Return-homeland promises to expellees sapped their will to integrate economically

Evidence

In a similar way, in 1950 the Social Democrat Heinrich Albertz, Minister for Expellees of Lower Saxony who had been displaced from Silesia himself, wrote an angry letter to the CDU Federal Minister of Labour Anton Storch (a non-expellee German from Hesse), in which he demanded a halt to promising the expellees that they could return one day to their old homelands. In Albertz’ opinion these promises just raised unrealistic hopes among the expellees, maintaining ‘the psychological situation of sitting on the packed suitcase’ and therefore weakening the ‘will to work’. Facing the dilemma of West German expellee policy, this Social Democrat made a clear choice: ‘Although the demand for a revision of the German East must be never abandoned by us, we in the West have to speak and to act, as if not a single German expellee would come home again.’ — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 382

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: An achievable return-to-homeland goal offsets hardship; without it a minority becomes a lasting middleman — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 474; Expellee leaders shifted from demanding return to integrating within a few years — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 933; Successful economic integration did not dissolve expellee political communities organized around lost-homeland grievance — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 33 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• An achievable return-to-homeland goal offsets hardship; without it a minority becomes a lasting middleman #corroborates (0.80) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 474