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Saturday September 2 1:23 PM ET WWII Expelled Germans Lay Wreaths
BERLIN (AP) - A group representing some of the millions of ethnic Germans driven out of neighboring countries after World War II laid wreaths Saturday in memory of those who died during the expulsions and pledged to work for reconciliation with Germany's former foes.
Gerhard Schroeder was due Sunday to become the first Social Democratic chancellor to address a meeting of the group, which has accused the center-left party of failing to recognize the plight of those who fled or were forced from countries such as then-Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Officials from the Federation of Expellees, marking the 50th anniversary of a charter founding their campaign for reconciliation and compensation, also honored several elderly veterans of the cause, including the only signatory of the 1950 charter still alive.
Social Democratic party General Secretary Franz Muentefering praised the signatories for their rejection of violence and revenge so soon after the expulsions, which were mostly completed by 1947.
``Today, 50 years later, German Social Democrats remember this monumental step,'' Muentefering said in a statement.
Reprisals after Nazi Germany's defeat saw about 12 million ethnic Germans dispossessed and driven from their homes in eastern Europe. About 2 million were killed or died from starvation and illness on the trek.
Some expellees have argued that eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic shouldn't be allowed to join the European Union until they change laws that legalized the confiscation of property from ethnic Germans.
I wonder whether publicizing such crimes as forced expulsions will open the same Pandora's Box of territorial disputes - as followed WWI.
When over 14 million Germans were expelled,(speak "Ethnic Cleansing") it was not merely from Czechoslovakia and Poland - as noted in the AP article - but also from countries like Latvia, Estonia, East Prussia, Pommerania, Silesia, White Russia, the Ukraine, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Sudetenland, among other E-European countries.
Following WWII this Ethnic Cleansing of Germans is on record as the largest [forced] "migration" in all history.
The German leftist writer Gunter Grass wrote of this as did the Polish writer Jerzy Kozinsky(sp). It was the result of a lost war.
50 years on it is the Germans who stand strong and united and the Slavs who are in ruins. Should Germany 'Drang Nach Osten' or simply engage in Ostpolitik?
My own sense is that Germany does better when it puts its mailed fist in the velvet glove.
I personally feel little sympathy for them. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Germany has been able to accomplish more with a smaller territory, unlike countries like Poland and the rest. The proof of this is that the incorporation of East Germany is an economic disaster. Reconstruction has provided benefits only for a few companies, and nothing more.
Some expellees have argued that eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic shouldn't be allowed to join the European Union until they change laws that legalized the confiscation of property from ethnic Germans.Maybe so, but most of the German public opposes EU expansion for different reasons. The experience of Germany's "enlargement" has visibly demonstrated the enormous cost involved. Most EU citizens, like the Germans, do not want to foot the bill. The EU has enough farmers to subsidize as it is.
"Since the end of the war about 3,000,000 people, mostly women and children and overaged men, have been killed in eastern Germany and south-eastern Europe; about 15,000,000 people have been deported or had to flee from their homesteads and are on the road. About 25 per cent of these people, over 3,000,000 have perished. About 4,000,000 men and women have been deported to eastern Europe and Russia as slaves. It seems that the elimination of the German population of eastern Europe - at least 15,000,000 people - was planned in accordance with decisions made at Yalta. Churchill had said to Mikolajczyk when the latter protested
during the negotiations at Moscow against forcing Poland to incorporate eastern Germany: "Don't mind the five or more million Germans. Stalin will see to them. You will have no trouble with them: they will cease to exist."
Quoted by Sen. Homer Capehart in speech before U.S. Senate, Feb. 5, 1946.
This is an article from German Life magazine on Germany's border problems, with a little more in depth look at the Silesian expulsions.Germany's Expellees and Border Changes - An Endless Dilemma?
I wouldn't be so pessimistic about the 'costs' of German reunification. West Germany not only had to absorb the East ( and at a Mark for Mark exchange rate) but also pay Russia to remove its 400,000 man occupation army from the eastern provinces. 10 years on the East is still lagging but given the problems it was an extraordinary achievement.
Now Austria is being driven into the Greater German orbit as EU bureaucrats in Brussels try to squelch its own national aspirations.Will the Swiss be next?
It is well to remember that the EU first began as an engine of French ego harnessed to German industry and war guilt but as the generations change it may end up an Anglo/German consortium.
Your comments are well researched.
The fact there are scholarly sources who assert that at the time of expulsions of 15 million, not two, but 3 million Germans, mostly women and children and over-aged men, were killed by violence, torture, desease, famine, and brutality. Such history must not be trivialized or forgotten. Infact it is wrong to trivialize or forget this deed of massive ethnic cleansing, even if Soviets or Allies after WWII considered three million civilian deaths as "only" three million in the sea of deaths.
