German Expellees

They were taken care of – as part of the displaced persons – by international refugee organisations until 1951 and then by West German authorities granting them the extra status of "heimatloser Ausländer" with preferential naturalisation rules, distinct from other legal aliens or stateless people.

These comprised refugees and emigrants either originally of foreign citizenship but of German ethnicity, or who themselves or whose ancestors had involuntarily lost German citizenship, coming from the above-mentioned uniform territory of expulsion or from Albania, Bulgaria, China, Romania, the Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia, and arriving only after the end of general expulsions but not later as 31 December 1992.

[4] In a document signed in 1950 the Heimatvertriebene organisations recognised the plight of the different groups of people living in today's Poland who were resettled there by force.

The expellees are still highly active in German politics, and are one of the major social groups of the nation, with around 2 million members.

Examples of this phenomenon include Neugablonz, a quarter of Kaufbeuren in Bavaria, founded by the expellees and named after Gablonz (Jablonec nad Nisou).