16. 02. 11. - 14:00

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16. 02. 11. - 14:00

Don't let's be beastly to the Germans!

BERLIN‘S neighbours in Europe are horrified by a new proposal to create a “Commemoration Day“ to honour millions of Germans driven out from Nazi-occupied lands towards the end of WW2.
 
If adopted it would be on a par with Holocaust Day on January 27 marking the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp and remembering the six million Jews murdered by the Third Reich.
 
These “expellees“ as they are called were forced back from countries like Poland, East Prussia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other lands where they had lived for centuries, or which they colonised for Hitler.
 
Already a controversial museum to their memory - planned for the centre of Berlin near to the moonscape of stones that comprises the Holocaust Memorial to the murdered Jews - is scheduled to be built within the next two years.
 
Now comes a proposal from Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s ruling CDU conservative party to create a special day to remember their suffering. Dozens of leading academics have signed a letter castigating this
retreat into “victim hood.“
 
The plan passed the first stage of the parliamentary process in the Bundestag last week, leading to the outcry from opposition politicians and 68 historians whose letter reads; “Such a commemoration day is an
incorrect historical-political signal.“
 
In particular it objects to the plans linking the commemoration day to the anniversary of the "Charter of German Expellees," a 1950‘s document that does not offer any atonement for Hitler‘s policies.
 
"In the charter, there is no word about the cause of the war, about the mass crimes of the National Socialists, about the murder of the Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war and other persecuted groups," said the academics.
 
"Instead, the expellees declare themselves to be ‘those most affected by the agony of the period' which is a grotesque contortion of the historical reality."
 
Poland is furious. A government spokesman said; “The authors of the Charter of German Expellees did not take into account the entire historical context of World War II. The document does not serve the
interests of German-Polish reconciliation.“
 
The expellees were driven back inside the frontiers of the crumbling Reich by the Red Army. Tends of thousands suffered and died in appalling weather conditions; many succumbed to the frenzied mass rapes
that Stalin viewed as a spoil of war for his legions.
 
Historian Heinrich August Winkler, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin and a signatory to the open letter, told Germany‘s Der Spiegel magazine; "There are possibilities to remember the victims of expulsions. But I don't see any justification to focus exclusively on Germans because of the danger of losing sight of the context."
 
Some believe the commemoration day bid is a cynical vote-grabbing ploy by the CDU ahead of vital regional elections this year in which her party faces a drubbing. The extreme conservatives in her party have always been pro the expellee movement.
 
*The Nazi past of the country‘s intelligence service, the BND, is also being probed, it was confirmed on Wednesday. Independent historians have been hired by the agency to determine how many known Nazi war criminals were hired by it during the immediate post-war years.
 
Media reports say the revelations could embarrass the Merkel government. The promise of the moral house-cleaning came from BND head Ernst Uhrlau who has been pushing for years for transparency on his
organisation‘s past.
 
In the early years the British referred to BND agents as the “Gestapo boys“ as so many of them were recruited from Hitler‘s secret police force.

German Herald

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