In 1950, in the aftermath of the Second World War and after flight and expulsion had come to an end, there were about four million Germans still living in East, East Central and Southeastern Europe. Between 1950 and 1975, a total of about 800,000 Aussiedler (immigrants who are recognised by the German authorities as being of German descent) passed through the Western German border transit camps, and 616,000 more arrived between 1976 and 1987. Then, with the opening of the Iron Curtain, mass immigration of the Aussiedler began. Against the background of ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ in the USSR, their numbers increased rapidly from 1987 onwards. During the next nearly two decades, three million Aussiedler entered the Federal Republic of Germany. In all, more than four million migrants of officially recognised German descent emigrated to Germany during the second half of the 20th century. In comparison, ‘ethnic German’ immigration during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic amounted to only several tens of thousands of people who, moreover, to a considerable extent returned to their countries of origin or continued to migrate overseas. The ‘remigration’ of ‘Germans of foreign citizenship’ since the late 19th century constitutes the background of today's influx of Aussiedler, a phenomenon that, since the beginning of the 1990s, has been increasingly contentious. The following comments will first discuss manifestations and structural patterns of ‘ethnic German’ immigration between the 1880s and 1930s. Then the focus will turn to the perception within Germany of ‘ethnic German’ immigration and to the integration – or, if applicable, non-integration – of the group under consideration, taking into account the fundamental changes occurring after the First World War in Germany's political and economic situation.

‘Remigration’ of Russian-German Settlers in the Empire and Promotion of ‘Germanness’ in the Prussian East

From the late 19th century onwards, a large number of German settlers from East, East Central and Southeastern Europe had continued to migrate. Many of those German colonists, for example, who, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, had settled in tsarist Russia since the 1870s, moved on to the United States, South America, Canada, and Australia.