Twelve million ethnic Germans immigrated between 1944 and 1950, 4.5 million of these to East Germany. This chapter tracks the complex prehistory, in particular the Nazi aggression, that predated their flight from Eastern Europe and their hostile reception in Germany. Contrary to today’s myth of easy integration, the expellees were perceived as wholly Other. The racism of the Nazi era was applied to them – they were thought to look and smell differently and were called a “mulatto race.” Surprisingly, because of their importance as voters, around 1950 the state started to configure them in a way that foreshadowed the salad bowl model: they were allowed to retain their particularist Silesian etc. cultural backgrounds while being seen as unequivocally belonging to the German nation. This chapter suggests that contemporary German society remember their migration differently: as one of many waves, no more “natural” or important than that of Eritrean asylum seekers or Soviet Jews, and as quintessentially modern by foreshadowing the salad bowl model avant la lettre.

This chapter establishes the core principles of this study and defines its key terms. It problematises and deconstructs the relationship between the German ‘people’s community’, the Volksgemeinschaft, and the concept and practice of Total War in East Prussia. By establishing the mentality of the native population towards the war, this chapter assigns agency to those who would eventually become the main victims of late-war intra-ethnic violence. Subsequently, the chapter addresses the impact of the Party and the Wehrmacht on the behaviour of civilians, using as case-studies the construction of the Ostwall and the establishment of the Volkssturm in the second half of 1944. Finally, it examines how East Prussians viewed their roles within the late-war community of Germany and how they established the potential to break with the ‘traditional’ values of the National Socialist state.