German Emigration

On 1 June 2026 the Federal Statistical Office published Germany’s migration figures for 2025. On its count more Germans left the country than came back, for the twenty-first year running, and the loss had grown from 81,000 to 97,000¹. The next morning the Neue Zürcher Zeitung supplied the reading that stuck. 288,579 Germans had moved abroad, it wrote, “So viele wie noch nie”, more than ever before. Three quarters of the emigrants had a university degree, and to put it drastically: “Deutschland verliert seine Leistungsträger”, Germany is losing the people who carry it². Nine days later Alice Weidel of the AfD told the government in the Bundestag that in its first year in office “so viele deutsche Staatsbürger ausgewandert wie nie zuvor”, more German citizens had emigrated than ever before³.

The figures are official and come from the Federal Statistical Office: in 2019 it announced that 262,000 Germans had emigrated the year before⁴. Economists make the claim as well. In January the chief economist of the state bank LBBW wrote that over twenty years Germany had “netto etwa eine Million Staatsbürger verloren”, a net loss of about a million citizens, and that three quarters of the emigrants were graduates trained at the taxpayer’s expense⁵. The survey behind the three quarters was run by a federal research institute⁶. And in 2014 the government’s own expert commission on research and innovation summed it up like this: “Deutschland verliert viele der besten Wissenschaftler durch Abwanderung”, Germany is losing many of its best scientists to emigration⁷.

So the claim has four parts:

1. More Germans leave than ever.
2. Those who leave are the best educated.
3. They do not come back.
4. The country is therefore being drained of brains it paid to train.

We checked each part against the population registers, Eurostat’s migration and labour-force data for about thirty countries, the survey behind the three quarters, the publication record of scientists, the medical association’s count of doctors, and the emigration statistics back to 1820. The number turns out to be about twice too high, the leavers better educated than those who stay but by less than claimed, and the country a net importer of graduates. What holds is the direction: more Germans leave than a decade ago, fewer come back, and no statistic records who they are.

A change in the statistics in 2016 produces the record

The figure of 288,579 is correct as printed⁸. It counts de-registrations. Residents of Germany have to register their address with the local authority, and the migration statistics count every case in which a German citizen’s registration ends with a move abroad, however short the stay⁹. A registration can also be ended by the authority itself, when it finds that somebody no longer lives at the registered address. That person is struck off von Amts wegen, by the authority, and the destination is as a rule unknown⁹.

Until the end of 2015 such cases were largely left out of the migration statistics when the person was German. Since 1 January 2016 they have been counted as moves across the border⁹, in a row of the table labelled Ungeklärt / Ohne Angabe, unresolved or not stated. We call them the unresolved cases. Between 2015 and 2016 the departures of Germans rose from 138,273 to 281,411, and that row rose from 174 cases to 150,679¹⁰. The office explained the jump itself when it published the figures in 2018: leaving the people of unknown whereabouts out, it wrote, departures had fallen by 5 per cent, to 131,000¹¹. The doubling of German emigration in 2016 contained no additional emigrants.

The same holds for the record of 2025. Of the 288,579 departures, 134,804 are unresolved cases, 47 per cent¹⁰. The office’s quality report says that counting them as moves abroad is an assumption, because nobody knows whether these people are in Germany or outside it, and that analyses of later re-registrations show the cases are “oftmals um Personen handelt, die unangemeldet in Deutschland verblieben sind”: often people who stayed in Germany without a registration⁹. The government’s migration report says the same in a footnote¹². The press release of 1 June gave the net loss of 97,000 and mentioned none of this¹.

For the figures it sends to the European Union, the office corrects for the unresolved cases itself. In 2025 two of its statisticians described the method: every German who registers from an unknown place is matched with a German who was struck off to an unknown place, and the pair is treated as a move inside Germany¹³. In 2022 that removed 90,652 of the 127,550 departures to an unknown destination. Only the unmatched remainder is counted as emigration, which is again an assumption. After moves of less than a year are taken out as well, the estimate of Germans who emigrated in 2022 comes to 156,826, against 268,167 in the national statistics¹³. For 2024 the figure Germany reported to Eurostat is 151,286¹⁴.

