Postwar immigrants to Germany and today's EU immigration issues

I've been interested in immigration issues for my whole adult life. As a very recent immigrant to Austria, as the spouse of an Austrian citizen, I have a new kind of immediate personal stake in the whole issue. That's not entirely new, though, since my wife was an immigrant to America during most of the nearly 25 years we've been married.

I've been posting for a while about the immigration issue in Europe, where rightwing populists have been making political hay with it. Opponents of xenophobia tend to say these days that the EU is not facing any kind of "crisis" on immigration. And that's true in the sense that the EU isn't facing a level of immigration (refugees and others) that they can't reasonably absorb. On the contrary, as long as economic growth in the conventional sense is a goal EU countries share - and it is - the EU needs immigration to do so. Births in the EU have been below replacement rates for a while. And for jobs providing personal support to the elderly, German and Austria are already heavily dependent on immigrant labor, a demand that will only grow with the much-discussed aging of the European population.

I prefer to describe the European immigration situation is a longterm crisis, a permanent crisis for all practical purposes, that has acute and less acute moments. In 2015, an acute moment occurred, connected particularly to the (internationalized) Syrian civil war. Immigration numbers are way down since then.

But that's partly an out-of-sight-out-of-mind illusion, too. The solution to the 2015 crisis was primarily two things: Germany unilaterally took something like a million refugees, for which the government was not adequately prepared in the short run, and Angela Merkel made a deal with Turkey to house refugees transiting to the EU in Turkey itself. It was a classic Merkel extend-and-pretend solution. It let politicians like Austria's then Foreign Minister Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz claim to have "closed the Balkan route." That claim helped him advance to his current position as Chancellor in the 2017 elections. But, like way too much of the alleged actions on the immigration crisis, it was largely fake political theater. A Kasperlespiel (Punch and Judy show), as they say here.

You don't have to go back to the Magyar invasions of the 9th and 10th century to find examples of mass immigration to German-speaking areas. One of the largest rapid relocations of people in history was that of the millions of ethnic Germans were driven out of eastern Europe in the years immediately after the Second World War.

The politics of this became incredibly complicated. The new immigrants formed their own organizations and pressure groups and generally counted among the most conservative elements of West German politics. The Florida Cubans who fled from the Castro regime could provide a useful analogy in the US context. And the massive wave of immigration was a mixture of some more-or-less voluntary migration (though not easily comparable to East German migration to West Germany in the 1950s), official expulsion (including the notorious Benes decree in Czechoslovakia), and forced-if-not-exactly-official pressure.

The postwar order also involved major changes to the borders of Germany. Significant territory that was German before the war went to Poland (Schlesien) and Russia (East Prussia). And the postwar Soviet occupation zone became East Germany. So there was complex and highly emotional questions of international borders in the mix, as well. The political power of the expellee groups were a major barrier to neogiating lasting peace arrangements and final borders.

One might think that these ethnic German refugees would be received and integrated into German society much more easily than today's refugees, mostly non-Germans from much poorer countries. After all, large numbers of the postwar expellees were actually German citizens. And in reality, millions were integrated into German society and contributed mightily to the German "economic miracle" in the 1950s.

But It turns out that ethnic German refugees were greeted with a great deal of hostility, too. Andreas Kossert is the author of Kalte Heimat: Die geschichte der deutsche Vertribenenen nach 1945-1949 (2008) about the German "expellees." An interview with him on that topic appears in 1945-1949: Die Nachkriegszeit (Spiegel Geschichte 1:2018). He says that "[Bedenken und Ängste] gehören zur universalen Geschichte von Flucht und Vertreibung, sie tauchen in untershiedlichsten Mustern immer wieder auf." ("[Preconceptions and fears} are part of the universal history of flight and expulsion, they always turn up again and again in the most diverse patterns.")

