ZGram - June 26, 2002 - "More on the German expellees of half a century ago"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

June 26, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Of course the article below was written by a journalist steeped in 
Political Correctness.  Nonetheless, there is an undertow that tells 
the reader that the Germans are ever so slowly clawing their way back 
to where they were and where they should have been - much to the 
discomfort of those who would rather see the Germans to continue 
grovelling forever before the Powers we all know. 

When I asked Ernst Z=FCndel to comment on this article, he said:  "The 
time is long overdue on this debate.  The Poles and Czechs will have 
to come to terms with these issues and better settle them fairly.  If 
they do not, they could unhinge 50+ years of compromise in a matter 
of months.

Judge this article's flavor by its title - and you will know where it 
came from:

[START]

Some Germans clamor for recognition as victims:  Stories of postwar 
expulsions getting more attention

By Tom Hundley
Tribune foreign correspondent

June 25, 2002

BERLIN -- From the unsettled memories of Adolf Hitler's defeat in 
World War II, Germans are resurrecting a controversial group of war 
victims: themselves.

In the chaos following the Third Reich's collapse in 1945, more than 
13 million Germans were expelled from lands where they had lived for 
centuries. About 7 million lost their homes when Poland's borders 
shifted west. An additional 3 million Sudeten Germans were evicted 
from what was then Czechoslovakia. Others were pushed out of 
traditional German settlements along the Danube River in Yugoslavia 
and Hungary.

Tens of thousands of people died in the process, but little was said 
of them. Germany, after all, was the aggressor in the war and the 
perpetrator of the Holocaust. The mantle of its own guilt lay heavily 
on its postwar consciousness.

Outside Germany, there was a sense that whatever Germans may have 
suffered, they were the architects of their own misery.

In Germany, however, the stories of these Germans are now being 
looked at in a different light. In his latest novel, Gunter Grass, 
the Nobel laureate and conscience of postwar Germany, re-creates the 
deaths of 8,000 German civilians on a ship torpedoed by a Russian 
submarine as it attempted to flee the port of Danzig, Grass' 
birthplace, which is now the Polish city of Gdansk.

"Crab Walk," published earlier this year to critical acclaim, has 
opened a door that many others not of Grass' stature appear eager to 
shoulder through.

Among them is Joerg Haider of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, who 
has lately championed the cause of the Sudeten Germans. So is Klaus 
Rainer Roehl, a former far-left intellectual gone over to the far 
right, who recently published a polemic, "Forbidden Grief: The End of 
the German Taboo," telling his compatriots that they, too, were 
victims.

Newspapers and magazines in Germany and Austria are beginning to 
explore the theme of German victimhood, and a recent German 
television series that documented the misery of the expellees, as 
they are known in Germany and Austria, drew a wide and appreciative 
audience.

Some feel debt is paid

Emboldened by a growing sense among younger Germans that their 
country has paid its debt to history, politicians are beginning to 
suggest that the time has come for others to apologize to Germany, 
and perhaps to offer some token restitution for property that was 
seized.

The issue flared into the open earlier this year when nationalist 
politicians in Germany and Austria called for the Czech Republic to 
repeal the so-called Benes decrees that stripped Germans of their 
property in Czechoslovakia at the end of the war. Most of those who 
lost land had roots there dating back centuries, long before Nazi 
forces took over Czechoslovakia.

Milos Zeman, the Czech prime minister, bluntly rejected the idea, 
telling the Germans they got what they deserved.

"Many Sudeten Germans committed treason, a crime which was punishable 
by death according to the laws of the time," Zeman told an Austrian 
magazine. "If they were expelled or transferred, it was more moderate 
than the death penalty."

