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Around a quarter of Germans are descended from those expelled from the east after the Second World War. They have had a complicated role in German history, and the AfD is trying to make use of their grievances.
A blue-eyed German teacher points to a weathered map of Germany in his classroom. The map displays Germany's territory before World War One, when it was far larger and contained parts of what is now Poland, the Czech Republic, and Russia. When students asked the teacher why he displayed the map despite it being over a half-century out of date, he reportedly told them: "So that you all can always see your European roots right in front of you." In Germany, a country whose borders were set after a brutal war of aggression and state-sponsored ethnic genocide, saying this is a huge taboo. And the teacher? That was Björn Höcke, the polemic head of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern German state of Thuringia. The state holds elections on Sunday seen as a key test for Chancellor Angela Merkel's party and the future of German politics, and Höcke is at the top of the far-right party ticket.
"They were treated like dirt."
With ancestors who were expelled from the formerly eastern German region of East Prussia, Höcke is one of many such "expellees" and their descendants. Many of them have never visited the lands of their ancestors, but still feel tied to those places decades later. They gather in pubs to talk about their genealogy, attend memorials for their ancestors who fled from the Red Army, and use online forums to speak of their "Heimat" — an evocative German notion of "homeland."
For some, this takes the form of simply appreciating the varied cultures that comprise German history. But others see themselves as the true "victims" of World War II, and talk about an "ethnic cleansing of the German East." The rights of expellees and Germany's eastern border were once fiercely disputed topics. These questions have dropped off the political agenda — and the AfD is trying to make use of that.
Forgotten history
After the Second World War, some 14 million ethnic Germans fled from areas that had been Germany's east, but was now controlled by Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, regions known as Prussia, Pomerania, the Sudetenland and Silesia. For much of the rest of the world, the story ended there.
But within Germany, there were huge numbers of "expellees" who had to settle in new areas and rebuild their lives. The experience led many to band together and see their situation in a similar light. Many expellees started political and social organizations; a large contingent joined the the conservative parties the Christian Democrats. "They played a huge role politically," Andreas Kossert of the Berlin-based Foundation Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation told DW. "In some regions, expelled Germans weren't a minority, they were a majority."