Putting numbers to the Vertreibung of the late '40s is tricky. My respect constantly grows for the historians who do the original research of picking through the evidence to make reasonable estimates of such numbers. Among the challenges here is that the Vertreibung is not a clearly defined event with a beginning and an end. And there is a significant amount of judgment involved in how to parse the various reasons for the outmigration, although it was overwhelmingly forced. Kossert's Spiegel Geschichte  interviewer cites a number of "up to 14 million," which seems significantly too high based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the history. The graffic immediately following the interview shows 11.9 million dated 1944-48 for refugees and expellees. And that figure seems to be estimating those who settled in Germany, which was most of them. It's also not clear if the 11.8 million are supposed to be ethnic Germans. During the last year of the war, it's worth noting, German propaganda painted the nature of Soviet occupation in the most lurid terms in order to strike maximum fear in the population and therefore encouraged and facilitated evacuation of Germans during that period. (The Soviet forces did provide some actual atrocities that lent credence to the propaganda.) How to view those evacuees in the context of the larger population movement of that time is one of the challenges.

Major contributing factors to German reluctance and hostility toward the new immigrants included the massive destruction of urban housing during the war, the devastating economic conditions facing millions of Germans including the loss of primary breadwinners in the war, and the food shortage that faced much of Europe immediately after the war, the latter exacerbated by unusally brutal winter weather in 1945. Those circumstances are a challenge in making comparisons between the reception of refugees in 1945-50 to today's immigration issues.

And there was a heavily ideological aspect of the reception, as well:

Die Menschen waren in der NS-Zeit immer wieder mit dem Negativbild vom „slawischen Untermenschen", vom Osten Europas als minderwertig konfrontiert warden. Diese Vorstellungen sind nach Kriegsende nicht einfach verschwunden.

Wir mussen fur diese unmittelbare Nachkriegszeit durchaus von einem handfesten Rassismus sprechen. Es ist nicht so, dass die Aufnahme der Fluchtlinge problemlos gelang, weil Deutsche zu Deutschen kamen. So fühlte es sich für die Menschen damals nicht an. Die Flüchtlinge und Vertriebenen kamen oft aus Lagern, viele hatten Gewalt erlebt, waren in einem erbärmlichen Zustand, als sie ankamen, verlaust, zerlumpt - und damit entsprachen sie in vielem den Klischees, die die einheimische Bevölkerung von Menschen „aus dem Osten" hatte. Es gab ihnen gegenuber ganz eindeutig Fremdenfeindlichkeit.

[People in the Nazi era were always confronted with the negative image of "Slavic subhumans," of eastern Europe as inferior. These conceptions didn't just disappear after the war.

For this immediate postwar period, we have to call it outright racism. It's not the case that the acceptance of the immigrants was achieved without problems, while Germans were coming to Germans. The people at the time didn't take it that way. The refugees and expellees often came from camps, many had experienced violence, were in a pitiful condition when they arrived, louse-ridden, ragged - and thereby fit in many ways the clichees that the native population had about people "from the east." There was clear xenopobia against them.]

The Nazi notion of the "Aryan race" turned out not to be so inclusive even of ethnic Germans!

Although many of these new immigrants spoke German, they often spoke different dialects from that of the regions where they settled. Many of them were Catholics moving into heavily Protestant areas, others Protestants moving into Catholic areas. Many were settled in rural areas, and local farmers often exploited them as cheap labor.

Over the years, understanding of the postwar refugee/expellee situation was clouded by the difficulty many Germans had in recognizing what happened during the Third Reich. So, many advocates for the Vertriebenen preferred not to discuss the plight of the postwar immigrants as a direct result of Germany's massive war of aggression in the east. In ethical, legal, and political terms, the expulsions were also unjust reactions to the consequences of the war. Advocates for the Vertriebenen preferred to emphasize the latter and largely ignore the former.

Kossert is cautious about drawing lessons for 2018 from the postwar experience with the German refugees and expellees, saying the "integration is a very long, sometimes generations-long process."

This is an interview with Kossert (in German) from the YouTube channel Ostpreußischer Rundfunk, which is managed in cooperation with the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen of the German state Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia). As their website and newspaper indicate, they are very much on the right wing of the German political spectrum. "Kalte Heimat" von Andreas Kossert - Die Integration der Vertriebenen in West- und Mitteldeutschland YouTube date :10/04/2012:

One reviewer of Kossert's book suggests, though, that his account is problematic in continuing the narrative of vicitimization characteristic of the rightwing Vertriebenen organizations. Andrew Demshuk (The German Expellee as Victim: The End of a Taboo? H-Net Reviews Oct 2010) criticizes:

... the book’s attempt to uphold (rather than critically investigate) expellee victim status. Certainly, it is not hard to portray expellee suffering, nor to find that they saw themselves as victims; the evidence in the core chapters does this well enough. Unfortunately, in part because of Kossert’s heavy reliance on statements by contemporary expellee political leaders in the League of Expellees (BdV), he claims that all expellees still demand redress from their German neighbors for failing to recognize that they had discriminated against them and contributed to their real status as victims.

