This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

Eastern Europe and the USSR had large German minorities. In the USSR this dated back to Catherine the Great, who in 1763 issued a manifesto inviting Germans to settle and colonize land on the Volga in exchange for tax and legal privileges. During Gorbachev’s Perestroika the German minorities began making use of the West German law of return that immediately granted them citizenship as Aussiedler – a consequence of the ethnobiological definition of German nationhood (but why, assimilated, tax-paying, Germanophone second-generation descendants of Turkish labor migrants wondered, should russified descendants of labor migrants to eighteenth-century Russia have easier access to citizenship than they?). Chapter 6 charts the history and lived experience of the 2.3 million Aussiedler who immigrated since 1987 and who have remained largely invisible in public consciousness. The chapter title encapsulates their fraught situation of dual non-belonging: discriminated against in the postwar Soviet Union as “fascists,” they hoped to rejoin fellow Germans when emigrating, yet in reality were excluded as “Russians.”

Wartime destruction and postwar redrawing of borders sparked a refugee crisis in Poland massive in dimensions and very particular in character. Two million ethnic Poles, driven out of the territories annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of the war, had to find new homes in the German territory ceded to Poland in 1945. The refugees did not encounter a “host society” per se, as the region’s former ethnic German population had been expelled, nor did they settle entirely unpopulated land. Some 2.5 million other Poles had migrated from the war-torn towns and villages of central Poland to the country’s new west shortly before the refugees’ arrival. These groups of Poles were joined by 200,000 Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust, 200,000 Ukrainian-speakers forcibly resettled from southern and eastern Poland in 1947, and 1,000,000 so-called autochthones in Upper Silesia and Masuria, former German citizens allowed to stay in Poland because of their presumed Polish background. This essay explores strategies used to integrate this diverse population and the long-term consequences of forced migration.