Where the record comes from

Departures of German citizens from Germany per year. The upper part of each column is the row Ungeklärt / Ohne Angabe: people struck off the register with no known destination, counted as emigrants since 2016 and largely left out before. The statistical office marks 2008 to 2010 as inflated by a clean-up of the registers.

Show the numbers

Year	All departures	Abroad	Unresolved cases	Abroad per 1,000 Germans
2000	111,244	103,131	8,113	1.38
2001	109,507	101,435	8,072	1.35
2002	117,683	106,967	10,716	1.42
2003	127,267	103,580	23,687	1.38
2004	150,667	114,720	35,947	1.53
2005	144,815	123,337	21,478	1.64
2006	155,290	135,848	19,442	1.81
2007	161,105	151,534	9,571	2.02
2008	174,759	174,606	153	2.33
2009	154,988	154,830	158	2.07
2010	141,000	140,961	39	1.89
2011	140,132	139,377	755	1.88
2012	133,232	132,230	1,002	1.79
2013	140,282	137,950	2,332	1.87
2014	148,636	148,565	71	2.02
2015	138,273	138,099	174	1.88
2016	281,411	130,732	150,679	1.78
2017	249,181	117,636	131,545	1.61
2018	261,851	125,684	136,167	1.72
2019	270,294	124,949	145,345	1.72
2020	220,239	95,767	124,472	1.32
2021	247,829	118,745	129,084	1.64
2022	268,167	143,763	124,404	2.00
2023	265,035	139,351	125,684	1.95
2024	269,986	141,393	128,593	1.98
2025	288,579	153,775	134,804	2.16

A series that can be compared over time has to leave the unresolved cases out, as the office did in 2018. On that count 153,775 Germans left for abroad in 2025, or 2.2 for every 1,000 German citizens (own calculation)¹⁰¹⁵. That is 11 per cent more than in 2015 and 10 per cent more than the average of 2010 to 2015. In a series that begins in 1954, only 2008 and 2009 were higher⁸, and the office marks both as inflated: after the tax identification number was introduced the registers were cleaned up, which led to many removals by the authorities, in numbers that it says cannot be determined⁹. So it is possible that more Germans left for abroad in 2025 than in any earlier year. If that is the record, it is about 154,000, and it stands a tenth above the level of ten years ago. The figure in the headlines says the level has doubled.

The registers err in the other direction too. Some people leave without de-registering, and when they are later struck off they land among the unresolved cases. The census of 2022 cut the official population by about 1.2 million people of all nationalities⁹. The office’s estimate for the EU, which adds the unmatched cases and takes out the short stays, comes to about 150,000 as well. So the number of Germans who leave in a year lies somewhere between 150,000 and 290,000, and the office’s own evidence points to the lower end.

The million fares the same way. On the official count Germany’s net loss of citizens from 2005 to 2024 is 1.03 million. Without the unresolved cases it is 544,000 (own calculation)¹⁰.

Fewer than the neighbours

Eurostat collects emigration from every member state by one definition, a move abroad for at least twelve months¹³. On that basis 2.1 of every 1,000 German citizens emigrated per year in 2022 to 2024. Of the 30 European countries with complete figures, Germany ranks 23rd. The rate was 9.0 in Romania, 6.8 in Ireland, 4.7 in Switzerland, 3.8 in Poland, 3.7 in Sweden, 3.2 in Spain, 2.9 in France and 2.2 in Italy (own calculation)¹⁴¹⁶.

Flow figures depend on how well each country records departures, and some record them badly: Czechia reports 0.4 per 1,000. A sturdier comparison counts emigrants where they live. The United Nations adds up the receiving countries’ censuses and registers. In 2024 about 4.3 million people born in Germany lived abroad, which is 5.1 per cent of Germany’s population. In 1990 it was 4.9 per cent¹⁷. That puts Germany in the middle of western Europe: the share is about 7 per cent for Britain, 5.7 for Switzerland, 5.0 for Italy, 4.7 for Austria and 3.8 for France. It is far below Poland’s 11.9, Ireland’s 13.6, Portugal’s 17.3 and Romania’s 24.1 (own calculation)¹⁷. Even this count flatters the claim. The UN finds 1.14 million German-born people in the United States, while the American census counts 520,000 foreign-born residents from Germany, because it counts only people who were not American citizens at birth¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹. The difference is presumably, in large part, the children of American soldiers.

