High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Ostflucht (flight from the East) was a movement by residents of the former eastern territories of Germany, such as East Prussia, West Prussia, Silesia and Province of Posen beginning around 1850, to the more industrialized western German Rhine and Ruhr provinces. Along with ethnic Germans, many of those migrating to the Ruhr were originally of Polish ethnicity later so-called Ruhrpolen.