A friend from Romania--she speak fluent German and had been arrested numerous times as a dissident in her home country--couldn't convince the German authorities of her German identity. Livid with rage, she asked whether she ought to mention that her father had been in the SS and that her uncle had died serving the same organization. They responded coolly that proof of that sort would help. Anywhere else in the world, you'd do better to hide your father's Nazi Party papers--but in Germany they still had their uses.

[...]

From the beginning, it should have been obvious that the Federal Republic's invitation to all Germans would remain heartfelt only so long as the East German authorities kept the masses of potential guests away. When the Wall became more porous with Gorbachev's glasnost, the West Germans' joy at reuniting declined visibly. They paled when they saw how many people they'd invited. Two hundred thousand ethnic German resettlers arrived in 1988, and about 350,000 in 1989, and that doesn't include the East German refugees. In 1990, between 400,000 and 450,000 ethnic Germans "came home," as the West Germans put it, and immigration authorities now fear that, as their native economies collapse, millions more ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe may remember their German origins.