Other countries have the same debate. Britain’s statistical office estimates that 246,000 British nationals left in 2025 and that the net loss was 136,000²⁰. France lost 193,000 people who were not immigrants in 2022 and got 115,000 back²¹. Italy counted 109,000 citizens leaving in 2025 after 141,000 the year before, and its statistical office puts the net loss of Italian graduates aged 25 to 34 at 78,000 for 2019 to 2024²².

The claim is about graduates, and here too a comparison exists. The EU’s labour-force survey counts the citizens of each member state who live in another country of the EU or of EFTA (Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein), by education. In 2025 that was 784,000 Germans of working age, of whom 437,000 had a degree²³. Set against the 13.7 million graduates among German citizens at home, 3.1 per cent of working-age German graduates live elsewhere in the EU or EFTA (own calculation)²³²⁴. Of 25 countries Germany ranks 18th. The share is 16.1 per cent for Romania, 13.6 for Croatia, 7.0 for Italy, 4.9 for Austria, 4.4 for Poland and 3.2 for the Netherlands; France stands at 2.3. Germany’s share was 2.9 per cent in 2015 and has barely moved since.

Few leave Germany, and few come back

Citizens of each country who emigrated for a year or more, per 1,000 citizens and year, average of 2022 to 2024; and how many citizens came back for every 100 who left. The sixteen most populous of the 30 countries with complete figures; the table has all of them.

Show the numbers

Country	Left per 1,000 citizens a year	Came back per 100 who left	Net loss per 1,000 citizens a year
Luxembourg	9.3	54	4.3
Romania	9.0	108	−0.7
Liechtenstein	7.1	99	0.1
Croatia	6.9	44	3.9
Ireland	6.8	98	0.2
Iceland	6.2	86	0.9
Latvia	5.9	91	0.5
Estonia	5.1	104	−0.2
Switzerland	4.7	72	1.3
Lithuania	4.0	174	−2.9
Poland	3.8	61	1.5
Greece	3.8	119	−0.7
Hungary	3.8	106	−0.2
Sweden	3.7	48	1.9
Malta	3.7	146	−1.7
Denmark	3.3	104	−0.1
Spain	3.2	107	−0.2
Belgium	3.0	52	1.4
Slovenia	3.0	73	0.8
France	2.9	74	0.8
Netherlands	2.9	84	0.5
Italy	2.2	55	1.0
Germany	2.1	49	1.1
Austria	2.1	61	0.8
Norway	2.0	75	0.5
Cyprus	1.7	173	−1.3
Bulgaria	1.7	164	−1.1
Finland	1.7	79	0.4
Slovakia	0.8	83	0.1
Czechia	0.4	63	0.2

The survey stops at the borders of the EU and EFTA. The OECD’s count of emigrants in all its member countries, the United States and Britain included, found about 1.4 million German-born graduates abroad in 2015/16, and it put the emigration rate of highly educated Germans at 6.3 per cent. For Britain it was 8.8, for Italy 7.2, for Poland 12.6²⁵. That is a working paper, and its rate cannot be compared with the labour-force figure, but in both counts Germany stands below Italy and Poland.

The doubling of German emigration in 2016 contained no additional emigrants.

Who goes

No German statistic records who leaves. Asked in 2024 what qualifications Germany’s emigrants have, the federal government answered that the migration statistics contain “weder Angaben zum Erwerbsstatus noch zur Qualifikation”, information neither on employment nor on qualifications²⁶. The government’s migration report says the same, and adds that the statistics cannot show how many of the departing Germans are naturalised citizens moving to the country whose passport they used to hold or still hold¹².

The claim that three quarters of German emigrants are graduates goes back to the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study. Its researchers drew 26,273 names from the registers of 81 municipalities: German citizens aged 20 to 70 who had de-registered for a move abroad between July 2017 and June 2018. They reached fewer than two thirds of them, and 4,616 completed the questionnaire, 17.6 per cent²⁷. Of those respondents 76 per cent had a university degree⁶. Weighted to the register sample it is 72 per cent, against 26 per cent of Germans who had not moved²⁸.

