Russians in Germany

Earlier in history, particularly during the 17th century, a number of Germans migrated to Russia. Article 116 of Germany's Basic Law, approved in 1949, provides individuals of German heritage with the right of return to Germany and the means to acquire German citizenship if they suffered persecution after the Second World War as a result of their German heritage.[8] As a result, roughly 3.6 million ethnic Germans moved to West Germany between 1950 and 1996.[8] These German descendants increasingly petitioned to return to Germany under the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev. According to historian John Glad, by 1957 the petitioners, commonly known as "Aussiedler" (singular and plural) or transferred settlers, filed over 100,000 applications a year to migrate to West Germany; several thousand returned in the 1970s.[9] The flow of Aussiedler increased with the breakup of the Soviet Union.[9] For instance, between 1992 and 2007, a total of 1,797,084 ethnic Germans from the former USSR emigrated to Germany. Of this total number 923,902 were from Kazakhstan, 693,348 were from Russia, 73,460 were from Kyrgyzstan, 40,560 from Ukraine, 27,035 from Uzbekistan, and 14,578 from Tajikistan.[10] Numbers peaked in 1994–213,214 Aussiedler—and then gradually began to decline.[11] The number of non-German relatives who emigrated along with them is not known, but many if not most are presumably members of Germany's ethnic Russian community (see below). The number of emigrated Aussiedler fluctuates as many retained housing in the Former Soviet Union—some are presumed to have returned to their residences in Former Soviet Republics.[9]

After the Second World War Germany's Jewish population was 15,000, a small percentage of the country's pre-war Jewish population of 500,000.[12] That number grew to 30,000 by the late 1980s. Then between 1991 and 2005, more than 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union moved to Germany.[13] In total, the Berman Jewish DataBank estimates that over 225,000 Jews from the Former Soviet Union (Russia and various republics) immigrated to Germany between 1989 and 2012.[14] Many, speaking Yiddish as well as Russian, picked up the German language easily. The Berman Jewish DataBank estimates "Germany's core Jewish population at 118,000 in 2013," of which all but about 5,000-6,000 are post-Soviet immigrants; the community numbers about 250,000 if non-Halachic-Jewish relatives are included."[14] Growth began to diminish in 2005 when the German government replaced the special quota immigration law (Kontingentsflüchtlingsgesetz) with more restrictive rules (Zuwanderungsgesetz)

Other Russian speakers in Germany fall into a few different categories. The German Statistisches Bundesamt (Federal Statistical Office) reported the following figures for Russian speakers from the year 2000: legal aliens (365,415), political asylees (20,000), students (7,431), family members of German citizens (10,000-15,000), special workers in fields of science and culture (5,000-10,000), and diplomatic corps (5,000).[15] The largest percentage comes from the "legal alien" category. The vast majority of the legal aliens, who are mainly ethnic Russians (with smaller numbers of Belarusians, Ukrainians, and other groups) are family members of returnees (Aussiedler and Soviet Jews), but who have yet to receive German citizenship.[15]