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This chapter explores Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's foreign policy and his government's interaction with the expellees and their purported organizational representatives. The basic objective of Adenauer's foreign policy was for West Germany to be permanently integrated into the Western community, an imperative derived from a coolly realistic reading of the post-war balance of power in Europe. Because the programme was aimed at a radical reorientation of German politics and presupposed a de facto abandonment of popular national causes, Adenauer regarded systematic public dishonesty at home as necessary for its implementation. This chapter highlights an often overlooked major theme in the early history of the Federal Republic of Germany: the complex way in which the expellee problem functioned as a link between the country's domestic politics and foreign policies.

This chapter examines Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's era from 1955 to 1959, in which the expellee groups in West Germany repeatedly flexed their muscles against what they viewed as overly conciliatory Ostpolitik ideas and initiatives. Even before West Germany had acquired sovereignty, expellee elites had begun to worry about the complications that diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union might generate, including the possibility of official relations with the Eastern states. The government ultimately managed to gain the expellee groups' acceptance for the opening towards the Soviet Union, even as the expellee elite's willingness to tolerate eastward diplomatic relations applied only to the Soviet superpower. In the months following Adenauer's visit to Moscow, the unconditional rejection of formal relations between Bonn and the rest of the Eastern bloc, particularly Poland and Czechoslovakia, hardened into a key expellee dogma that was to remain unchanged for years to come.

This chapter analyses West German politics from Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's era from the late 1950s to the Bundestag election of 1965 and the last months of Ludwig Erhard's government in 1966, with a special focus on the intensified scramble for expellee votes that took place in these years. The battle's immediate cause was the SPD's concentrated campaign to court this segment of the electorate, which, in turn, was part of the party's larger project of repositioning itself away from the traditional left towards the contemporary political centre. The resulting electoral tussle raised the stakes in expellee politics and seemingly brought the expellee lobby to new heights of political influence in the first half of the 1960s. However, these appearances were deceptive, for in reality the expellee organizations had by then entered a period of decline.

Broad generational, social, and attitudinal changes swept West Germany during the 1960s, posing challenges to established patterns and assumptions in many fields of public life, including Eastern policy. As these changes in the domestic and international context became increasingly obvious during the latter half of the 1960s, politicians reacted by gradually modifying their Ostpolitik positions. This chapter follows the slow adaptation of West Germany's political elites to these shifting conditions, particularly during the three-year period defined by the rule of the so-called Grand Coalition — composed of the CDU/CSU and the SPD — between late 1966 and 1969. Complicated manoeuvring during these years culminated in the collapse of the pattern that had characterized the interaction between the expellee activists and the political elites since the founding of the Federal Republic.

This chapter discusses the reinterpretation of Hindenburg in both German states after 1945. It shows that Hindenburg's role was soon reassessed by opinion makers: from ‘national saviour’ to the senile figure that ‘delivered’ Germany to Nazi rule. While this represented a break from his mythical glorification, it also entailed apologetic tendencies. In both FRG and GDR, blaming Hindenburg made it possible to skirt the issue of popular consent so vital to Nazi rule. The chapter illustrates that this reinterpretation of Hindenburg was mirrored in the symbolic realm: re-buried secretly in a church in Marburg, his unobtrusive post-war grave stands in sharp contrast to his monumental pre-war burial site. In the pluralist Federal Republic, undercurrents of Hindenburg's veneration have continued to exist: streets and army barracks still carry his name, and he remains a lieu de m é moire for select, but influential, groups, especially among German expellees.