who interviewed each family individually to ensure that it was of German origin and wanted to be evacuated. The ethnic Germans greeted these teams with enthusiasm and attempted to document their German heritage by any means. Cooperation of the Soviet officials was sometimes positive and sometimes obstructionist, as many non-German anticommunists also tried to leave, usually without success. The population transfer began in the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia, where 66,000 and 20,000 people, respectively, settled in Germany in the late fall of 1939. The Nazi government was disappointed in the quality of these immigrants. They wanted farmers to colonize the newly conquered lands in the Polish West, not urban residents, many of whom were elderly and without children. In winter 1939–1940, about 60,000 ethnic Germans were brought from Volhynia, western Ukraine, first to a transit camp in Lodz in occupied Poland, and because the majority of these settlers were farmers, they were sent to the former Polish provinces of Poznan (Posen), now renamed the German province of Warthegau, or to West Prussia, the region bordering Gdansk (Danzig). The evacuees who were not suitable for farming were settled elsewhere in Germany. At the end of September 1940, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to transfer Germans living in the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina, now occupied by the Red Army. By the end of October of that year, this resettlement was practically complete, with a total of 124,000 ethnic Germans transferred to the Reich. The total number of ethnic Germans resettled into the Reich has been estimated by some historians at 500,000. On arrival in the Reich, most of the resettled Germans were given German citizenship, and the young men were drafted into the Wehrmacht. In accordance with Nazi racist theories of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil),the goal was to settle the annexed eastern lands with German farmers; the majority were placed on farms in the Warthegau, formerly the Polish province of Poznan, and a smaller number in the former Polish territory of West Prussia. In order to accomplish this, the SS and German army began to expel Polish farmers from these lands, and German re-settlers took over their houses and farms. In their place, 332,000 German evacuees, mostly farmers, were settled on these lands. Escape to West Germany With the close of the war, most of the resettled Germans in West Prussia and Poznan fled