The sample left out, by design, everybody the authorities had struck off. The study’s own manual counts 137,972 such departures of Germans in 2018²⁹, more than half of the 261,851 in that year’s statistics⁸. So the three quarters describe the sixth of a sample that answered, drawn from the half of the official count who de-registered themselves. The researchers say so in their method chapter. Reports that set the 76 per cent beside the 288,579 leave it out.

There is an independent check from the receiving side. In the labour-force surveys of the other EU and EFTA countries, 56 per cent of the working-age Germans living there have a degree, against 32 per cent of German citizens at home (own calculation)²³²⁴. That counts everybody who lives abroad, not one year’s leavers, but it points the same way: graduates are heavily over-represented among Germans abroad, although by less than the survey suggests. The pattern is the same for the French (63 per cent abroad, 40 at home) and the Italians (40 and 21). It is reversed for Poles (31 and 34) and Romanians (15 and 17). In the richer countries of a free-movement area, those who move tend to be those a foreign employer will hire. Seen from the other end, the group is small: of the Germans who graduated between 1993 and 2005, 5.2 per cent were working abroad five years after their degree³⁰.

The survey also asked why. Of the emigrants, 58 per cent called their own career a very important reason, 45 per cent lifestyle, 29 per cent their partner’s job and 26 per cent money. Dissatisfaction with life in Germany was a very important reason for 17 per cent³¹. Full-time workers earned on average €1,186 more a month after tax about a year after the move, while those who stayed in Germany gained €87⁶. The median emigrant was 32, the median German who had not moved 49²⁸.

The registers add what the survey cannot, because they cover everyone. Of all the Germans recorded as leaving in 2025, the unresolved cases included, half were aged 25 to 49, one in six was a child and 7 per cent were 65 or older (own calculation)³². The largest named destinations were Switzerland with 22,730, Austria with 13,549, Spain with 9,676 and the United States with 8,860¹⁰. The classic destinations of a brain drain have shrunk. In 2008 the United States took 15,436 Germans and Britain 10,706; in 2025 Britain took 4,444¹⁰. The statistical office itself noted in June that moves to the United States had fallen “auf den tiefsten Stand der vergangenen 20 Jahre”, to their lowest in twenty years, the pandemic apart³³. Other destinations have grown from a low base. Between 2019 and 2025 the United Arab Emirates went from 996 Germans a year to 3,410, Thailand from 1,711 to 2,894 and Portugal from 1,546 to 2,634¹⁰.

Not all of this is a labour market. Of the Germans who moved to Switzerland in 2024, 63 per cent were aged 25 to 49 and 2 per cent were 65 or older. Of those who moved to Spain 11 per cent were 65 or older, and of those who moved to Thailand 19 per cent¹². As many Germans arrive from Turkey as leave for it, about 5,400 each way in 2025, and a third of those who left for Turkey in 2024 were children¹⁰¹². At least 6 per cent of all the Germans recorded as leaving in 2025 were born abroad; the true share is higher, and unknown (own calculation)⁸.

Who comes back

Many do. For every 100 Germans who left for abroad in 2025, 61 arrived from abroad¹⁰. But the balance is negative and has grown. Leaving the unresolved cases out on both sides, the net loss was 60,651 in 2025. In 2015 it was 17,571, and in 2017 and 2020 it was close to zero (own calculation). About a third of the 2025 loss went to two neighbours, 14,159 to Switzerland and 6,699 to Austria¹⁰.

It is the second such wave in twenty years. From 2006 to 2009 the net loss ran between 41,000 and 67,000 a year, and it set off the same alarm. In October 2006 the FDP’s parliamentary group wrote in a question to the government that Germans had always emigrated, “allerdings waren die Zahlen noch nie so hoch”, but the numbers had never been so high, and that the emigrants were mostly young and very well educated³⁴. Over the following decade the loss shrank to almost nothing.

The two waves differ. In 2008 the loss came from departures: 174,606 Germans left for abroad and 107,638 arrived. In 2025 fewer left, 153,775, and fewer arrived, 93,124. Arrivals fell by about a fifth between 2019 and 2021, in the pandemic, and have not recovered, while departures have risen in four of the five years since¹⁰.

Departures are back up, arrivals are not

German citizens who left Germany for abroad and who arrived from abroad, per year, without the unresolved cases. The statistical office marks 2008 to 2010 as inflated by a clean-up of the registers, and treats the arrivals as a comparable series only from 2020. The scale starts at 80,000.

