Since 2014 the president of the Federation has been Bernd Fabritius, who arrived in West Germany in 1984 as a Transylvanian Saxon refugee from Agnita, Socialist Republic of Romania, and who has since been elected as a Christian Social Union in Bavaria Member of the Bundestag.
It is estimated that in the aftermath of World War II between 13 and 16 million ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from parts of Central and Eastern Europe, including the former eastern territories of Germany (parts of present-day Poland), the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia (mostly from the Vojvodina region), the Kaliningrad Oblast of (now) Russia, hitherto USSR (in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War) and prior to this, the northern part of East Prussia, Lithuania, Romania and other East European countries.
The Charter of the German Expellees (German: Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen) of 5 August 1950, announced their belief in requiring that "the right to the homeland is recognized and carried out as one of the fundamental rights of mankind given by God", while renouncing revenge and retaliation in the face of the "unending suffering" (unendliche Leid) of the previous decade, and supporting the unified effort to rebuild Germany and Europe.
[1] Critics argue that the Charter presents the history of German people as starting from the expulsions, while ignoring events like the Holocaust.
Professor Micha Brumlik pointed out that one third of signatories were former devoted Nazis and many actively helped in realisation of Hitler's goals.
Although the Social Democrats showed strong support for the expellees, especially under Kurt Schumacher and Erich Ollenhauer, Social Democrats in more recent decades have generally been less supportive – and it was under Willy Brandt that West Germany recognized the Oder-Neisse line as the eastern German border with Poland under his policy of Ostpolitik.
One of the potential complications was the claim to the historical eastern territories of Germany; unless this was renounced, some foreign governments might not agree to German reunification.
Once the five "reestablished federal states" in the east had been united with the west, the Basic Law was amended again to show that there were no other parts of Germany, which existed outside of the unified territory, that had not acceded.
[10] When in government, both CDU and SPD have tended to favor improved relations with Central and Eastern Europe, even when this conflicts with the interests of the displaced people.
Furthermore, the nationalization of private property by Poland's former communist government did not apply only to Germans but was enforced on all people, regardless of ethnic background.
[12] In February 2009, the Polish newspaper Polska alleged that over one third of the Federation top officials were former Nazi activists, and based this on a 2006 article published by the German magazine Der Spiegel.
[13] The German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, later revealed that Der Spiegel had written this not in respect to the Federation of Expellees, but instead about a previous organization that was dissolved in 1957.