Abstract

When about 14 million German and German-speaking refugees fleeing or expelled from the former eastern German regions or from Central-Eastern Europe arrived in West Germany after the end of WWII, it caused a huge social, economic and political emergency for Germany fresh from the dramatic experience of a lost war. The illustrious Bohemian sociologist Eugen Lemberg, himself a refugee, is one of the first and most skilful to have identified the consequences and potential economic and social dangers of such a migration emergency, at the same time appreciating the important resource that Ostvertriebene could have represented for their new West German homeland