Show the numbers

Year	Left for abroad	Arrived from abroad	Arrivals per 100 departures
2006	135,848	94,326	69
2007	151,534	101,805	67
2008	174,606	107,638	62
2009	154,830	114,146	74
2010	140,961	114,263	81
2011	139,377	115,450	83
2012	132,230	113,988	86
2013	137,950	117,061	85
2014	148,565	121,979	82
2015	138,099	120,528	87
2016	130,732	115,453	88
2017	117,636	115,181	98
2018	125,684	113,563	90
2019	124,949	112,794	90
2020	95,767	99,636	104
2021	118,745	92,164	78
2022	143,763	95,356	66
2023	139,351	96,330	69
2024	141,393	92,866	66
2025	153,775	93,124	61

How much of the missing fifth is real is uncertain. The Swiss registers confirm it for Switzerland. In 2015 they counted 16,181 German citizens leaving the country, in 2025 11,978, while the number arriving rose from 22,896 to 26,434. Switzerland’s net gain of Germans went from 6,715 to 14,456, almost exactly the loss in the German register³⁵¹⁰. Even so it is less than half the peak of 2008, when the Swiss gain was 34,153³⁶. Austria’s register does not confirm it. It shows more Germans leaving Austria than ten years ago, 12,224 against 10,606, and a net gain of about 6,400 Germans in 2025 as in 2015, where the German register shows the loss doubling³⁷¹⁰. Eurostat’s figures for Spain and the Netherlands also show more Germans departing in 2024 than in 2015¹⁴. And a German who was struck off and later registers again is booked as arriving from an unknown place, wherever he has been, so some real returns sit among the unresolved cases⁹¹². The office itself treats the arrivals of Germans as a comparable series only from 2020⁹.

The stock abroad is not in doubt. At the end of 2010 Switzerland had 263,271 German residents and at the end of 2025 336,446³⁵. Austria had 75,262 at the start of 2002 and 242,272 at the start of 2026³⁸.

On Eurostat’s twelve-month definition Germany got back 49 citizens for every 100 who left in 2022 to 2024, the third-lowest ratio of 30 countries after Croatia and Sweden, and lost a net 1.1 citizens per 1,000 a year, the seventh-highest rate (own calculation)¹⁴³⁹¹⁶. That ranking leans on the unresolved cases again, since the German figure counts the unmatched cases as emigrants who by construction never return. Without the unresolved cases the ratio for those three years is 67 per 100, which would be low but no longer near the bottom. So how poorly Germany does at getting its citizens back, compared with others, depends on 30,000 to 37,000 people a year whose whereabouts nobody knows.

Only a minority of emigrants plan to stay away. In the panel study 22 per cent meant to stay abroad for good, 50 per cent intended to return and 28 per cent had not decided⁴⁰. The institute’s summary turned this into 69 per cent who planned only a temporary stay, which is the share among those who had decided (own calculation)⁶. What they did is harder to establish. The panel’s published interview counts suggest that a little under three in ten of those abroad had moved back three years later, but the panel lost more than half its participants on the way, so the figure is rough (own calculation)⁴¹.

The returnees are not quite the same people as the leavers. The OECD estimated from the labour-force surveys that 48 per cent of the Germans who left for another EU or EFTA country in 2012 were highly educated, and 32 per cent of those who came back⁴². In the panel study the gap is smaller, 76 per cent of leavers against 69 per cent of returnees⁴³, but it holds when age, family and income are taken into account. Each additional year of education lowered the probability of being among the returnees, the best-paid third were less likely to return, and people in computing and the natural sciences were 13 percentage points less likely than those in business administration⁴⁴. The authors conclude that fears of a brain drain are exaggerated, and name the findings that point the other way themselves: “lower educational levels, lower net income, and employment in specific occupational sectors”⁴⁴.

Two of the panel’s researchers have scaled its answers up to all emigrants and returnees of 2018, to see what the imbalance costs in labour. The net loss came to about 2,700 people in business management, 2,500 in computing, 2,200 in finance and 2,100 in medicine and health. At that pace health care would lose 0.7 per cent of its workforce in ten years and computing 1.9 per cent⁴⁵. It is the only estimate across occupations, and it rests on a sample that covers half the recorded departures.

