German refugee policy
The term Flüchtlingspolitik refers to the legal provisions and the handling of refugees and asylum seekers wanting to enter a country, and/or subsequently staying there for a long period of time, in this case Germany and its predecessor states.
According to the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio ("whose realm, his religion"), the first type of religious refugee was established in the Holy Roman Empire at the Augsburg Settlement.
These refugees were members of an "incorrect" denomination and therefore fled to a state which was led by a sovereign ruler who shared their beliefs.
In summer 1789 it was mainly the high nobility, especially the King's relatives, and members of the higher clergy and the military leadership, who emigrated.
During the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, Germany was one of the countries most sought after by Jews who were fleeing violence and discrimination in eastern, central and south-eastern Europe.
Due to the Entente powers' blockade, this wave settled mainly in Central Europe, Germany and Austria.
This change not only intensified antisemitic resentment by the right wing supporters, but also triggered defensive reactions of fully integrated, sometimes even completely assimilated, "Jews from the West".
According to a population census in 1950, around 12.5 million refugees and exiles from the eastern territories formerly occupied by the Nazi regime fled after the end of the Second World War, to the Allied[excluding Russia?]
The so-called Displaced persons (DP) played a key role in the history of the German refugee policy post-1945.
[2] All over Eastern Europe, Stalinist dictatorships were established; that is why many of the Displaced Persons", especially those who were suspected of having collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, would not leave Germany: they feared severe penalties in their country of origin.
Between 1945 and 1949, a housing estate for roughly 5000 Displaced Persons from Ukraine[4] was built, under the initiative of the Americans,"in the "Ganghofersiedlung" in Regensburg (the former "Göring-Heim" (lit.
In addition, some were former Nazi collaborators and formed gangs of petty criminals, controlling the black market, which was important for the supply of the population at that time.
[6] More than 3.8 million people left the GDR, many of them illegally and at high risk, between 7 October 1949 and June 1990, from its foundation until reunification.
The "bottleneck" of asylum was very early "pried[clarification needed] forcefully from the outside and tightened again and again from the inside in a public defensive struggle, which created the bogeyman of the so-called 'refugee'".
[10] During the Cold War hundreds of thousands of people fled from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe through the "Iron Curtain" to the west.
In particular, after the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the violent termination of the "Prague Spring" in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement in Poland, politically motivated asylum seeking was again a mass phenomenon.
The refugees were granted asylum, most notably in the member countries of the NATO Pact, particularly in the Federal Republic of Germany.
In order to spare the 40,000 affected Vietnamese, who had been received by the Federal Republic of Germany, from the long procedure of applying for asylum, the category of "humanitarian refugees" was created.
[13] In the years of Germany's division, politically persecuted figures fled from Greece, Chile, Angola, Mozambique, El Salvador and Nicaragua to the GDR.
As a reaction to this crisis, asylum policy in Germany was established with the introduction into the Grundgesetz of articles tackling this problem.
It stated, amongst other things, that foreigners who from the start have been dependent on government aid, were to receive a lower amount than Germans and any others of equal status.
[16] In September 2015, the authorities found it more and more difficult to house the huge number of refugees and in particular concerned[clarification needed] the states' registration facilities (LEA).
In order to meet the needs at least partly, the responsible regional councils of the states opened provisional shelters in many locations: demand-oriented registration facilities (BEA).
The numbers of people living in the LEAs and the BEAs varied daily and they were accommodated in these registration facilities for a maximum of three months.
