Until the middle of the 19th century the majority of those men and women leaving the Old World came from Southwestern Germany, though by that time emigration had also started in the West and Northwest. From the 1850s onward Northern and Northeastern Germany became major emigration areas. Throughout history the intensity of the emigration movement varied from region to region. By the 1880s, however, East Elbian Prussia had become the most important sending area within Germany.

Depending on conditions at home (push factors: crop failures, economic crises, under- and unemployment, low wages etc.) and abroad (pull factors: cheap land, industrial progress, high wages, upward social mobility etc.) mass emigration was subject to considerable fluctuations. A first wave of emigration hit Germany in the 1850s, peaking in 1854 when 215.000 people left their homeland. Altogether almost 1.3 millions left during that decade. A second wave commenced as early as 1864 and by 1873 another one million had left for abroad. The heaviest wave occurred from 1880 to 1893, when approximately 1.8 million made their way to the U.S.

However, as a result of steady economic growth Germany ceased to be a major emigration country from the mid-1890s onward. Internal mass migrations to the expanding, labor markets of Germany replaced overseas migrations. At the same time Germany became more and more attractive to immigrants from other European areas. As a matter of fact, from the turn of the century onwards until 1914, Germany became the second largest 'importer of foreign labor' after the United States.

The short-term rise of transatlantic migration in the early 1920s peaking in the year of inflation in 1923 was above all determined by the results of World War One. Thus it can only conditionally be compared to the mass emigrations of the 19th century. In the 1930s the movement from Nazi-Germany to the United States was characterized by the flight and expulsion of about 37.000 Jewish men and women in 1933 and another 23.000 annually between 1934 and 1937.

After the end of the second world war the emigration of Germans was prohibited by the Allies for the time being. By 1951, however, the last restrictions on going abroad had been lifted in Western Germany. Among those who left for overseas in the 1950s refugees and Germans who had been driven out of their homelands in the eastern territories were over-represented. Post- war emigration peaked in 1952 when around 90.000 left in search of a better life abroad. After that the level of emigration sank continually while at the same time the so-called 'economic miracle' attracted an increasing number of foreign workers, the so-called 'guestworkers' recruited by German industry in far away places of  Southern Europe.