April 08, 2007	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 19, 1428

LIDZBARK WARMINSKI (Poland): Hundreds of inhabitants of this northern Polish town are on the sharp end of a legal battle rooted in Germany’s World War II defeat, a case that has revived barely-buried fear and hatred.

Lidzbark Warminski, an unassuming community of 17,000 people, has found itself in the spotlight because of a lawsuit at the European Court of Human Rights by a German association seeking the restitution of property that lies in present-day Poland.

The case, filed late last year by the small, privately-funded Prussian Trust, has aggravated simmering resentment between Poland and its little-loved western neighbour.

One of the 22 claimants represented by the trust is Felix Hoppe, who was born in 1931 near what was then the German town of Heilsberg in East Prussia.

The Hoppe family’s holdings — both land and buildings — were seized by the Polish authorities after World War II and are now home to 2,000 residents of Lidzbark Warminski.

“I’m very worried. I live in a house which, so they say, belongs to the town. The mayor keeps reassuring us, but I’ve heard it said that the house is part of the lawsuit,” said Maria, a 40-something industrial worker who declined to give her surname.

The Prussian Trust lawsuit stems from the redrawing of borders agreed by the Soviet Union, aBritain and the United States at the 1945 Potsdam conference.

Cementing the defeat of the Nazis, the victorious Allies awarded large parts of eastern Germany to Poland, in “compensation” for the swathes of territory Warsaw lost to the Soviet Union.

Millions of Germans, including the teenage Hoppe, were forced from their homes by the advancing Soviet army or later by Polish security forces, often brutally.

The property and land they left was seized by Polish authorities and repopulated largely by Poles who had been expelled from the east.

At the time, the land loss was widely seen as a fair payback for the bloody Nazi occupation of Poland, which cost the lives of six million Polish citizens.

The regions, which had been German for centuries, make up around a third of modern Poland.

According to a recent opinion poll, a quarter of Germans consider that the former territories are still German and 40 per cent regret their loss.

Hoppe said it was high time for redress.

“I don’t have any moral scruples. Why should I? This property was stolen from Germany,” he told in an interview from his current home in Muenster, in western Germany.

“It was a human rights violation. We suffered enormously from the expulsions,” he said.

Asked what his message is for the current inhabitants, Hoppe said: “I would say to the people in Lidzbark Warminski, ‘You live on someone else’s property.’

The property claims are seen by many in Poland as part of a wider bid by Germans to portray themselves as victims of World War II.

Poland’s conservative President Lech Kaczynski has made a string of scathing attacks on Germany over the issue.

But Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, in line with all post-war German governments, has remained as neutral as possible on the issue to avoid clashing head on with the large numbers of affected Germans.—AFP