# Exactly what happened to East German landowners after WWII

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/exactly-what-happened-to-east-german-landowners-after-wwii/33319>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 15, 2000, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/exactly-what-happened-to-east-german-landowners-after-wwii/33319 "2000-09-15T16:47:48Z")\
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**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\
**Post date:** [September 15, 2000, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/exactly-what-happened-to-east-german-landowners-after-wwii/33319/1 "2000-09-15T16:47:48Z")

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I have an old public-relations oriented book published by  
the East German government, which proudly describes the progress and accomplishments of the Socialist state. This  
book was published around 1979, not long after I spent a year as an exchange student in West Germany.

One part of the book says that after 1949 the Junkers and other large landholders were expropriated without compensation, and that led me to wonder: What happened to those folks afterwards? Were most of them strung up as  
war criminals, were they forced to work as peasants on what  
had been their land, or were they hounded out of the country? If they had to stay, what lengths did they go to  
to hide their aristocratic background?