Kinlore
1955–1973 and after

Guest Workers and a Country of Immigration

West Germany recruits millions of workers from southern Europe and Turkey; many stay, turning Germany into a country of immigration and home to Europe's largest Turkish diaspora.

  • Gastarbeiter/-innen (lexicon entry) — Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung
  • The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany — Rita Chin, Cambridge University Press (2007)
  • 21.8 million people in Germany with an immigration history in 2025 (press release) — Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) (2026)
  • A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
  • Bevölkerung mit Migrationshintergrund: Ergebnisse des Mikrozensus 2018 — Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis) (2019)
  • Turkey: A Modern History (4th edition) — Erik J. Zürcher, I.B. Tauris (2017)

Well established migrationdiasporaidentityeconomy

Part of the story of Germany and Turkey (Türkiye).

Short of labour during the economic miracle, West Germany signed recruitment agreements with Italy in 1955, then Spain and Greece (1960), Turkey (1961), Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia and Yugoslavia. The workers were called Gastarbeiter, “guest workers”, because both governments expected them to rotate home. Between the late 1950s and the recruitment stop of 1973, about 14 million came and about 11 million went home. The rest stayed and brought their families.

The Turkish agreement, signed on 30 October 1961, became the most consequential. Young men, and soon women, mostly from rural Anatolia, took medical tests in Istanbul and boarded trains for the factories and mines of the Ruhr, Cologne, Stuttgart and Berlin; many saved to build houses back in their villages. After 1973 Turkish neighbourhoods grew in places like Berlin’s Kreuzberg and Cologne’s Keupstraße.

  • The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany — Rita Chin, Cambridge University Press (2007)
  • Turkey: A Modern History (4th edition) — Erik J. Zürcher, I.B. Tauris (2017)

The Swiss writer Max Frisch put it in a line Germans still quote: “We called for workers, and people came.”

  • The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany — Rita Chin, Cambridge University Press (2007)
East Germany also brought in contract workers, mainly from Vietnam and Mozambique, who were kept separate from the population.
  • A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)

Integration was hard while Germany denied it was a country of immigration. Racist arson attacks in Mölln (1992) and Solingen (1993) killed Turkish families, and between 2000 and 2007 the neo-Nazi NSU murdered eight Turkish-origin men, a Greek man and a policewoman, while police wrongly suspected the victims’ own communities.

  • The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany — Rita Chin, Cambridge University Press (2007)

Only in 2000 did Germany give children born to long-term foreign residents a path to citizenship by birth, and from 2024 it broadly allowed dual citizenship. In 2018 about 2.8 million people in Germany had a Turkish migration background, many of them German citizens, some Kurdish or Alevi.

  • Bevölkerung mit Migrationshintergrund: Ergebnisse des Mikrozensus 2018 — Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis) (2019)
Their children include the film-maker Fatih Akın, the politician Cem Özdemir, and Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, founders of BioNTech. In 2025 about 21.8 million people, 26% of the population in private households, had an immigration history; the largest groups born abroad came from Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia and Syria.

How it's seen
Guest workers and their children

Many first-generation workers did hard, dangerous jobs and expected to go home; their children grew up between two worlds and often felt Germany never quite accepted them. Racist attacks such as the Solingen arson of 1993, which killed five Turkish women and girls, and the NSU murders of 2000–07 remain open wounds.

  • The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany — Rita Chin, Cambridge University Press (2007)
  • A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)

Why it matters today

Germany

About a quarter of people in Germany now have an immigration history, and the descendants of guest workers are footballers, ministers, entrepreneurs and the people who run the corner shop. For decades politicians insisted Germany was "not a country of immigration"; the slow acceptance that it is, and arguments over what belonging means, still shape German politics.

Turkey (Türkiye)

Almost every Turkish town has relatives in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria or France. The "Almancı", the "German-ers", are a familiar figure at home, and Turkish-Germans are a big part of German life, from kebab shops to football, politics and science. Their experience of discrimination, from racist murders to questions of loyalty, is a sore point in Turkish-European relations.