözese Hildesheim eV, accessed on August 28, 2017 .
  15. ↑ Resettlement, HAP, relocation - please? Overview of admission programs. Pro Asyl, August 16, 2016, accessed August 29, 2017 .
  16. ↑ Slovakia and Hungary fail with lawsuits against the refugee quota. In: FAZ. September 6, 2017. Retrieved September 10, 2017 .
  17. ^ The Nansen Initiative. In: Environmental Migration Portal environmentalmigration.iom.int. IOM, accessed February 15, 2020 .
  18. ↑ a b Nansen Initiative. In: sustainabledevelopment.un.org. October 8, 2017, accessed February 15, 2020 .
  19. ^ Sabine Balk: Nansen Initiative: Resilience and planned resettlements. In: dandc.eu. D + C Development and Cooperation , March 29, 2017, accessed on February 15, 2020 .
  20. ^ A b Agenda for the Protection of Cross-Border Displaced Persons in the Context of Disasters and Climate Change. Final draft. October 6, 2015, accessed February 15, 2020 .
  21. ^ Nansen Initiative: Switzerland is committed to protecting people who have been displaced from the environment. In: humanrights.ch. October 16, 2015, accessed February 15, 2020 .

Web links

Wiktionary: resettlement  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations