A County-Level Database on Expellees in West Germany, 1939-1961

Between 1944 and 1950, almost eight million expellees arrived in West Germany. This paper introduces a rich county-level database on the expellees' socio-economic situation in post-war Germany. The database contains regionally disaggregated information on the number, origin, age, gender, religious denomination and labour force status of expellees. It also records corresponding information on the West German population as a whole, on the pre-war economic and religious structure of host and origin regions, and on wartime destruction in West Germany. The paper illustrates the scope of the database by studying the determinants of county-level differences in expellee inflows.