Israel joins protest againts planned Berlin memorial for German expellees

Jerusalem Post ^ | Jul. 17, 2003 | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

[yonif]

For some here, the millions of Germans who fled or were expelled from their homes in countries throwing off Nazi occupation after World War II are victims of Adolf Hitler.

But the idea of honoring those expelled Germans with a Berlin memorial is unsettling Germany's eastern neighbors, countries now lined up to join the European Union.

A private organization, the Federation for Expellees, launched a drive three years ago to create a memorial for the 12.5 Germans who lost their ancestral homes in present-day Poland, Czech Republic and other eastern lands.

This week, more than 70 prominent intellectuals and politicians from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Israel and Germany voiced their concerns about the nascent plan.

In an open letter, the signers said they feared the suffering of countries victimized by the Nazis would be overlooked—land they proposed taking a broader European approach, instead of a strictly German center on expulsions.

"Organizing such a center as a mainly national project, as is planned by the foundation of expellees in Germany, causes mistrust among our neighbors and cannot be in the mutual interest of our countries," said the open letter.

Among those who signed were Czech Deputy Premier Petr Mares, two former Polish foreign ministers, German Nobel literature laureate Guenter Grass and former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietreich Genscher.

The memorial proposal comes at a time when Germans are talking more openly about German civilians' suffering during and after World War II—la topic that long smacked of right-wing nationalism in the minds of many.

The Federation for Expellees, founded in 1944, is led by a conservative politician. But the topic of German victims of the war also is being addressed by liberals.

Most notably, Grass wrote about the sinking of a Nazi vessel rescuing German refugees from the approaching Russian army in last year's novel "Crab Walk."

The author, originally from Danzig—lnow the Polish city of Gdansk—lsaid he wanted to reclaim the issue from nationalists.

In the chaos that emerged during the Nazi defeat, with millions of Europeans fleeing advancing armies and formerly occupied nations re-establishing control, more than 2.5 Germans were expelled from areas that became Poland and 3 million from the Sudentenland in the present-day Czech Republic, along with millions of other Germans from other countries.

The Federation of Expellees wants to build a Center against Expulsions as a memorial and learning center in the German capital.

Defending the project, the head of the federation, Erika Steinbach, said the memorial will also address Hitler's mistreatment of citizens in lands Germany occupied, as well as more recent instances of mass expulsions in Africa.

"We want to ensure that expulsions don't become a political method," Steinbach said Tuesday by telephone.

She also insisted that the center will have a "European orientation," stressing that its backers have brought foreign historians and advisers on board, among them Poles and Czechs.

The center so far does not have a site. The foundation has asked the government to help find a suitable building in central Berlin where it could establish the center with permanent and changing exhibits.

Still, the problem of how to remember ordinary Germans' suffering continues to rankle.

Last week, Polish Foreign Minister Wlodziemierz Cimoszewicz acknowledged that the fate of displaced Germans was tragic—lbut, he added, "the idea of a European center on expulsions might suggest that we compare the situations of expelled Poles and expelled Germans."

"Those situations are not comparable in a moral dimension," he told the Trybuna newspaper. "Germans bore the consequences of the war they started. Most of them were not expelled but they escaped."

Relations between Prague and Berlin cooled last year after then-Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman described the Sudeten Germans expelled in 1945 as "Hitler's fifth column."

Schroeder's narrowly defeated election challenger, Edmund Stoiber, slammed the Czech Republic for its refusal to revoke the decrees that exiled the Germans—la policy that Steinbach also described as "unspeakable."

[yonif]

Ping.

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