This claim is premised on a misreading of history, in which the causes of the expulsion are blurred. In a style reminiscent of the old German nationalist accounts, the two contextual chapters idealize a peaceful, prosperous German East, in which the violent aspects of medieval colonization by the Teutonic Knights and general ethnic conflict before 1918 have no place. Discussion of the interwar period emphasizes the suffering of the German minority in Poland, thereby establishing them as victims even before the expulsion. Only hinting at Nazi crimes with his statement that “the Poles also suffered terribly under the Nazi politics of occupation and Germanization” (p. 27), as well as with an earlier nod to Jewish suffering, Kossert fails to explain what could have motivated the expulsion, to which he grants extensive detail. While he is right that children who suffered as Holocaust victims or expellees bore “similar long-term psychological burdens”, the search to heal such burdens requires additional analysis of the distinct contexts that brought this suffering about (p. 349). And it is problematic to imply that Nazi guilt was equal to, or even less than, the guilt of the Allied powers who expelled Germans. Illustrating German crimes in the East would not have undermined Kossert’s argument that many expellees had played no part in these crimes, nor that most suffered consequences out of proportion with their own behavior during the war. Indeed, had he demonstrated that Nazis also persecuted German communists in East Prussia and Upper Silesia during the war, he might have further added to his claims about the utter lack of rationality in the expulsion of Germans from the East. [my emphasis]

It worth noting that the claim of German victimization by the supposedly threatening and grasping immigrants is a key feature of the rightwing populist xenophobic appeal. And the preferred self-portrayal of the Vertriebenen groups during the Cold War years is a very important part of the historical background of that pitch.

A brief but well-done cartoon version of how Hitler became Chancellor of Germany 1933

How did Hitler rise to power? - Alex Gendler and Anthony Hazard TED-Ed 07/18/2016

For a five-minute video, this is remarkably good. It gets the Versailles Treaty, the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and the Great Depression into the story, frames anti-Semitism in an accurate way, and presents Hitler as a skilled politician, which he was - very much to the detriment of the whole world including Germany.

I'm particularly impressed that it avoids completely one of my pet peeves in the accounts of Hitler's rise to power, the claim that the hyperinflation of 1923-24 led to Hitler seizing power in 1933. That argument only works if you pretty much ignore the Great Depression, which hit Germany very hard, the actual voting results from 1924-32, and the issues on which the Nazi Party campaigned. The Nazis did use parliamentary methods supplemented by street violence to come to power.

But their biggest vote total in clean elections came in summer 1932, after several years of Herbert-Hooverish economic polices that made the Depression much worse. And their vote total dropped in a second parliamentary election in 1932. There was another vote just after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 which was semi-free at best. And even then the Nazis failed to get a majority.

There's a history that is a classic from 1938 but is still a valuable sources on the politics of the Nazis takeover, Why Hitler Came Into Power by Theodore Abel.

More on Heinrich Brüning's disastrous austerity policies

I recently wrote about German historian Knut Borchardt's controversial defense of Heinrich Brüning's economic policies during his Chancellorship of 1930-32.

Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1985/3 did an issue on the controversy over Borchardt's argument, featuring four major articles.

Editor Heinrich August Winkler breaks Borchardt's argument into two main points: the German economy was dangerously wounded before Brüning's Chancellorship; and, Brüning basically had no alternatives to his deflationary policies.

Charles Maier in "Die Nicht-Determinirtheit ökonomische Modelle.Überlegungen zu Knut Borchardts These von der „kranken Wirtschaft“ makes a strong argument against Borchardt. He points out that Borchardt bases his argument about labor costs being the whole problem rests on using total production costs per employee rather than the more conventional measure of cost by hour (unit of labor). This understates productivity during the period in question (1924-1932) because starting in 1924, the hours per worker were progressively and substantially reduced to such an extent that so using headcount understates productivity; it doesn't pick up the very substantial decrease in hour worked. Maier gives figures of the metal industry that the percentage of workers that worked more than 48 hours per week was 64% in 1934, going down to 34% in 1928.

