Historians in Germany are criticising the federal government’s policy regarding Eastern Germans who were “resettled” after the Second World War.

According to a statement issued by the Association of German Historians (VHD), the new draft law concerning the Flight, Expulsion, and Reconciliation Foundation—tabled in the Bundestag in mid-August—reduces the complex events of the post-Second World War “resettlement” process to “German suffering”. It ignores the necessary historical context, namely the war of annihilation waged by Germany in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, and thereby creates a “self-referential national narrative” hitherto developed primarily by expellee associations.

Historians point out that this situation jeopardises reconciliation efforts, particularly with Poland and the Czech Republic.

Because this change of focus directly affects the permanent exhibition maintained by the foundation at the Documentation Centre for Flight, Expulsion, and Reconciliation in a central district of Berlin, it will generate a broad public impact.

This development goes hand in hand with the revival of Berlin’s former “Germanness” policy towards minorities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Post-war German migration exhibition: where is Nazi Germany?

According to German Foreign Policy, the starting point of the recent debates surrounding the Flight, Expulsion, and Reconciliation Foundation was the permanent exhibition at the Documentation Centre for Flight, Expulsion, and Reconciliation, which is operated by the foundation and opened at the Deutschlandhaus in Berlin in 2021.

Spanning two floors, the exhibition chronicles the resettlement of the German-speaking population from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe after the Second World War. The exhibition thus addresses historical events within a two-part context.

As the historian Felix Ackermann, who teaches at the Distance-Learning University of Hagen, described by way of example, the first floor presents “the pre-history of ethnic nationalism and state-enforced migration”, particularly in the context of various cases of flight, expulsion, and resettlement in 20th-century Europe.

Building on this content, the second floor focuses on the post-war resettlement of Germans.

However, this core element of the permanent exhibition is preceded by a very brief overview of the war in which Nazi Germany occupied significant parts of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.

This aspect is of vital importance because without this knowledge, the complexity of the “resettlement” process cannot be evaluated in its proper context and adequately understood.

The Polish border issue

The overall structure of the permanent exhibition is widely described as a “compromise” reached between right-leaning expellee associations and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Flight, Expulsion, and Reconciliation Foundation.

This board also includes historians, particularly from Poland and the Czech Republic.

This compromise had hitherto been maintained by the director of the Documentation Centre, the historian Gundula Bavendamm.

However, in mid-2024, expellee associations effectively abandoned this compromise and launched a fierce attack.

For instance, in a letter sent to Bavendamm by Bernd Fabritius (CSU), then president of the Federation of Expellees (BdV), it was stated that the connection between the resettlement process and Germany’s war of annihilation had to be severed, as this “confused context with causality”.

Fabritius also argued that the Federal Republic of Germany’s 1990 recognition of Poland’s national borders should not legally be characterised as a “cession” of the former eastern territories of the German Empire.

This statement recalls that the border treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and Poland merely “confirmed” the border between the two states, described it as “inviolable”, and renounced all “territorial claims”.

The treaty contains no unconditional recognition definitively describing the border as “inviolable”. As Fabritius’s statement implies, this situation could give rise to potential loopholes.

CDU/CSU influence in German expellee associations

The offensive launched by the expellee associations gained momentum following the change of government last year.

Initially, despite the unanimous objections of the Academic Advisory Board, this led to Documentation Centre director Bavendamm’s contract not being renewed in November 2025 and the post being advertised.

Close observers noted that not only the expellee associations played a role in this process, but also the Group of Expellees, Repatriates, and German Minorities within the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, which is closely linked to them.

The leader of this group, Klaus-Peter Willsch (CDU), is a member of the board of trustees of the Flight, Expulsion, and Reconciliation Foundation.

Similarly, Stephan Mayer, deputy chairman of the Expellees Group who took over the BdV presidency from Fabritius, is also a member of this board.

The person they sought to appoint as director of the Documentation Centre to replace Bavendamm was Sven Oole.

Critics had noted that Oole had “no managerial experience in German museums” and had produced no “academic publications” on the subject, but that “as the long-time managing director of the ‘Group of Displaced Persons’, he knew the group’s historical-political goals like the back of his hand”.

Oole’s candidacy failed due to threats from the Scientific Advisory Board that it would resign en masse if he were elected.

In the end, Roland Borchers was selected, but it is said that no one knows “where he intends to lead the foundation”.

Attempts to define Germans as a community based on descent

However, the substance of Borchers’s work is likely to be severely curtailed by the new law on the Flight, Expulsion, and Reconciliation Foundation, which was adopted by the federal government in July and submitted to the Bundestag in mid-August.

The Association of German Historians (VHD) directed sharp criticism at this legislation in late May. This criticism stems partly from the fact that Bernd Fabritius, in his role as Federal Government Commissioner for Matters Related to Ethnic German Resettlers and National Minorities, will in future hold an additional seat on the foundation’s board of directors.

According to the VHD’s statement, this will effectively give the BdV “a government-backed majority position on the foundation’s supervisory board”.

In its statement, the VHD explicitly warns against “bad examples of a state-directed remembrance policy”.

Furthermore, the statement contends that the new law focuses the foundation’s work to a certain degree on “German suffering” and replaces “the historical context of flight and expulsion with a self-referential national narrative”.

This situation further exacerbates “existing threats to reconciliation efforts, particularly with the Federal Republic’s Eastern European neighbours, especially Poland and the Czech Republic”.

Finally, the statement notes that, diverging from the openness of recent years, the law “once again defines Germans as a community based on descent”.

No immigration to Germany—except for “ethnic Germans”!

The historian Felix Ackermann also recently addressed the broader political context.

According to Ackermann, the new law aims not only to strip the resettlement process of its historical context and confine commemorative activities to a narrow national framework.

In addition, the federal government is moving the Flight, Expulsion, and Reconciliation Foundation from the purview of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media to the remit of the Federal Ministry of the Interior.

Christoph de Vries, Parliamentary State Secretary at this ministry and deputy chairman of the Expellees Group within the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, is also pushing for “the opening of new immigration channels for ethnic kin”.

Indeed, while politicians such as de Vries advocate strict restrictions on immigration, the Federal Ministry of the Interior seeks to revise immigration regulations for members of German-speaking minorities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

This revision would allow even German speakers born after 31 December 1992 to obtain German citizenship.

As Ackermann noted, this dual focus on the concept of “Germanness” makes it possible to describe the expulsion regions, just as during the Konrad Adenauer era, as the whole of the “German East”.

The fact that the “responsibility to preserve the history of the German East” now falls once again to the Federal Ministry of the Interior—which, as is well known, is responsible for domestic and not foreign affairs—seems to Ackermann “like a bad joke”; yet, Ackermann says, in reality this situation “brings terrible consequences.”