Hallo Danube Swabian Researchers, As you can read below I am forwarding to you another information that was swept under the carpet for the last 20 years. Hans Grimm from the Donauschwaben-L is pointing to a documentary that will be shown on the 17th of January 2014 on the ARD Mediathek channel. http://www.ardmediathek.de/das-erste/reportage-dokumentation/deutsche-gegen-devisen-ein-geschaeft-im-kalten-krieg?documentId=19069896 I translated for you the description of the documentary. -------- German citizenship for foreign currencies - A business in the Cold War Over more than 20 years there have been a secret deal between the Federal Republic and Romania . The communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu gave permission for the Romanians of German descent to emigrate to Germany during the Cold War - against the payment of bounty . The " top secret channel " as it was called in Bonn, it cost Federal Republic billions of dollars. The currency helped the regime in Bucharest to repay its sovereign debt . That way around 250,000 people left their homes, or Romania's majority of their citizens of German descent. For more than 800 years their ancestors had lived in Transylvania and the Banat . For many, the passport to Germany was the promise that determined their future and the fate of their families. The West German public learned about the biggest open purchase history nothing . Ceausescu had demanded the utmost secrecy. The world should not know that Romania ran a trade with its citizens. Even the Bonn's Ministry of the Interior was only recently informed about that operation. The sole negotiator on behalf of the Federal Government was the Düsseldorf lawyer Heinz Günther Hüsch . Between 1968 and 1989 he traveled hundreds of times for meetings with the Romanian Securitate , often with suitcases full of money and a pistol in his luggage. 25 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain Heinz Günther Hüsch opened his archives to documenting the reports on the " top secret channel " . Through its documentations and reports he helps to reconstruct a largely unknown chapter of the Cold War . The policy makers of those times were interviewed in the documentary as well as numerous of Romania's ethnic Germans , telling the circumstances of their departure and the history of their families. Rosina T. Schmidt www.hrastovac.net