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Kurds in Germany

Ethnic group in Germany

  • 4 min read
  • 8 chapters

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Immigration history of Kurds in Germany

1919 & 1920s

The first Kurds migrated to Imperial Germany in 1919 and the years following, most came for diplomatic reasons related to the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey.

1961-1973 (First wave)

The first wave of Kurdish immigrant workers from Turkey arrived after Germany and Turkey signed an economic treaty which allowed Turkish citizens (mostly men) to immigrate to West Germany as Gastarbeiter (English: "guest workers") in October 1961. This immigration officially stopped in 1973. By then, the number of immigrants had reached 867,000 (1.5 million in 1980 and 2.1 million in 1998). The percentage of Kurds in this immigrant diaspora is unknown but is speculated to be in the high hundreds of thousands.

1980-2003 (Second wave)

The oppression of Kurds in the 1980s under the then-newly formed Islamic republic of Iran and the then following Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) kickstarted the second wave of Kurdish migration to Germany and other countries. This second wave only increased in scale after the Gulf War (1990–1991) and later invasion of Iraq by the United States (2003).

2011-2025 (Third wave)

Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, many of the Syrian refugees who have come to Germany are Kurds. The later War against ISIL also created a wave of immigrants from Iraq and Kurdistan Region.

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