Republikflucht

The term was first used in 1945 almost immediately after World War II by officials in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, four years before the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany or GDR), in reference to the large number of Germans legally migrating westward to the American, British, and French zones of occupation.

A propaganda booklet published by the GDR's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1955 for the use of party agitators outlined the seriousness of "flight from the republic": Both from the moral standpoint as well as in terms of the interests of the whole German nation, leaving the GDR is an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity.

Is it not despicable when for the sake of a few alluring job offers or other false promises about a "guaranteed future" one leaves a country in which the seed for a new and more beautiful life is sprouting, and is already showing the first fruits, for the place that favors a new war and destruction?

[3][4] Close to one million of those who left were refugees and expellees from World War II and the post-war era initially stranded in the Soviet zone or East Berlin.

[5] Republikflucht was effectively criminalized after the GDR began erecting the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961, which saw the extreme tightening of emigration across the Iron Curtain.

The large numbers of emigrants was regarded as an embarrassment for the GDR leadership, owing to its competition with the Federal Republic, and undermined its legitimacy as an independent state.