Infrastructure of Exclusion: Expellee Segregation and Legacies of the Third Reich
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A quarter of the current German population are expellees or their immediate descendants. Although the most dominant historical narrative contends that German expellees successfully integrated into larger German society by the mid-1950s, this dissertation shows that integration remained only at the most superficial level. As of 1955, 185,000 German expellees still lived in refugee camps some of which had formerly functioned as forced labor camps during the Third Reich. This project aims to uncover the living situation, the experience, and reception of German expellees in the British zone province of Lower Saxony, in postwar West Germany from 1945 to 1954. The project specifically seeks to answer the question of how or if German expellees successfully integrated into West German society from 1945-1954. From a larger view this study is an inquiry into the origins of Germany’s modern asylum system. This project based its findings on documents found through conducting archival research, examining maps, reading testimony, surveying newspapers, and conducting an interview. Some of the major findings discussed in this dissertation include how German expellees arrived in Germany after World War II, how they were received by officials in the British zone, where they lived in Lower Saxony, and what German expellees did to move out of or transform the camps they resided in. The function of the camps changed in postwar Germany, but the social, physical, and intellectual space occupied by those camps remained stigmatized in the immediate postwar period. Settled Germans (Einheimische) in the western Allied occupied zones predominantly viewed incoming German expellees and refugees as foreigners. Officials documented, segregated, and quarantined incoming expellees in Transit Camps. German officials also assigned expellees and refugees to live in former forced labor camps. From these camps, German expellees and refugees had to fight for their right to equal treatment in postwar West Germany. The interaction between native Germans and German expellees from 1945 to 1954 set the foundational processes and structures that West German officials would use in housing and interacting with both Guest Workers and asylum seekers for decades thereafter. The eventual integration of German expellees occurred partially because German expellees and refugees demanded equal treatment to that of the native Germans. Although they eventually integrated into larger German society, this integration occurred with the social, physical, and intellectual stigmas of occupying formerly excluded spaces. Therefore, German expellees integrated into larger German society in a separated manner and occupied excluded spaces that later became the same locations where newcomers would reside in the coming decades.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".