The other direction

A drain is a net quantity, and the claim counts only one direction. In 2015 about 1.96 million graduates of working age who were born abroad lived in Germany. In 2025 it was 3.68 million (own calculation from the labour-force survey)⁴⁶. The 437,000 German graduates in the rest of the EU and EFTA, and the 1.4 million German-born graduates the OECD found in all its member countries, stand against that. Not every foreign degree is worth a German one on the labour market, and many of these graduates took their degree in Germany. But the direction is not in doubt, and the surplus has grown.

Graduates in, graduates out

People with a university-level degree: aged 15 to 64 in the first two counts, 15 and over in the third. The counts come from different sources and years and can be compared only roughly.

3.68 million

graduates born abroad and living in Germany, 2025

1.96 million in 2015

437,000

German graduates living elsewhere in the EU and EFTA, 2025

335,000 in 2015

1.4 million

graduates born in Germany and living in another OECD country, 2015/16

the United States included

Germany is also unusually good at keeping the students it imports. Of the foreigners who received their first residence permit for study between 2006 and 2012, 55 per cent were still in the country after five years and 46 per cent after ten⁴⁷. In the OECD’s comparison only Canada kept as many⁴⁸. Of the holders of an EU Blue Card, the permit for highly paid professionals, 83 per cent were still in Germany after five years⁴⁷.

Many of those who come leave again. In 2025, 956,363 foreign citizens were de-registered for a move abroad, more than three times the number of Germans⁸. The Institute for Employment Research surveyed more than 40,000 immigrants of working age in the winter of 2024/25. A quarter had thought about leaving Germany in the past year and 3 per cent had concrete plans⁴⁹. Among those with a master’s degree or a doctorate it was 35 per cent and 4 per cent, and the report sums up: “Höherqualifizierte äußern deutlich häufiger Auswanderungsüberlegungen und konkrete Auswanderungspläne”, the more highly qualified more often consider emigrating and more often have plans to⁴⁹. A year later 2.6 per cent of those surveyed had left⁵⁰. The selection that worries people about Germans is at work among immigrants too. If Germany has a problem keeping skilled people, the German passport is not what defines it.

The top of the distribution

The strongest form of the claim is about quality: the very best leave, and those who come or return are not as good. This is what the expert commission meant in 2014. Its evidence was a count of scientists by the addresses on their publications: between 1996 and 2011, 23,460 publishing scientists had left Germany and 19,521 had come, and the commission concluded: “Die Besten wandern ab, kehren aber nur selten nach Deutschland zurück”, the best leave and seldom return⁷.

The quality finding was thinner than the sentence. It compared the impact factor of the journals in which each group published: 1.212 for those who left Germany, 1.202 for new arrivals, 1.168 for returnees and 1.030 for those who never moved⁷. The gap between leavers and arrivals was one hundredth of a point. Two later OECD snapshots, for 2013 and 2016, put Germany’s arrivals ahead of its leavers⁵¹.

Ten years later the same commission counted again and reversed its finding on the numbers: “Deutschland ist zum Nettoempfängerland für publizierende Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler geworden”, Germany has become a net recipient of publishing scientists⁵². For 2005 to 2020 it found a net gain of more than 5,400 authors⁵². The OECD’s current database shows a small net loss in 2011, 2012 and 2015 and a net gain in every year since, of about 1,100 authors in 2023 and 800 in 2024⁵³. Some of the turn is revision. The OECD has recalculated the series more than once, and the loss it reports for 2008 has shrunk from 1,119 authors in its 2017 edition to 603 in the figures the commission used⁵¹⁵².

Scientists: the balance turned

Scientific authors who moved to Germany or returned, less those who left, per year, read from the addresses on their publications. Earlier editions of the same series showed larger losses for the years before 2016.

