We had a German couple living next door in the early 1980’s. He was a scientist at the JET project at Culham. She said not a lot of people owned property in Germany, most rented. They were buying a house that would accommodate her mother. He mother was in East Germany, but she will be retiring age soon and the East Germans would let her cross to the West when she retired. They didn’t want to keep people who were too old to work. Interesting she was on holiday at a relatives, when the East Germans built the wall and she never went back home.