Fifty-nine years ago, the most destructive war in world history ended.
The responsibility of Germany's Nazi regime and Japan's imperial government
for the death of an estimated 45 million people and the deprivation
of millions more is recorded history. We know of the heroic deeds of
those who won the battles and ultimately liberated both friends and
foes from the bloody dictators that had fomented the carnage.
Regrettably, much of the suffering and many of the acts of vengeance
committed by the victors (Americans?) and their surrogates have remained
untold. Those who continue to suppress or ignore this part of the record
of the Second World War argue that the atrocities committed against
German nationals and ethnic Germans were minimal and deserved. If widely
disseminated, this information would only detract from the vast criminal
record of the Hitler regime. Such denials and evasions of the truth,
however, are unacceptable for scholarly writers and conscientious teachers
of history. They are also unacceptable for the victims and their descendants.
It was Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin who insisted on the detaching of
Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia from Germany and the expulsion
of its inhabitants. It was not, as the apologists claim, an orderly,
though punitive, population transfer, but a chaotic mass deportation.
The Western allies condoned this act of vengeance. Knowledgeable people,
including Russians and Poles, never claimed that these lands and their
inhabitants had not been German for centuries.
German expellee associations recently proposed to build a museum, a
"Center against Expulsions," to document and memorialize the
forcible expulsion of 20 million German nationals and ethnic Germans
in territories between the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the killing
of 2.8 million during the expulsion process (1).
Opposition to a public documentation and display center of the ethnic
cleansing and persecution under Soviet occupation comes not only from
Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, and other countries involved but
also from Germans imbued with a vicarious guilt complex bordering on
the paranoid. Some Poles and Czechs simply do not want to admit that,
in the rush to vengeance during and after the war, some of their ancestors
committed large-scale murder, mayhem, looting, and destruction.
Few of the perpetrators are still alive, and nobody contemplates prosecuting
them for their crimes. The documentation center in Berlin would simply
remind the world of what the Jewish Holocaust museums do all over the
world: chronicling the inhumanity of men toward men.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his foreign minister Joschka
Fischer announced that they would not support the creation of a "Center
against Expulsions." As expedient politicians, they apparently
find it easier to ignore the historical truth than to aid their victimized
countrymen in documenting it. One wonders how they can build a united
Europe on such dishonesty.
It appears that the agitators against the proposed documentation deliberately
gloss over the fact that the ethnic cleansing almost totally eradicated
the once flourishing German subcultures of Silesia, Pomerania, East
Prussia, and many smaller ethnic German settlements elsewhere in Europe.
To add insult to injury, Polish and Czech agitators have been persistently
and falsely accusing the expellees of revanchism. Surely it was only
natural that many of them had hoped to return some day to their ancestral
homes. By now, however, they have built themselves new lives in new
homelands while their ancestral culture has been displaced or obliterated,
often beyond recognition.
Since ethnic cleansing has victimized many other ethnic groups in the
past, particularly in the context of colonialism, and again since World
War II, their stories also should be recorded in the "Museum against
Expulsions." The first step toward preventing this kind of breakdown
of law and justice in the future is a truthful recording and dissemination
of its history. That is why the creation of a "museum against expulsions"
ought to be applauded and supported worldwide.