Maier also shows that the portion of national income going to labor rather than capital during the Weimar Republic after 1924 looks fairly normal in international comparison. Borchardt makes much of the fact that the percentage going to labor increased after 1924.

Maier also points out that Borchardt's argument about real wages after 1924 is misleading, because in the immediate aftermath of the hyperinflation of 1923-4, conditions were very unusual and showed an artificially low real wage level in Germany. A comparison between real wages from 1913 to 1929 had Germany at a similar or lower level than the US and Britain.

Maier describes that Borchardt's argument about Brüning having no real alternatives as essentially deterministic, i.e., Borchardt argues that what did happen had to happen.

Bernd Weisbrod in "Die Befreiung von den 'Tariffesseln'" explains how closely Borchardt's arguments reflect the general view being expressed by business lobbies during the Weimar Republic. And he gives examples of how determined some business leaders were to drive down wages. This doesn't mean that all business leaders were well-disposed toward Brüning regime. On the contrary, some wanted him to be even more partisan toward capital and against labor. Weisbord also stresses the exaggerated fears of inflation expressed by business leaders and Brüning.

Gottfried Plumpe in "Wirtschaftspolitik in der Weltwirtschaftskrise.Realität und Alternative" calls into question Borchardt's argument about excessive wages and their effects, showing that especially the chemical and electrotechnical industries were very competitive in exports despite rising prices. Wages clearly weren't pricing them out of the export market.

He observes that with a depression already pushing down wages and prices, even conservative, classical economics should have told Brüning and his government that their policy of actively pushing down wages and prices further was seriously misguided.He argues further that the onset of the financial crisis in Germany in the summer of 1931 should have been a signal to Brüning to change direction away from aggressive deflation. "Die Regierung hat mögliche Alternativen nicht einmal ernsthaft erwogen," he writes. ("The government never even seriously considered possible alternatives.")

Jürgen von Kruedener in "Die Überfordung der Weimarer Republik also Sozialstaat" makes an unconvincing argument in favor of blaming labor for Weimar's economic problem s by looking at benefits costs paid by businesses. He also takes a weak stab at making the case that public social expenditures had overwhelmed the Republic.

Tags: austerity economics, german history, heinrich brüning, knut borchardt, weimar republic

Did Heinrich Brüning have no other choice but austerity economics in the Great Depression?

German economic historian Knut Borchardt caused a stir in the late 1970s and 1980s when he offered a spirited defense of the austerity policies of the "Hunger Chancellor" Heinrich Brüning (1885-1970).

Brüning served as German Chancellor from March 30, 1930 to May 30, 1932, holding his office by Presidential decree rather than by normal Parliament electoral procedures. Unemployment and the human distress that came with it rose significantly during Brüning's Chancellorship, as did the votes for Hitler's NSDAP (Nazi Party) as they exploited the issue. The NSDAP's popular vote in parliamentary elections rose from 6.4 million in 1930 - already a huge increase in their support from 0.8 million in 1928 - to 13.7 million in 1932, for the first time getting more votes than the Social Democrats and Communists combined.

Heinrich Brüning (1885-1970)

Several things struck me in my first reading of Borchardt's argument. (Chapters 9-11 of his Wachstum, Krisen, Handlunsspielräume der Wirschaftspolitik. Studien zur Wirschafsgeschichte des 19. un 20. Jahrhunderts, 1982) One is that it sounded awfully like a dogmatic defense of Brüning's "Hunger Chancellor" policies. And he sounds like he basically wants to blame the whole economic problem of the Weimar Republic on greedy workers demanding too much in wages. Both of those inclined me to take a dim view of his argument.

And, like Brüning's other defenders, he also argues that the foreigners made him do, i.e., that the reparations demands of the First World War victor countries are largely to blame for the restricted scope of decision-making by Brüning's administration.