Show the numbers

Year	Net flow of scientific authors
2011	−148
2012	−9
2013	+40
2014	+285
2015	−105
2016	+156
2017	+283
2018	+425
2019	+404
2020	+549
2021	+794
2022	+1,004
2023	+1,094
2024	+811

The second report did not take back the rest. It says Germany still loses human capital across the board⁵². Against the United States, Switzerland and Britain it finds a clear net loss, and the OECD’s figures for 2010 to 2024 agree for two of the three: Germany lost a net 2,755 authors to Switzerland and 1,287 to the United States, and gained 806 from Britain⁵⁴. For every 100 authors who left Germany between 2005 and 2020, 44 returned⁵². And in the study behind the report, those who left published in better-ranked journals than those who arrived, as in 2014, although the same study finds that more than a quarter of the returnees are among the most cited researchers in their fields⁵⁵.

Professors are the group where the outflow is most visible. In 2023 the universities of Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands employed 2,508 German professors, up from 1,818 ten years earlier. All German universities together employed about 4,200 professors with a foreign passport in 2024, 8 per cent of the total⁵⁶⁵⁷.

For doctors the direction is the reverse. The medical association counts the doctors who were working in Germany and moved abroad: 2,234 in 2025, of whom 1,236 were German citizens⁵⁸. That is half a per cent of the doctors working in Germany. In 2011, the peak year, it was 3,410, or 1 per cent⁵⁸. The association’s count is probably too low: Switzerland reported 1,075 German-trained doctors arriving in 2024, where the association counted 675 leaving for it⁵⁹⁵⁸. The traffic the other way is larger on any count. The OECD records 10,962 doctors trained abroad who started work in Germany in 2024, five times the number the association saw leave that year, and the number of foreign doctors working in Germany has risen from 24,595 in 2011 to 71,480⁵⁹⁵⁸.

If Germany has a problem keeping skilled people, the German passport is not what defines it.

What a brain drain looks like

The phrase comes from Britain, where a newspaper coined it in 1963 for scientists leaving for America⁶⁰. Germany saw emigration on a large scale long before that, and today’s can be measured against it. In 1854, 239,246 people left the German states for overseas, 6.6 for every 1,000 inhabitants. In 1881 it was 220,902, or 4.9 per 1,000⁶¹⁶². Most of them stayed away: in the years before the First World War, when return was easier than ever before, American statistics counted 18 people going back to Germany for every 100 arriving from it (own calculation)⁶³. The argument about lost talent is as old as the outflow. The statistician Friedrich Burgdörfer wrote in 1931: “Germany lost by emigration millions of healthy, skillful, venturesome and creative people in their most productive age”⁶¹. A study of nineteenth-century Hesse-Cassel found that artisans were indeed over-represented among emigrants, and farmers and labourers under-represented⁶⁴.

Today against the past

People who left in a year, per 1,000 inhabitants; for 2008 and 2025 per 1,000 German citizens. The rows for 1854, 1881, 1923 and 1952 count overseas emigration only, nearly all of it one-way. Where a bar has two parts, the second runs to the higher of two counts.

Show the numbers

Year	What is counted	Per 1,000 inhabitants (2008 and 2025: German citizens)
1854	overseas emigration, the peak year	6.6
1881	overseas emigration, peak of the second wave	4.9
1923	overseas emigration in the year of hyperinflation	1.9
1939	Jewish refugees, the peak year	1.1
1952	West Germans leaving for overseas, post-war peak	1.9
1950–61	East Germans leaving for the West, yearly average	12.2–16.8
2008	Germans leaving for abroad	2.3
2025	Germans leaving for abroad; with unresolved cases	2.2–4.1

The largest sustained loss came later and from the smaller German state. Between 1950 and 1961 about 217,000 people a year applied for admission in West Germany after leaving the GDR, on a population of about 18 million, and the West German registers counted nearly 300,000 arrivals a year. That is between 12 and 17 per 1,000 inhabitants every year for twelve years (own calculation)⁶⁵. About half were under 25⁶⁵. It ended with a wall.

The loss that fits the phrase best was small in numbers. Between 1933 and 1941 about 270,000 Jews fled Germany, 78,000 of them in 1939 alone⁶⁶. Even in that year this was about 1 per 1,000 of the population, half of today’s rate of departure. What it took was the top. The German universities lost 19.3 per cent of their teaching staff after 1933; of 901 dismissed scholars whose lives have been traced, 560 emigrated⁶⁷. The economist Fabian Waldinger has measured what they were worth. Of the physicists at German universities in 1933, 13.6 per cent were dismissed within two years, and they included six of the fifteen Nobel laureates among them, Albert Einstein for one⁶⁸. Counting Austria and the dismissals up to 1940, the 15 per cent of physicists who were dismissed had received 64 per cent of the citations to papers published before 1933⁶⁹. He estimates that the dismissals cut the output of the affected departments by a third until 1980, and that they contributed “about nine times more to the decline of German science than physical destruction during WWII”⁶⁹. In the fields of the chemists who went to America, patenting by American inventors rose by 31 per cent⁷⁰.

