Expellee party support peaked around 1950 then decayed through the 1950s

Evidence

So far it has been shown that, through the i rst years of the Federal Republic, the expellee movement was not only headstrong, but also enjoyed signii - cant support from the state and population. In 1950, roughly one-quarter of all Silesians in West Germany were members of either the Silesian or Upper Silesian Landsmannschaft , and the new expellee political party, the Block der Heimatvertriebenen (BHE), captured 23.4 percent of the vote in Schleswig-Holstein, followed by 5.9 percent at the federal level in 1953. Of course, that was the high point. By 1954, support in Schleswig- Holstein had dropped to 14 percent, a trend that repeated itself across the republic. By 1961, the BHE had to combine with another party and faded from view. Less ephemeral was the League of Expellees (BdV), but it managed to collect only 2.5 million members at its founding in 1957 by fusing together a myriad of earlier coalitions. Even these numbers may have been exaggerated, because the BdV admitted that only 1.5 million members paid “full dues.” — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 503

Categorization

• XREF: Directly documents the reader’s core question — the actual timeline/mechanism by which threat-hardened revisionist politics decayed as integration proceeded. — connects to: Expellee political power eroded once generational change and border settlement removed grievances — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 403; Once expellees integrated, their protests lost power to influence party loyalties — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 760

Broader Connections

• Expellee political power eroded once generational change and border settlement removed grievances #corroborates (0.90) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 403
• Once expellees integrated, their protests lost power to influence party loyalties #corroborates (0.85) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 760