Federation of Expellees
organization
The Federation of Expellees (German: Bund der Vertriebenen; BdV) is a non-profit organization formed in West Germany on 27 October 1957 to represent the interests of German nationals of all ethnicities and foreign ethnic Germans and their families (usually naturalised as German nationals after 1949) who either fled their homes in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, or were forcibly expelled following World War II.
Since 2014 the president of the Federation has been Bernd Fabritius, who arrived in West Germany in 1984 as a Transylvanian Saxon refugee from Agnita, Socialist Republic of Romania, and who has since been elected as a Christian Social Union in Bavaria Member of the Bundestag.
History
It is estimated that in the aftermath of World War II between 13 and 16 million ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from parts of Central and Eastern Europe, including the former eastern territories of Germany (parts of present-day Poland), the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia (mostly from the Vojvodina region), the Kaliningrad Oblast of (now) Russia, hitherto USSR (in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War) and prior to this, the northern part of East Prussia, Lithuania, Romania and other East European countries.
Charter of the German Expellees
The Charter of the German Expellees (German: Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen) of 5 August 1950, announced their belief in requiring that "the right to the homeland is recognized and carried out as one of the fundamental rights of mankind given by God", while renouncing revenge and retaliation in the face of the "unending suffering" (unendliche Leid) of the previous decade, and supporting the unified effort to rebuild Germany and Europe.
The charter has been criticised for avoiding mentioning Nazi atrocities of Second World War and Germans who were forced to emigrate due to Nazi repressions. Critics argue that the Charter presents the history of German people as starting from the expulsions, while ignoring events like the Holocaust.
Professor Micha Brumlik pointed out that one third of signatories were former devoted Nazis and many actively helped in realisation of Hitler's goals.
Ralph Giordano wrote in Hamburger Abendblatt "the Charter doesn't contain a word about Hitler, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Not to mention any sign of apologies for the suffering of the murdered people", "avoids mentioning the reasons for expulsions" and called the document "example of German art of crowding out the truth (...) The fact that the charter completely ignores the reasons for the expulsions deprives it of any value".
German laws concerning the expellees
Between 1953, when the Federal Expellee Law was passed, and 1991, the West German government passed several laws dealing with German expellees. The most notable of these is the "Law of Return" which granted German citizenship to any ethnic German.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Federation of Expellees” as organization. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as organization. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q819657. VIAF identifies the subject as 157749744. The Library of Congress control number is n83029541. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1949, 2014 and 1984.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Federation of Expellees” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.