"Migrations in the 20 th century and their consequences – ways forward for history lessons within a European context"

Bundestag
. Then in 1950 the BHE was founded in Bavaria and immediately became the 
fourth most powerful party in the Bavarian state parliament, the 
Landtag
. The BHE set out the 
basis for its policies as follows: “The BHE shall never renounce its claims to an ancestral home 
in the east. … The federation is revisionist but rejects the idea of war to achieve its ends”. As a 
rule, however, the more the integration of refugees and expellees progressed, the more these 
parties became superfluous. The established parties also made every effort to get the refugees 
on their side. Before this, however, the BHE reached its high point in the 1953 parliamentary 
elections with nearly 6% of the vote and still gained 11% of the vote in the Bavarian regional 
elections in 1954. The most powerful men in the BHE were Walter Becher, Walter Stain (State 
Secretary) and Willi Guthsmuths, who was a state secretary at the Ministry of the Economy in 
Munich from 1950 to 1962.
Most of the BHE’s votes came from low-income retired people and pensioners. Protestant 
associations were also over-represented within the BHE while Catholics were more inclined to 
vote for the CSU. When Oberländer went over to the CDU in 1955, the BHE lost many of its 
supporters. The political end came in the regional elections of 1962 when the BHE failed to 
clear the 10% hurdle in any of the districts.
In the last part of this report I would like to show how the refugee question and the integration of 
refugees were perceived by the general public and in the media and how the matter was viewed 
and dealt with in newspapers and on the radio. This was important because the radio and the 
press made a decisive contribution towards shaping opinion among the government and 
society.
As early as 12 May 1945, Radio Munich, the military government broadcaster, began providing 
the Bavarian public with information and opinion again. None the less, everything that was to 
broadcast had to be checked first by an American press officer.
A licence from the military government was required to publish a daily newspaper and the first of 
these licensed newspapers appeared in autumn 1945. However, it turned out to be considerably 
harder for expellees to set up their own newspapers because the allied “coalition ban” of spring 
1946 prohibited refugees from organising themselves in any way. Only in July 1948, when the 

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Americans finally granted expellees the right of association at local level, could the refugees 
begin to set up their own papers.
As a result of the direct influence exerted by the American press officer, Bavarian Radio 
broadcast very few programmes on the refugee issue, even though an in-house eastern 
European affairs department was set up under Dr Herbert Hupka. In 1949 this department 
produced highly detailed reports on the old homelands and the current situation there and on 
east German customs but had little or nothing to say on the integration of expellees into the 
Bavarian state, economy and society and the related problems and difficulties.
In contrast, the later refugee newspapers had an understandable tendency towards 
exaggeration, extremely negative assessments of their situation and excessive demands on the 
Bavarian government and people. Practically all the licensed newspapers called for the 
rapprochement of the refugees with the local population, greater understanding for the plight of 
the expellees and help for them in their efforts to build new lives for themselves. This attitude 
was particularly manifest in the refugee charity or relief schemes which were supported by all 
the newspapers. At the same time the licensed newspapers and the later expellees’ 
newspapers in particular, but also church magazines, repeatedly criticised the resistance and 
unwillingness to help the expellees among the local population.
However, very soon other opinions were voiced, particularly in readers’ letters. Doubts were 
raised as to whether the refugees were really German, Silesians were branded as “Piasts” and 
there was speculation as to whether Gauleiter Hanke was the only Nazi party member in 
Silesia. Soon the following joke was doing the rounds: “Were you a party member? - No I’m a 
Silesian”.
However, during the heated debate on the compensation law the Passau-based newspaper, the