Heimatvertriebene

Heimatvertriebene (German for "expellees", literally "persons driven from their home countries") are those around 12 million German citizens (no matter of which ethnicity) and ethnic Germans (no matter of which citizenship) who fled or were expelled after World War II from parts of Germany annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union (today Russia), and from other countries (the so-called einheitliches Vertreibungsgebiet; i.e. uniform territory of expulsion), who found refuge in both West and East Germany, and Austria. Refugees who had fled voluntarily but were later refused permission to return are often not distinguished from those who were forcibly deported. By the definition of the West German Federal Expellee Law, enacted on 19 May 1953, refugees of German citizenship or German ethnicity, whose return to their home places was denied, were treated like expellees, thus the frequent general usage of the term expellees for refugees alike.

Distinguished are refugees and expellees who had neither German citizenship nor German ethnicity but as a matter of fact had fled or been expelled from their former domiciles and stranded in West Germany or West Berlin before 1951. 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. Occupational functionaries and other German expatriates, who had moved to German-annexed or German-occupied foreign territory only due to the war were not considered expellees by law unless they showed circumstances (such as marrying a resident of the respective area) providing for the intention to settle abroad also for the time after the war. Besides the narrow legal definition for the Heimatvertriebene, there were also other groups accepted as Vertriebene (expellees) such as the Aussiedler. 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.

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Wikipedia