Compensation plus courtship persuaded expellees to integrate despite lingering inequality

Evidence

The Equalization of Burdens Act of 1952 taxed residents who had survived the war relatively unscathed to compensate expellees, prisoners of war, widows, orphans, and victims of persecution or material destruction. Social and economic inequality persisted between newcomers and ‘natives’, and some expellees departed for the USA and Canada. Nevertheless, monetary compensation, the government’s courtship of expellees, and the West German ‘Economic Miracle’, persuaded most to see their future in West Germany. To neutralize expellee organizations, many of them representing Germans from the former Prussian east, and to exploit the provisional status of the Oder–Neisse boundary as stipulated at the Potsdam Conference, the Adenauer government advocated a reunified Germany that returned to its 1937 borders before the Nazi annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 186

Categorization

• XREF: The government’s courtship of expellee organizations and advocacy of 1937 borders and Oder-Neisse revision is a state-led manufactured/grievance-maintaining external enemy (Poland/Czechoslovakia) — directly relevant to reader’s question of whether external grievance sustains solidarity. — connects to: Close intergroup contact can sustain inequality through paternalistic affection rather than reduce it — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 671; Integration myths both obscured and drove postwar absorption of expellees — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 104; Dominant groups shift from paternalistic affection to reasoned persuasion once segregation breaks intimacy — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 672 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Did Adenauer’s pro-1937-borders platform sustain expellee grievance as a deliberate tool against Eastern communist states, and did abandoning it correlate with the BHE collapse?

Broader Connections

• Integration myths both obscured and drove postwar absorption of expellees #expands (0.80) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 104
• Close intergroup contact can sustain inequality through paternalistic affection rather than reduce it #complicates (0.75) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 671
• Prejudice has mutated into benevolent forms that sustain inequality #contradicts (0.75)
• Dominant groups shift from paternalistic affection to reasoned persuasion once segregation breaks intimacy #qualifies (0.72) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 672
• Dominant groups maintain advantage through affection-laced paternalism rather than hostility #contradicts (0.72) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 182