This number - three million comprises a multiple of all US combat fatalities in both theaters of war, and to the families involved, every person of these three million counts.
I do not subscribe to Stalin's cynical philosophy that the death of one is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic. More importantly, the mechanisms of such outrageous state-sponsored social engineering must be understood - regardless of who did it: Hitler, or Stalin prior to, during, and after the war - in the case of the Germans it was done with the signatures of the Allies.
Such behavior has to become completely unacceptable. Otherwise bad precedent will lead to repetitions - as it has in the Baltic in the most recent conflagrations - even if on a smaller scale. Such events will generate destabilizations and animosity for many years to come. It is not something the world needs.
If one can justify ethnic cleansing in one case and condemn it in another, it leaves the door wide open for abuse and ever growing 'creative accounting'.
In order to avoid misunderstandings I would like to state I have not and will not make comparisons to The Holocaust.
Yet there is a field called genocide studies and a body of literature on it. Serious investigations into the nature and classification of human rights disasters and crimes against humanity require extensive expertise in law and international law as well as a fair amount of calm objectivity.
De Zayas was one of the (early) investigators of the German expulsions. Others, dealing with this and other ethnic cleansings and/or forced mass deportations, will certainly follow.
I have not seen a recent study on the still widely ignored German expulsions, however there are others by Markusen and Kopf, (in _The Holocaust and Strategic Bombings: Genocide and Total War in the 20th Century_, 1995) they have classified the strategic bombing offensive against Germany as "genocidal."
I personally feel little sympathy for them. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Keep in mind that many of these deportee families had lived in those countries for hundred of years. Many had been invited to settle there by local rulers. The retaliations against these civilian populations were purely on the basis of their ethnicity.
Were these people somehow special? Of course not. Many populations have been attacked this way. But the ethnic Germans of East Europe were unique in that the atrocities inflicted against them had the UN seal of approval.
Reprisals after Nazi Germany's defeat saw about 12 million ethnic Germans dispossessed
and driven from their homes in eastern Europe. About 2 million were killed or died
from starvation and illness on the trek.
I'm not happy that these ethnic Germans suffered and died like this.
But given the misery of WWI, they should have all spent a few Deutschmark and called
Herr Hitler in 1938 and said:
"Please just leave things alone. We're fine here. Don't start anything, because folks
are still p-ssed at us!"
Too bad these folks had to find out how severe "paybacks" are when you
start and then lose two World Wars.
"Were these people somehow special? Of course not. Many populations have been attacked this way. But the ethnic Germans of East Europe were unique in that the atrocities inflicted against them had the UN seal of approval"
Let us look a little bit closer.
First, let me note that the war in the East was a tribal war of German tribe against loose union of Slav tirbes while war on the West was a state war of Germany vs France, UK and US. Tribal wars are not stopped as easily as state wars. So, it seems reasonable to attribute these losses to the (tribal) war which was still going on in the second half of 40s.
Second, it seems to me that long term results of ethnic cleansing were not so bad for the cleansed. Look, Germans expelled from Eastern Europe avoided communism altogether, they had better opportunities within German state than whithin their native lands (e.g. German foreign minister is Ioshka Fisher, who was cleansed from Hungary.), also absense of "opressed minorities" of either kind greatly improved state-to-state relationships.
Third, territoty means nothing: Germany was better off when it has the least amount of land.
To sum it up: I would definetely prefer a BAD UN sponsored ethnic cleansing to a GOOD ethnic war a-la-Yuogslavia.
But given the misery of WWI, they should have all spent a few Deutschmark and called Herr Hitler in 1938 and said: "Please just leave things alone. We're fine here. Don't start anything, because folks are still p-ssed at us!"
Lots of highly debatable assumptions here.
All world wars are not the same. Responsibility for WWI is a very complex matter, and opinion is highly divided on it. No single country is 100%, or even 75%, responsible for it. At any rate, the Germans were welcomed by the population of the Ukraine (including the Jews) in 1941.
The fact that the German expellees have behaved in a civilized manner is to their credit, and does not mean that the atrocities committed against them are "good."
Two wrongs don't make a right. One wrong doesn't make a right, either.
A great many of the dead were German children. Many were not even old enough to talk. Yet, there should be no concern, rigth? When the victors made a decision to not allow the feeding of starving people, that was the "American Way," right? You see, I thought Nazis were like that. My father became a 100% disabled veteran fighting Hitler's scum. I expected the Communists to take revenge, but why wouldn't we allow the feeding of starving German civilians by civilian relief agencies in our zone during the months following the war? The same standard should apply to all.
