Abstract
In the immediate period following the Second World War the Western occupation zones of Germany received eight million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. Initially these newcomers were lumped in Western German discourse under the term ‘refugees’. Yet, within less than a decade, the term ‘expellees’ emerged as a more popular denotation. Scholarship has offered two explanations for this semantic change, emphasising the political influence of both the Allies and the ‘expellee’ leadership. This article presents a complementary reason for this discursive shift. We argue that ‘expellees’ marked the symbolic weight that the ethnic Germans offered as expulsion victims in order to balance out German guilt for Nazi crimes.
Highlights
In the immediate period following the Second World War the Western occupation zones of Germany received eight million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe
We argue that ‘expellees’ marked the symbolic weight that the ethnic Germans offered as expulsion victims in order to balance out German guilt for Nazi crimes
We argue that West Germans agreed to integrate these newcomers and endorse, or at least tolerate, their political demands and terminology, because they benefited from the unique symbolic weight that the ethnic Germans offered as expulsion victims
Summary
In the immediate period following the Second World War the Western occupation zones of Germany received eight million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. The research literature provides two complementary reasons for the shift in terminology to the label ‘expellees’: first, the US military government ordered the German authorities in its zone of occupation to refer to the uprooted Germans from Central and Eastern Europe by this name;[5] secondly, the ethnic Germans in question identified themselves as victims of expulsion and lobbied effectively to be recognised as such by the local Western German population.[6] This discursive change is all the more evident when compared to parallel processes in Eastern Germany. By referring to specific newspaper reports and articles, we show how the shift to the nomenclatureexpelleesentailed an added value to the German self-representation as victims of the Second World War
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