German Expulsions

From Deutsche Welle:

"Remembering Europe's touchy issue of expulsion"

Over centuries, millions of Europeans have been expelled for ethnic and political reasons, including Germans after World War II. A plan is finally on the table that might just honor the victims - and not Nazi crimes.The idea for a documentation center where the fate of displaced people is told first came up 13 years ago. It was the end of the 1990s when Erika Steinbach, a conservative politician and president of the League of Expellees - an advocate group for Germans and their descendents who were expelled from eastern Europe after World War II, proposed her plans for a Center Against Expulsions. And her plan met with firm resistance. Voices both in Germany and neighboring countries quickly pointed out that such an institution could present a lopsided view of history. In Poland, Steinbach was accused of labeling Germans as the victims in the aftermath of World War II, without adequately emphasizing that the fate of the ethnic Germans living in eastern Europe after the war was a consequence of the heinous crimes the Nazis had committed in Europe. For years, Poland has been a major opponent of the plan to build a Center Against Expulsions in Germany and the political elite in Poland has lobbied at the highest political level to prevent Steinbach from implementing her initiative. Steinbach's plan was at a stand still until 2008, when the German government decided to found its own organization tasked with creating a permanent exhibition on expulsion. To smooth over ties to Poland, Steinbach was left out of the picture entirely. The protests ceased, in both Poland and Germany. Poland trusted the German government to present a balanced historical view, according to official statements from Warsaw. In 2010, the first plans for an exhibition was presented to the public - and harshly criticized. "There are two different approaches to dealing with the history of expulsion," said Robert Zurek, a Polish historian in Berlin. "One takes the view that expulsions in the 20th century were mainly a consequence of the National Socialists' policies on European states. That suggests, however, that not just the Nazi crimes but nationalistic tendencies in general are responsible for the way of expulsions. "The second approach views the war and the Germans' atrocities as the main cause of expulsions in the East," explained Zurek. Critics of the 2010 proposal said the fate of the German expellees was not sufficiently contextualized in the war. Some historians found it unacceptable to put the expulsion of ethnic Germans on the same level as other expulsions in Europe. They said that the relationship between cause and effect - that is, between the Nazi crimes and the expulsions of the Germans from eastern Europe - was not clear enough. A look at the Germans who fled or were forced out of their homes in eastern Europe after World War II was intended to be "just" one focus of the permanent exhibition, placed in the larger context of expulsion throughout Europe during the 20th century, emphasized Bernd Neumann, Germany's minister for culture and media. Though the expulsion of Germans is to be the main focus, the concept intends to take into account many different perspectives on expulsion in Europe and include the fates of other groups as far back as the 19th century. Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans is a major issue, according to the proposal. Millions of Muslims were forced from their homes as a result of the Serbian uprising against Ottoman rule in 1804, the Greek independence movement starting in 1821 and the Balkan Wars from 1912 to 1913. The Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915 and 1916 is also to be touched upon. The millions of people affected by Stalin's policies in the 1930s are another focus of the exhibition. "Forced labor, deportation, gulags, starvation and mass murder were part of the Stalinist terror," the proposal said. The effects of totalitarianism, genocide and concentration camps as well as expulsions by Germans at the beginning of World War II will be addressed by the project. Then start of World War II saw massive displacements of people as the Nazis invaded neighboring countries and sending those who were politically or ethnically "unacceptable" to camps.

The expulsions documentation center will be housed in Berlin's Deutschlandhaus, in close proximity to other institutions like the Topography of Terror documentation center, which is located in the former Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.

^ I don't think there needs to be a German displaced documentation center at all. The Germans started the war, invaded all but 5 countries in Europe, killed millions upon millions of innocent men, women and children (in prisons, forests, concentration camps, labor camps, factories, bombings, death camps, death marches, mass pits, ghettos, POW camps, etc) and preached that they were the "Master Race." Once they lost the war the ethnic Germans (many who moved to the occupied territories once the war started while some having lived in these regions for decades) were justifiable deported to what was left of the German territory. I am not saying that the way they were deported (some were even killed or just disappeared) was also just, but in the greater scope of the war and it's aftermath the Germans got off a little too easily - thanks in part to the growing rift between the Soviets and the other Allies. I am all for a displaced documentation center that deals with all the displaced people of Europe and it can mention the Germans, but it should not be a focal point of any exhibition as it only allows Germans to claim victim status which very few at the time deserve to be called. ^

http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,16268786,00.html