compensation was paid to them after the war. In Ontario, the largest internment centre for German Canadians was at Camp Petawawa, which housed 750 who had been born in Germany and Austria. Between 1945 and 1994, some 400,000 German-speaking immigrants arrived in Canada; approximately 270,000 of these arrived by the early 1960s. Around a third of postwar German immigrants were from various parts of Eastern Europe and formerly German or German-ruled territories which fell outside of the boundaries of the two postwar German states. Migration followed a sponsorship system predominantly led by churches, leading to an influx of German immigrants to existing German neighbourhoods in cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Winnipeg, as well as rural townships in the Prairies. Alexander Freund remarks that "[f]or postwar Canadians [...] the great influx of German-speaking immigrants after the war posed, at least potentially, a personal confrontation with the recent past that could be difficult to navigate." There were also tensions between Germans and other European immigrants, some of whom had suffered under German occupation in Europe. Postwar Canadians "did not distinguish between Germans and Nazis", and this perspective was bolstered by decades of American war films which portrayed Germans in an unsympathetic light. Pressure increased on Germans to assimilate. German-Canadians began to create advocacy organizations to promote their interests, such as the Trans-Canada Alliance for German Canadians, which was founded in 1951 by social democrats but was soon taken over by right-wing elements of the German community. Going into the 1960s, Canadian nationalism and ethnic politics revolved increasingly around the Anglophone-Francophone divide, leaving little place for other groups, including the Germans. As the war became more distant, the Canadian national narrative, guided by historians, journalists, and veterans' organizations, was formed with the exclusion of German or other inter-cultural perspectives on the war, emphasizing instead themes of heroism and sacrifice by Canadian soldiers. Some German-Canadians "withdrew into a 'culture of grievance.'" As time went on, Canadian perspectives broadened around controversial Allied actions such as the bombing of Dresden, which some German-Canadians found encouraging. Demography Population Geographical distribution Provinces & territories Prairies There are several German ethnic-bloc settlements in the Canadian Prairies in western Canada. Over a quarter of people in Saskatchewan are German-Canadians. German bloc settlements include the areas around Strasbourg, Bulyea, Leader, Burstall, Fox Valley, Eatonia, St. Walburg, Paradise Hill, Loon Lake, Goodsoil, Pierceland, Meadow Lake, Edenwold, Windthorst, Lemberg, Qu'appelle, Neudorf, Grayson, Langenburg,