Heim ins Reich

Heim ins Reich was an irredentist foreign policy pursued by Nazi Germany from October 1936.
The aim of Hitler's initiative was to convince all Volksdeutsche who were living outside Nazi Germany that they should strive to bring these regions "home" into Greater Germany, but also [Nazi–Soviet population transfers|relocate from territories that were not under German control], following the conquest of Poland, in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet pact.
The Heim ins Reich manifesto targeted areas ceded in the Treaty of Versailles to the newly reborn state of Poland, various lands of immigration, as well as other areas that were inhabited by significant ethnic German populations, such as the Czechoslovak Sudetenland, Free City of Danzig, and other neighbouring regions after 6 October 1939.
Implementation of the policy was managed by VOMI. As a state agency of the NSDAP, it handled all Volksdeutsche issues. By 1941, the VOMI was under the control of the SS.

History

The end of World War I in Europe led to the emergence of new 'minority problems' in the areas of collapsing German and Austro-Hungarian empires. As a result of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, more than 9 million ethnic Germans found themselves living in newly organized Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Unlike the new sovereign states, Germany was not required to sign the Minority Treaties.
Prior to the Anschluss in 1938, a powerful radio transmitter in Munich bombarded Austria with propaganda of what Hitler had already done for Germany, and what he could do for his native home country Austria. The annexation of Austria was presented by the press as the march of the German armed forces into purported German land: "as representatives of a general German will to unity, to establish brotherhood with the German people and soldiers there". In a similar manner, the 1939 German ultimatum to Lithuania, leading to the annexation of Memel from the Republic, was glorified as Hitler's "latest stage in the progress of history".
After the Anschluss with Austria, Germany popularized the "Back home to the Reich" slogan among Sudeten Germans. During the Czech crisis, Hitler visited the German Gymnastics and Sports Festival in Breslau. When the Sudeten team passed the VIP stand where Hitler was, they shouted "Back home to the Reich!" Josef Goebbels noted in his diary that "The people yelled, cheered and cried. The Führer was deeply moved."
On 7 October 1939, immediately after the end of the Germany's Polish Campaign, Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood.
Duties of the new position included furthering the "return" of and organising newly-conquered territory for German settlement.
Concurrent with annexations were the beginnings of attempts to ethnically cleanse non-Germans both from Germany and from the areas intended to be part of a "Greater Germany". Alternately, Hitler also made attempts to Germanize those who were considered ethnically or racially close enough to Germans to be "worth keeping" as part of a future German nation, such as the population of Luxembourg. Germany officially considered these populations to be German, but not part of the Greater German Reich, and were thus the targets of propaganda promoting this view in order to integrate them. These attempts were largely unpopular with the targets of the Germanization. Up to 97 percent of Luxembourgers voted in a 1941 referendum against being recognized as German.
Propaganda was also directed to Germans outside Nazi Germany to return as regions, or as individuals from other regions. Hitler hoped to make full use of the "German Diaspora". As part of an effort to lure ethnic Germans back to Germany, folksy Heimatbriefe or "letters from the homeland" were sent to German immigrants to the United States. The reaction to these was on the whole negative, particularly as the letters increased in volume. Goebbels also hoped to use German-Americans to keep America neutral during the war, but his actions produced among them great hostility to Nazi propagandists. Newspapers in occupied Ukraine printed articles about antecedents of German rule over Ukraine, such as Catherine the Great and the Goths.

"Heim ins Reich" in occupied Poland 1939–1944

The same motto was also applied to a second, closely related policy initiative which entailed the displacement and relocation of ethnically German communities from Central and Eastern European countries in the Soviet "sphere of influence", whose ancestors had settled there during the Ostsiedlung of earlier centuries. The Nazi government determined which of these communities were not "viable", started propaganda among the local population, and made arrangements and organized their transport of such communities. Its use of scare tactics about the Soviet Union resulted in tens of thousands of persons leaving. They included ethnic Germans from Bukovina, Bessarabia, Dobruja and Yugoslavia. For example, after the Soviets had assumed control of this territory, about 45,000 ethnic Germans left Northern Bukovina by November 1940.

Territory of origin	Year	Number of resettled Volksdeutsche
South Tyrol	1939–1940	83,000
Latvia and Estonia	1939–1941	69,000
Lithuania	1941	54,000
Volhynia, Galicia, Nerewdeutschland	1939–1940	128,000
General Government	1940	33,000
North Bukovina and Bessarabia	1940	137,000
Romania	1940	77,000
Yugoslavia	1941–1942	36,000
USSR	1939–1944	250,000
Summary	1939–1944	867,000

In the Greater Poland region, the Nazis' goal was complete Germanization, or political, cultural, social, and economic assimilation of the territory into the German Reich. In pursuit of this goal, the installed bureaucracy renamed streets and cities and seized tens of thousands of Polish enterprises, from large industrial firms to small shops, without payment to the owners. This area incorporated 350,000 such "ethnic Germans" and 1.7 million Poles deemed Germanizable, including between one and two hundred thousand children who had been taken from their parents. They were housed in farms left vacant by expulsion of the local Poles. Militant party members were sent to teach them to be "true Germans". Hitler Youth and League of German Girls sent young people for "Eastern Service", which entailed assisting in Germanization efforts. They were harassed by Polish partisans during the war. As Nazi Germany lost the war, these ethnic Germans were expelled to remaining Germany.
Eberhardt cites estimates for the ethnic German influx provided by Szobak, Łuczak, and a collective report, ranging from 404,612 to 631,500. Anna Bramwell says 591,000 ethnic Germans moved into the annexed territories, and details the areas of colonists' origin as follows: 93,000 were from Bessarabia, 21,000 from Dobruja, 98,000 from Bukovina, 68,000 from Volhynia, 58,000 from Galicia, 130,000 from the Baltic states, 38,000 from eastern Poland, 72,000 from the Sudetenland, and 13,000 from Slovenia.
Additionally some 400,000 German officials, technical staff, and clerks were sent to those areas in order to administer them, according to "Atlas Ziem Polski" citing a joint Polish–German scholarly publication on the aspect of population changes during the war Eberhardt estimates that the total influx from the Altreich was about 500,000 people. Duiker and Spielvogel note that up to two million Germans had been settled in pre-war Poland by 1942. Eberhardt gives a total of two million Germans present in the area of all pre-war Poland by the end of the war, 1.3 million of whom moved in during the war, adding to a pre-war population of 700,000.
The increase of German population was most visible in the urban centres: in Poznań, the German population increased from around 6,000 in 1939 to 93,589 in 1944; in Łódź, from around 60,000 to 140,721; and in Inowrocław, from 956 to 10,713. In Warthegau, where most Germans were settled, the share of the German population increased from 6.6% in 1939 to 21.2% in 1943.