The term Flüchtlingspolitik refers to the legal provisions and the handling of refugees and asylum seekers wanting to enter a country, and/or subsequently staying there for a long period of time, in this case Germany and its predecessor states.
18th century and earlier
According to the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio ("whose realm, his religion"), the first type of religious refugee was established in the Holy Roman Empire at the Augsburg Settlement. These refugees were members of an "incorrect" denomination and therefore fled to a state which was led by a sovereign ruler who shared their beliefs. Cologne, for example, was a shelter for Catholics as well as for important church officials during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648).
The Margraviate of Brandenburg lost half of its inhabitants during that war; the Uckermark lost even more, 90%. To balance this loss, the country became reliant on immigration. After assessing the state of the economy, craftsmen and skilled agricultural workers were hired. People who were forced to leave their home land for religious reasons were also taken in. Because of the Edict of Potsdam, Brandenburg took in Huguenots who were expelled from France. Later territories, which were ruled by relatives of the Prussian king, also took them in: e.g. from the Markgraviate of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The majority of the Lutherans from Salzburg settled in the Kingdom of Prussia in 1731–32; other Lutherans and Protestants fled from Bohemia to the newly founded colony of Nowawes (Potsdam-Babelsberg) in 1750.
Before the 1782 Edict of Tolerance, religious refugees from the Habsburg Empire moved to other Protestant areas in the Holy Roman Empire. During the French Revolution, members of the French Counter-Revolution fled to German-speaking territories. The first wave of emigration took place after the events of July and August 1789. In summer 1789 it was mainly the high nobility, especially the King's relatives, and members of the higher clergy and the military leadership, who emigrated. Due to the abolition of the feudal system and the revocation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, there was a second wave of emigrants in the summer of 1790. Again, this consisted mainly of the nobility, the clergy and military officers. The third wave of emigration started shortly after 21 June 1791, when King Louis XIV tried to escape to Varennes.
The second main phase of emigration took place after the September massacres in 1792 and the increasing radicalization of the revolution after the King's execution in 1793. More and more members of the Third Estate were now emigrating. Among them were many former supporters of the revolution, including Girondists, who had by then broken away from the new leadership in Paris, or had been victims of political prosecution. There were smaller waves of emigration after the end of the Reign of Terror, caused by the royalist uprising on October 5 in Paris. The uprising was defeated by Napoleon and his troops and prompted the Coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797).
Empire and Weimar Republic
During the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, Germany was one of the countries most sought after by Jews who were fleeing violence and discrimination in eastern, central and south-eastern Europe. The first big wave of Jewish refugees to Germany from the east reached was a result of the Russian Revolution and Counter Revolution in 1904–05. During the First World War which turned Poland into a war zone, there was a second big wave of Jewish immigrants from the East. Due to the Entente powers' blockade, this wave settled mainly in Central Europe, Germany and Austria. "Hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews fled to Vienna and Berlin: children of foreign culture, speaking a foreign language, upholding foreign customs and beliefs." These were mostly forced to come as refugees with nothing to their name, and just tried to scrape a living in any possible way. There are no indications of any correlation between Jews from Eastern Europe and an increased crime rate. The historian Anne-Christin Saß discovered that in the second half of the 1920s in Berlin, Jews were prevented from continuing to move further west in Europe or even as far as the US, as they had originally intended; thus Berlin developed into a world Jewish center. This change not only intensified antisemitic resentment by the right wing supporters, but also triggered defensive reactions of fully integrated, sometimes even completely assimilated, "Jews from the West".