Between the greedy workers ruining the economy and the bad foreigners forcing him to do exactly what he did, what choice did poor Brüning have to pursue deflationary, pro-cyclical antilabor policies that exacerbated unemployment and gave the NSDAP (Nazi Party) their highest margin in Parliament in 1932?

Although he describes several possible alternatives, his descriptions are an odd mishmash of discussions of who advocated them, the fact that there were arguments against them, and suggestions that they weren't politically plausible anyway.

Doing "what if?" scenarios on historical events are tricky, and there is always an argument that what actually happened was the best of all feasible occurrences. But that method of looking at alternatives reduces history to a bare description of events. Which is why it is well suited to a polemical defense of whatever happened in the case being discussed.

The trickiness of it can be seen at the time of this writing in the January 1, 2013 tax bill that ended the phony "fiscal cliff crisis" in the US. Those who followed the disputes closely at this point could point to several feasible alternatives whose advocacy by key leaders might well have produced other results with other implications. But defenders of the deal do essentially what Borchardt does for Heinrich Brüning's entire record on economic policy as German Chancellor in 1930-32. They argue that the deal struck was the best of all possible worlds. Twenty years from now, it will be more of a challenge for an historian to make a case for alternatives, because what happened will be embedded in the various narratives of the whole period and the possible alternatives won't be so fresh in the minds even of those who followed the events closely at the time.

A more realistic way of looking at possible historical alternatives would be to state the alternatives clearly; look at who advocated those alternatives, who might have advocated them, and why those were either rejected or not seriously considered; and, examine the ways events might have developed if key decision-makers had taken an alternative approach.

Brüning's failures are most remembered now for their implications on the events that followed, which led to Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Virtually everyone would agree that some alternative that would have avoided that eventuality could have produced a much better result for Germany and the world.

And the outlines of an alternative scenario to Hitler's actual selection as Chancellor are not that hard to produce. President von Hindenburg could have decided to keep Hitler out of the government. The key political figures in the decision like Kurt von Schleicher could have taken different positions. Hitler's Chancellorship wasn't a foreordained event of destiny. It was the result of concrete decisions taken by real people, people who could have decided differently. There are many other ways to approach that question, such as looking at the positions of the various political parties in the year before. And any "what if" scenario requires a certain amount of humility from the historian, a quality not always in abundant supply among academics. But there are more reasonable approaches than Borchardt's.

Borchardt was looking at a longer series of events than a discrete decision like Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. But he effectively eliminates any look at what might have happened if Brüning or other key figures had insisted on a very different course of action. If Brüning had refused to continue his austerity course and insisted to the Western Allies that the Weimar Republic would be destroyed if he did, France might have proved more accommodating than they actually were. Similarly, Borchardt seems oblivious to the fact that the NSDAP was benefiting mightily from the dire economic conditions Brüning's policies produced. If the Nazis could make an issue out of unemployment, why couldn't Brüning?

In history as it actually occurred, with Brüning's accession to the Chancellorship in 1930, the Weimar Republic degenerated into a semi-authoritarian state. And Brüning's Chancellorship represented a major step toward the Third Reich. On the other hand, Brüning was very much opposed to Hitler's participation in government, and he fled Germany when Hitler actually did take power. It's not a counter-factual to argue that he really didn't want Hitler to take over. Given that reality, it seems feasible on its face that Brüning could have decided on policies that would have combated unemployment, if only to deprive the Nazis of that issue. That didn't happen. But why it didn't happen is more complicated than Borchardt's steadfast defense of Brüning would suggest.

Tags: german history, heinrich brüning, hitler, knut borchardt, weimar republic

Again on hyperinflation during the Weimar Republic and Hitler's rise to power

I posted back in January about Paul Krugman commenting on what has long been one of my pet peeves, the idea that the German hyperinflation of 1923 led directly to Hitler and his Nazi Party (NSDAP) taking power in 1933, nine years later.

M E Synon also posted on that same topic in February, Merkel forgets Germany's history: 'Austerity not inflation gave us Hitler' Daily Mail 02/07/2012:

... here are some lines from a letter to the editor in the Financial Times yesterday. It comes from Anthony Murray in Kingston-on-Thames.

Murray recommends that readers should study the record of Heinrich Bruning, a predecessor of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. They could discover 'the real reason for Germany's descent into Nazism.'