That did little to soothe German sensibilities. Last week the 
parliament of the German state of Saxony passed a resolution that 
would require the Czech, Slovak, Polish and Slovenian governments to 
renounce all wartime decrees against the Germans before they could 
join the European Union. The resolution carries no legal weight, but 
it sends a sharp message.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his predecessor, Helmut Kohl, 
tried to keep a lid on this emotional issue, but Schroeder now is in 
a tough election campaign against Edmund Stoiber, whose wife is an 
expellee. Expellee groups were elated this week when Stoiber embraced 
their cause, saying if he were elected, he would insist on talks with 
the Czech and Polish governments about renouncing the postwar decrees.

Limited role

In the years after World War II, the activities of expellee groups 
were legally restricted to helping with the resettlement of 
expellees. Politically, they had little to say.

Dieter Hempel is the head of the Berlin branch of the expellees' 
national organization. Hempel's family was from Breslau--present-day 
Wroclaw in western Poland.

"My father was a soldier, and at the end of World War II he was 
captured by British troops somewhere in Europe, and he never again 
saw Breslau until 1991," said Hempel, 60.

"He lost everything in Breslau, but for him there was never any 
discussion of this," he said.

The collapse of communism and German reunification made the 1991 
visit possible.

"We stood in front of the house. It was still there, but there were 
strangers living in it," the son recalled. "On the drive back to 
Berlin, my father didn't say anything. He wasn't upset. There weren't 
any regrets."

But the experience left Hempel unsettled.

"For some people there is an expectation that they should get some 
financial compensation from the Polish government or the Czech 
government, but that's not the position of our organization. For me, 
personally, the answer is more abstract. There should be some sort of 
recognition that what happened to us wasn't right, it wasn't legal," 
he said.

Museum/memorial proposed

Erika Steinbach, a member of the German parliament from the Christian 
Democrats and head of the expellees' national organization, is 
pushing for the creation in Berlin of a National Center Against 
Expulsion. As she envisions it, the center would be a kind of museum, 
study center and memorial for all groups that suffered expulsions in 
the 20th Century--among them Jews, Armenians, Ukrainians, Chechens, 
Ingush, Serbs, Kazakhs, Croats, Albanians and, of course, Germans.

"The expulsions that happened in the Balkans during the 1990s helped 
open the door. A new sensitivity emerged," she said. "All of these 
20th Century expulsions have to be dealt with in an open manner."

She compared the expulsion of Germans from their ancestral lands in 
Poland and the Sudetenland to "what it would have been like if the 
Americans had expelled all the Japanese-Americans after World War 
II." Her own family, she said, came from prewar Danzig and was 
treated "like cockroaches" when forced to resettle in Germany.

Steinbach's intentions may be sincere, but it is doubtful that many 
Jews would be interested in equating the Holocaust with the plight of 
German expellees. It also is unlikely that recent Serb expellees from 
Croatia would want to share their pain with Germany, a main backer of 
Croatia's independence drive.

"I don't like this project at all," said Wolfgang Benz, director of 
the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at Berlin's Technical 
University.

"I don't see the point in having a big documentation center, giving 
the message that this suffering on the part of the Germans has been 
forgotten and needs to be brought back to active memory."

The expulsion center project also has raised hackles in Poland and 
the Czech Republic, where many fear that demands for restitution or 
compensation will be next. The German government has paid reparations 
to Israel, and some companies that profited through their cooperation 
with the Nazi regime have paid individual reparations.

Adam Michnik, the former Polish dissident and current editor of his 
country's most influential newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, tried to 
defuse the crisis by suggesting that a Center Against Expulsion would 
be more meaningful as a European initiative instead of a German one, 
and that it should be in Wroclaw rather than Berlin.

"The German expellees are planning a project that is supposedly going 
to serve reconciliation, but they are falling into the trap that 
Thomas Mann called the `German lack of talent for politics,'" he 
wrote this week.

Noting that Wroclaw had its distinct Polish, German, Jewish, Czech, 
Russian and Ukrainian histories, he said the city would be a better 
symbolic choice because it "means reconciliation on a daily basis."

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Source:  The Chicago Tribune, June 25, 2002

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