The minority in Southern Schleswig has existed since 1920 and has ever since then been financially supported by the Danish state and has run Danish schools and clubs in the region. Up to 1926 only in Flensburg and thereafter in the entire region. However, its members have not always been the same people. In the 1920s there were around 1200 communists in the city of Flensburg, though the party declined in the prewar years. During the Nazi dictatorship the minority had an overall membership of 2t00. Historians account for communists being a large part of these, as many of them tried avoiding sendng there children to schools directly controlled by the Nazis. After the war, many refuges were send to the area from areas that Germany had lost in the east. Up to one third of the areas overall population was made up of these. This gave grounds for tensions, and so a lot of people chose to join the Danish inority in hopes of joining the much more prosperous Denmark and to avoid having to take more refuges. In the end of the year 1946, the minority therefore reached a membership of 62000. However, the Danish governemnt refused South Schleswig to join the kingdom, and in 1953 the socalled "Programm Nord" (eng:"Programme North") set up by the Schleswig-Holstein state government to help the area economically. This caused the Danish minority to decline up to the seventies. Since then the minority has slowly been gaining size and lies now around 50000 according to its major organizations, although no census has ever been made.
