From a sociological perspective, it may be surprising that interest groups that were founded in reaction to an event 60 years ago continue to be of social and political relevance. The Vertriebenenverbände (expellee organizations) which are the subject of this article might easily have lost their immediate significance and given up their existence after the admission and integration of the refugees into the social and economic fabric of the Federal Republic. Although this integration was not without its problems, it was generally accomplished by the late 1950s/early 1960s. Had it been the case that the expellee organizations had been founded with the sole purpose to represent the social and economic interests of those who had been displaced by flight and resettlement as a result of National Socialism and World War II, this loss of significance would have most likely been the case. In this case only a few elderly people would still be telling stories about the former Eastern German territories, for example, when they talked to their grandchildren about their own childhood. In the near future, these territories would have the same social and political status that they have had in historiography and international law for quite some time: that of a closed chapter of German history. However, the expellee organizations, which were founded illegally immediately after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, were by no means conceived as a lobby with exclusively domestic political ambitions (cf. Salzborn 2000, 52–65). The concept of “landsmannschaftliches Gedenken” was developed at an early stage, running counter to concepts of integration of the refugees into the Federal Republic. “Landsmannschaftliches Gedenken” implies that all refugees and resettlers should not only live in their new “Heimat” in the Federal Republic but should maintain a parallel mental existence in their “alte Heimat” in order to safeguard a real German future for it. The identity of the new fFederal citizens was supposed to be rooted in a Landsmannschaft,something that was articulated with a clearly recognizable territorial aspect. Since it was supposed to be concerned not just with the memory of times past but also with the earliest possible restitution of the lost territories, the expellee organizations’ concept of Heimat resulted in political demands that could only be perceived by the East European neighbor states as a provocation and a threat.