Expellee organizations never enrolled more than small minorities of expellees

Evidence

However, even if one were to give the official data the benefit of the doubt, at least in the Federal Republic’s early years, the fact would still remain that the expellee organizations have never managed to attract more than relatively small minorities of their purported followers. The two million members claimed by the BdV at its founding in 1958, for instance, equaled less than a quarter of all the expellees in West Germany at the time. The two largest homeland societies were even less successful in percentage terms with their roughly 300,000 claimed members, given the fact that some 1.55 million Silesians and 1.9 million Sudeten Germans had resettled in the Federal Republic. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 580

Categorization

• QUESTION: If mass membership was never real, does the fabricated-enemy-solidarity question change — i.e. was the ‘solidarity’ itself mostly an elite assertional project rather than a mass phenomenon?