Set beside these, the present is modest. About two Germans in every 1,000 leave for abroad in a year, more often than not for a job, and for every ten who leave six arrive. That gross rate is no lower than the overseas emigration of 1923 or 1952, the peak years of the Weimar Republic and of the early Federal Republic. The difference is the direction of travel: the emigrants of those years went one way. Today more scientists arrive than leave, and nobody is expelled.

What it costs

Each graduate who leaves for good takes public money along. In 2024 a medical degree at a German university cost €260,700 in basic public funding, against €80,100 for a university degree across all subjects⁷¹. The state loses more than the cost of the degree, because it also loses what the graduate would have paid in. The OECD puts the public’s net gain from a degree in Germany, in taxes and contributions over a working life less the cost of the studies, at $274,000 for a man and $104,200 for a woman, compared with someone who left education after secondary school⁷². In 2009 the ifo Institute worked through the case of a woman doctor who emigrates at about 30 and never returns, and arrived at €1,075,100 in lost net revenue⁷³. An AfD motion in the Bundestag in November 2025 cited it as “Kosten in Höhe von einer Million Euro”, a cost of a million euros to the taxpayer when a doctor of 30 leaves for good⁷⁴.

The case study assumes that she never comes back, which is the assumption the whole claim rests on. The sum also runs both ways. Germany paid nothing for the training of the 62,642 doctors now working in the country who qualified abroad⁵⁹. Nobody has added up the two sides for the country as a whole. We found no estimate of the total fiscal cost of German emigration, and a reliable one would need to know who leaves, with what training, and for how long.

The verdict: what remains of the claim

Take the four parts in turn.

More Germans leave than ever: the number in the headlines is about twice too high, because nearly half of it is people of unknown whereabouts who, the statistical office says, have often not gone anywhere. What is left, about 154,000 a year, may be the most on record, and it is a tenth above the level of a decade ago. By flows and by the share of its graduates abroad Germany sits in the lower third of Europe, and by the stock of its emigrants in the middle. Against the nineteenth century and the GDR the outflow is small.

Those who leave are the best educated: they are better educated than those who stay, as the emigrants of the other rich European countries are. The share of three quarters, though, holds only for those who answered a survey. Among all Germans living elsewhere in Europe it is a little over half.

They do not come back: six arrive for every ten who leave, and only one emigrant in five says at the start that he means to stay away. But the net loss of citizens, about 60,000 a year without the unresolved cases, is the largest since 2008, and since the pandemic the arrivals have not recovered. Those who return are somewhat less educated than those who leave, and people in computing and science are less likely to return than others. At the top of the academic ladder the balance with Switzerland and the United States is still negative.

The country is being drained: on balance it is not. Germany holds far more graduates born abroad than it has graduates living abroad, more scientists and doctors arrive than leave, and the commission that announced a net loss of researchers now reports a net gain. An institute close to German employers, summing up the same data in 2022, put both halves in one sentence: “Auch wenn kein Brain-Drain stattfindet, verlassen Hochqualifizierte doch besonders häufig das Land”, even if there is no brain drain, the highly qualified leave especially often⁷⁵.

What nobody can settle is who leaves, because nothing records it. The expert commission recommended in 2014 “ein systematisches Monitoring des Brain Drain und Brain Gain”⁷. In 2024 the CDU and CSU, then in opposition, asked the government: “wieso erfasst die Bundesregierung die Abwanderung deutscher Fachkräfte ins Ausland nicht systematisch”, why it does not systematically record the emigration of skilled Germans. The answer referred them to the preliminary remarks⁷⁶. A de-registration records a date, an address and at best a country. It records no degree and no occupation, and for nearly half of all departing Germans no country either. Until that changes, the number in the headlines will go on counting, among others, people who never left.