September 2, 2003	Tuesday	Rajab 4, 1424

BERLIN: The fate of 14 million German civilians displaced, deported or expelled as the Nazi regime crumbled around them is raising thorny new questions about how Germany’s own victims should be remembered.

At the centre of the debate is a proposed documentation centre dedicated to the Germans and eastern Europeans who joined the mass migratory waves in the final years of World War II.

The organization behind the idea is the Federation of the Expelled, which represents Germans who, from all corners of the Reich, left or were forced to abandon their homes.

It says the aim is “to offer to the displaced Germans the recognition that has largely been denied them over the decades” by successive governments keen to draw a line under the past.

But critics, who include Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, fear the centre — notably because of its proposed site in Berlin — would put undue emphasis on the German victims, effectively diverting attention from the fact it was Nazi Germany that caused the problem in the first place.

The mass migrations started in early 1944 in a mood of panic at the Soviet Red Army’s inexorable march westward.

Some 12 million Germans left their homes in East Prussia, Silesia, Bohemia, the Sudetenland and parts of Hungary and Romania to find refuge in modern-day Germany.

Another one million Germans were deported to the Soviet Union. Nearly 1.5 million died during the exodus.

To stall their critics, the centre’s backers are promising also to remember the fate of other displaced populations, not only under Nazism but in Armenia, the Balkans and Poland as well.

Schroeder however has warned that building the centre in Berlin would risk focusing “too unilaterally on the injustice suffered by the Germans” in 1944 to 1946 without showing “what the origins of it were.”

Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, likewise, said that by stressing Germans were victims like anyone else, “it is playing down the historic mistake” that was Hitler’s Third Reich.

“It neither corresponds to reality, nor is it in our European interests,” said Fischer, himself the son of Hungarian immigrants. He also proclaimed the Federation of the Expelled as unsuitable to run the centre.

The German government is keen not to offend Czech sensibilities ahead of Schroeder’s visit there next week.

Berlin and Prague are still trying to resolve their differences over the Benes decrees, the post-war accords that led to the expulsion of millions of Germans from the Sudeten region of then-Czechoslovakia.

Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla recently said he did not think Berlin was “the right place” for a documentation centre.

Similar concern has been expressed in Poland, notably from former foreign minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. According to a recent poll, 58 per cent of all Poles oppose the idea of the centre.

Guenter Grass, the Nobel literature prize-winning author whose most recent work, “Crab,” has done much to raise the issue of the displaced Germans, has instead suggested the German-Polish border as the best site.

Another suggestion has been to place the centre in Wroclaw in southwestern Poland, formerly known as Breslau when it was part of Germany.

Germans who fled or were expelled from Wroclaw were in many cases replaced by Poles fleeing from further east.—AFP