Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe be declared as having lost Greek nationality...” The Turkish minority was forced to migrate. While the vast majority of migration wave was towards Turkey, some groups chose to migrate to other European countries, in particular to Germany. Today, the population of Western Thrace Turks in Germany amounts to 30,000. A considerable number of Western Thrace Turks live in other EU Member States, such as the Netherlands, England, Sweden, France, Belgium and Austria. The need to keep alive their cultural values and maintain solidarity in their host countries led the Western Thrace Turks to create collectively created associations. In Germany, the
East Thrace the distribution of ethnoreligious groups in the local "sanjaks" was as follows: The Muslim "millet" was recorded as Turkish, while the church members of the Ecumenical Patriarchate as Greek. In the past century modern East Thrace was the main component of the territory of the Adrianople Vilayet, which excluded the Constantinople Vilayet, but included West Thrace and parts of the Rhodopes and Sakar. A publication from December 21, 1912 in the Belgian magazine "Ons Volk Ontwaakt" (‘Our Nation Awakes’) estimated 1,006,500 inhabitants in the vilayet: East Thrace East Thrace or Eastern Thrace ( or simply "Trakya"; , "Anatoliki Thraki"; ,