I will always remember a leftist Jewish English publisher who fought to expose the crimes against the German people after the end of the war. That man wrote a book titled Our Threatened Values, and pointed out that we should be better than the Nazis. (He also wrote and published other books exposing the vile actions of the Allies. Too bad, there weren't more Germans like him - and Americans.)
Its beautiful to see Dresden being rebuilt. The cranes are busy restoring it's former beauty on the basis of photographs etc.
This is an issue which has up until now been regarded as a Pandoras box and avoided. Apparently, the success of the Jewish class action suits is causing others to ask (or be prodded by attorneys to ask)"If the Jews can do it, why can't we?". All we need now is for some populist German politician to start making an issue of it.
You never really know. The Russians may encourage this stuff in order to keep the Slavic countries close to Russia.
VOA sez: "But given the misery of WWI, they should have all spent a few Deutschmark and called Herr Hitler in 1938 and said: "Please just leave things alone. We're fine here. Don't start anything, because folks are still p-ssed at us!"
That is certainly down-to-earth-common sense and very simple - when one really thinks about it. The problem is however that the German public were faced with the fact that the only opposition to Hitler's party in the early thirties were the Communists, the likes of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Just as AFTER WWII - during what became known as the Cold War, the communists persued expansionist policies long BEFORE WWII, as history recorded as the Spanish War of Independence, when Franco, the other European Fascist before WWII, also opposed communist expansion.
The other problem is that nobody knows who Rosa Luxemburg or Karl Liebknecht - Hitler's political opponents were - thanks to our "political history." (Easy to research, just enter their names under Yahoo - perhaps add Anna Pauker - the "Butcher of Rumania" to learn what went on in Germany after the Russian revolution.)
Nothing excuses the Nazis, however information would at least EXPLAIN why the Nazis came into power. In fact information would raise a debate to an exchange of educated ideas - instead of mere jingoism. Since information in this country is controlled - the one without it regrettably deals from a disadvantage.
BTW, how does the average US citizen feel that we were Allies to the bolsheviks during WWII ? Or that Roosevelt handed over one half of Europe to his favorite communist -"Uncle Joe" - as he used to call Stalin with personal affection. We handed over to the Reds half of Europe, 10 nations, over one hundred million people !
Among those millions of victims were 30 million in East Germany, where our Bolshevik Allies brought in communist exiles from Russia, (among them Honegger) and those communist leaders were assigned to run the country - thanks to and with our endorsement. They continued to try and execute ex-Nazis long after the west had scaled down their prosecutions, to the extent that they, our Friends and Allies - the Soviets - operated actual concentration camps (AFTER the war - during peace time !) at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruk. Buchenwald was kept open until 1950, and one third of the 30,000 prisoners kept there under the Soviets - our WWII Allies - died under their authority.
These facts are documented in Normark M. Naimark's study _The Russians in Germany_, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. Reviews of the book are on the net, i.e. H-Net.
Or did you know that our WWII Bolshevik Ally, Stalin's occupation forces held 240,000 postwar German prisoner in several special post-war camps, among them in the former Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Under our ally's control, with our consent and under Stalin's ruthless tyranny 95,643 prisoners died there, although one German historian puts the number lower, at 78,500 dead.
The post war leadership of the CIA and KGB have collaborated on a post-cold-war book - filled with documents newly available, titled, "Battleground Berlin," Yale University Press, authors David Murphy, Sergei Kondrashev and George Bailey. In this work you will find great descriptions of how the Moscow Trained leadership was tactically placed in critical leadership positions in EAst Germany, and its substructure of institutions - thanks to our support of our Allies, Stalin's Communists.
Abwehr, it's irrelevant whether I'm skeptical about the benefits, or rather, lack of them, of German "re-unification". It's simply a fact most Germans, a decade later, are more alienated by this "great moral victory" than ever.
As to whether these nominally independent countries like Austria, Switzerland, etc are absorbed into the German orbit, I don't know why that should bother me in the least. It doesn't seem to bother any of Germany's nay-bores, at least not publicly anyway. It seems to bother the US elites even less, having assisted its WWII nemesis in forcing the destruction of the major restraining factors on German expansionism - the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
Still, it's good to see there are some FReepers who are aware of Germany's ever-increasing power.
"The fact that the German expellees have behaved in a civilized manner is to their credit, and does not mean that the atrocities committed against them are "good."
Tirbal wars do not know "atrocities" (tribal war is nothing else than an atrocity itself) and it was clearly German tribe's choice to have a war of this particular kind.
