APPROXIMATELY ELEVEN MILLION GERMAN SOLDIERS became prisoners of war (POWs) of the Allied forces in the course of the Second World War. The majority of German POWs were released by the Allies and subsequently returned to Germany by the end of 1949, but the last POWs in the Soviet Union were released as late as the winter of 1955/56. As socalled Heimkehrer (literally “homecomers,” which in this study I will call “returnees”), the former POWs constituted a large and heterogeneous social group in both German postwar states, and for several decades they formed a significant subsection of German society. Their history as returnees begins with the end of their war captivity and their return to postwar society. This history is still ongoing.

For many German returned prisoners of war, their experiences as POWs and later as returnees from war captivity remained salient in their memories and narratives as well as in their social activities at various stages of their postwar lives. Some returnees actively participated in veterans’ associations, others dealt with their past by producing autobiographical accounts or by engaging in individual memory projects. The fate of returnees also impacted upon the public arena, particularly upon the mass media and the political realm. This was the case for returnees from Soviet camps as well as for returnees from camps all around Eastern and Western Europe, Northern Africa, and Northern America where German soldiers had been kept as POWs during and after the war. However, as the intensity of the past's impact on the returnees’ own lives changed, the ways in which the past was publicly commemorated, represented, and interpreted in Germany before and after unification varied.

Individual aspects of the history of returnees have been explored through the historiographical perspectives of social history, history of everyday life, discourse history, and more recently also the history of memory (Erinnerungsgeschichte). Informed by these approaches, this study provides a comprehensive approach to the history of returnees as a history of memory in divided and reunited Germany. This history comprises memories of individuals and collective representations of war, war captivity, and the return to postwar Germany.