Germany defined expellee status broadly while France narrowly restricted repatriate status

Evidence

Fourth, both groups received a peculiar legal status and benefited from particular migration regimes that evolved around them. Specific ministries were in charge of them – the Federal Ministry for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims (1949–69) and the Ministry of the Repatriates (1962–4, 1986–8, and 1993–5). Laws defined who was an ‘expellee’/‘repatriate’ – and who was not. On 19 May 1953, the Federal Expellee Law (Bundesvertriebenengesetz) defined the (hereditary) status of German citizens and people of ethnic German descent who had been forced to leave the former German provinces or other areas outside the 1937 borders of the German Reich. The repatriates were granted legal status on 26 December 1961, with a law that defined them as persons of French nationality who ‘had to [leave] or felt forced to leave’ a territory formerly under French sovereignty. Both states not only stipulated that expellees and repatriates were totally equal to other citizens but also granted them specific rights for their socio-economic advancement. While West Germany’s definition of expellee was extremely inclusive (ethnic and intergenerational), France’s definition of repatriate was narrow, based on citizenship and a person’s specific date of arrival. As a further difference, the German Expellee Law granted specific rights to preserve expellees’ cultural traditions and heritage, whereas the French law had no such provision for repatriates. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 60

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts the legal construction of group boundaries with similar migration-regime analysis in the France-West Africa colonial work; also links to reader’s theme of how states manufacture and maintain group categories. — connects to: West Germany preserved expellee cultural identity where East Germany and France sought swift assimilation — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 72

Broader Connections

• West Germany preserved expellee cultural identity where East Germany and France sought swift assimilation #expands (0.82) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 72