The Federal Expellee Law (Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge; short: Bundesvertriebenengesetz, abbr. BVFG; literally: Law on the affairs of the expellees and refugees) is a German federal law of May 19, 1953 which regulates the rights of expelles and refugees of German citizenship or ethnicity from Central and Eastern Europe and defines - in § 6 - who is considered expellees and, in case of other or no citizenship, entitled to get German citizenship, if they wish so. The persons entitled to become Germans also include (former) foreign citizens of states of the Eastern Bloc, who themselves - or whose ancestors - were persecuted or discriminated between 1945 and 1990 for their German or alleged German ethnicity by their respective governments. The argument goes that the Federal Republic of Germany had/has to administer to the needs of these foreigners, because their respective governments in charge of guaranteeing their equal treatment as citizens, severely neglected or contravened that obligation. The major force behind the law was the All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights party, which had among its supporters - besides German citizens, who had fled or were expelled from formerly German territory annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union - many formerly foreign citizens, who exactly experienced by the end of World War II and the post-war years of 'ethnic cleansing', denaturalisation, robbing and humiliation (1945 until 1950) prevailingly carried out by the governments of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. While the expelled destitute Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians and Yugoslavs of (alleged) German ethnicity, who happened to live in the western Allied occupation zones in Germany by the time the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949, were granted German citizenship by the Basic Law (federal constitution), Art. 116, those who only later managed to escape the persecuting states, were entitled to get citizenship by this law.
Famous quotes containing the words federal and/or law:
“Goodbye, boys; I’m under arrest. I may have to go to jail. I may not see you for a long time. Keep up the fight! Don’t surrender! Pay no attention to the injunction machine at Parkersburg. The Federal judge is a scab anyhow. While you starve he plays golf. While you serve humanity, he serves injunctions for the money powers.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)