"Two wrongs don't make a right. One wrong doesn't make a right, either"
I am sorry, it seems that what are you talking about is unrelated to my post. My point was (and is) (1) that ethnic cleansing is not so bad thing in the modern world where territory plays a much smaller role than before, (2) German losses during cleansing should be attributed to the tribal war still going on, (3) in any case Germans have nothing to complain about: they both benefited from cleansing and tribal war was their own idea, (4) I see nothing wrong in UN controlled ethnic cleansing (actually my family was a subject of a similar thing 10 years ago and greatly benefited from it too).
One more thing about tribal wars and German fate. The real significance of D-day is that it simply protected German tribe to be completely wiped out.
I find denunciations of Germany today mired in cynicism and hypocrisy, especially after the war on Yugoslavia.
The ultimatum at Rambouillet, the cowardly terror bombing of hospitals and refugee convoys from 15,000 feet, the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 Serbs and non-Albanians, and much more besides.
Still, I suppose most Americans can afford to ignore all that because they never had to pay for their aggression?
What you say is not perfectly relevant to the topic. In the eastern European countries of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, communism was not very strong in the 1930s; in fact, that was far from being the case. Nevertheless, the Nazi Party had very strong support among the VolksDeutscher groups in these countries.
The communists did not come to power in Czechoslovakia until 1948. The Germans were expelled in 1946 by the decree of President Benes.
I remember when the English Queen visited Dresden several years ago to promote "friendship".
She couldn't have picked a worse time, or maybe it was all part of the plan, for the English had just unveiled a statue of "Bomber" Harris. Most of the people crowded on the streets not to greet the Queen but boo her. Not surprisingly, the British media tried to act as though it was deeply offended by this "unwarranted" heckling.
(3) in any case Germans have nothing to complain about: they both benefited from cleansing and tribal war was their own idea, (4) I see nothing wrong in UN controlled ethnic cleansing (actually my family was a subject of a similar thing 10 years ago and greatly benefited from it too).
Get help.
abwehr's comment: "50 years on it is the Germans who stand strong and united and the Slavs who are in ruins."
You are quite right, considering that time has withstood the test of enormous changes after WWII.
Your question concerning 'Drang Nach Osten' calls for careful examination of this much-vaunted "German Trait." It actually has taken an ironic turn - hasn't it - when today the nations who accused Germans of landgrabbing ambitions are the very same nations who are in possession of German land, they are the ones who wrapped their borders around lands that were old in German population, traditions and cultures - from Breslau to Danzig; cities like even Posen - that knew only German universities and only German civic order.- As an aside, today these nations, especially Poland, court/invite Germans to invest, to buy and to "RE-BUY" their former holdings(!)
I agree with your observations, when you state: "My own sense is that Germany does better when it puts its mailed fist in the velvet glove."
To your metaphor I would like to add that Germany has done excedingly well with its "mailed fist inside the velvet glove" -- especially while writing big checks. - It's called "checkbook diplomacy" - a very convenient gesture of inclusion through the years, whenever Germany's NATO neighbors feared her military potentials or participation in military interventions, which as a rule were determined by others.
One such example was Desert Storm, where deployment of German troops - German soldiers marching in the Middle East - would have been unthinkable, where however Germany's loyalty was put to use again through her checkbook diplomacy, this time to offset pain and suffering by the Israelis under Saddam's attacks, when Germans supplied the Patriot Mi$$iles, underwrote the co$t of airborne logistics, supplies and medical support based at Rhine Main, and when subsequent to Desert Storm Germans as part of its checkbook diplomay, built - upon request - 2 new submarines for Israel.
Paying the Russians for the HISTORICAL WITHDRAWAL of its military forces - after occupying European territory for 50 years - was one of the most understated events of the 20th century! This epochal outcome again was the result of German "checkbook diplomacy" - executed with the "mailed fist inside the velvet glove" ...
“A great many of the dead were German children. Many were not even old enough to talk. Yet, there should be no concern, rigth? When the victors made a decision to not allow the feeding of starving people, that was the "American Way," right? You see, I thought Nazis were like that. My father became a 100% disabled veteran fighting Hitler's scum. I expected the Communists to take revenge, but why wouldn't we allow the feeding of starving German civilians by civilian relief agencies in our zone during the months following the war? The same standard should apply to all. “
When I look at this objectively I have to say that this stuff is wrong ofcourse. But on a personal level I feel no sympathy for them. My mother and grandparents would have much stronger opinions on the subject than me, although I’m sure that they would agree that is wrong on a basic level.
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