'Monetarist fetishists have helped to circulate a pernicious falsehood that the Weimar uber-inflation caused the rise of Hitler.'

'The wild inflation storm occured in 1924. [sic; it was actually 1923 - Bruce] The Weimar economy recovered from it.'

'The Nazis came to power only in 1933, as an immediate consequence of the deflationary spiral that resulted from what Mr Wolf [commentator Martin Wolf, in an earlier article] refers to aptly as the "catastrophic austerity" introduced by Bruning.'

In my earlier post, I included this table from Peter Gay's The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952):

Repeating what I wrote in January:

The hyper-inflation incident was primarily a phenomenon of 1923. This is the period about which those stories are told about a loaf of bread costing a wheelbarrow full of money or whatever. A new currency was introduced late in 1923 and inflation stabilized.

This chart of election results shows the election results in millions of votes for the NSDAP (National Socialists, Nazi Party). In 1924, the year following the hyper-inflation, the NSDAP got 0.9 million votes. That fell to 0.8 million in 1928. Then in rose dramatically to 6.4 million in 1930 and 13.7 million in July of 1932. What else might have happened between 1924 and 1930? What could it have been?

Oh, yeah, that Great Depression thing. Economic crash, soaring unemployment. And Heinrich Brüning's Chancellorship of 1930-32.

None of this implies that the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s had no lasting effect. It's just that it's hard to match the notion that hyper-inflation brought the Nazis to power with the historical record as shown in election results.

While we're on the subject, it's worth noting that the NSDAP vote dropped significantly from the July 1932 election to November 1932. It's true that Hitler came to power mostly through electoral means. But Hitler's  feverish politicking that got him appointed Chancellor at the end of January 1933 was driven by his falling electoral support.

On the hyperinflation itself, see also Alexander Jung, Millions, Billions, Trillions: Germany in the Era of Hyperinflation Spiegel International 08/14/2009 14.08.2009

Tags: german history, hitler, hyperinflation, weimar republic

Krugman on European austerity and that German hyper-inflation thing

Paul Krugman has been looking at the lengths of the current depression in Britain and Italy compared with the Great Depression. In Britain, this one has gone on longer. (The Worse-than Club 01/28/2012) In Italy, it has gone on as long.

Heinrich Brüning (1885-1970)

And he makes an important historical point about the German economy in those days. Conservatives like to claim that the "hyper-inflation" in Germany in the 1920s resulted in bringing Hitler to power. Krugman writes:

France and Germany are doing much better than in the early 1930s - but then France and Germany had terrible, deflationist policies in the early 1930s. (It was the Brüning deflation, not the Weimar inflation, that brought you-know-who to power).

With two of Europe’s big four economies doing worse than they did in the Great Depression, at least in terms of GDP — and that’s three of five if you count Spain — do you think the austerity advocates might consider that maybe, possibly, they’re on the wrong track?

Peter Gay provided a helpful chart on this subjects in The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952):

The hyper-inflation incident was primarily a phenomenon of 1923. This is the period about which those stories are told about a loaf of bread costing a wheelbarrow full of money or whatever. A new currency was introduced late in 1923 and inflation stabilized.

This chart of election results shows the election results in millions of votes for the NSDAP (National Socialists, Nazi Party). In 1924, the year following the hyper-inflation, the NSDAP got 0.9 million votes. That fell to 0.8 million in 1928. Then in rose dramatically to 6.4 million in 1930 and 13.7 million in July of 1932. What else might have happened between 1924 and 1930? What could it have been?

Oh, yeah, that Great Depression thing. Economic crash, soaring unemployment. And Heinrich Brüning's Chancellorship of 1930-32.

None of this implies that the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s had no lasting effect. It's just that it's hard to match the notion that hyper-inflation brought the Nazis to power with the historical record as shown in election results.

While we're on the subject, it's worth noting that the NSDAP vote dropped significantly from the July 1932 election to November 1932. It's true that Hitler came to power mostly through electoral means. But Hitler's  feverish politicking that got him appointed Chancellor at the end of January 1933 was driven by his falling electoral support.

Tags: german history, hitler, paul krugman, weimar republic