Dateline 2nd July 2004
INTRODUCTION
The President of the German State of Bavaria Edmund Stoiber is a “Conservative” and his party the CSU is in permanent coalition with the Christian Democrat Party which has of course ruled for most of the post second world war period in Germany. Both the CDU and CSU are erroneously seen by the British Conservative Party as “allies” in Europe. That is why even Michael Howard has accepted the Conservative Party should join them in the European Parliamentary group the EPP (European People’s Party – hardly sounds conservative!).
Edmund Stoiber is like his CSU party primarily corporatist and catholic (whereas of course the British Conservative Party (and also Scandinavian Conservatives) are primarily capitalist and protestant. It is the corporatist/statist element which has prompted Stoiber in the past to condemn “Anglo-Saxon capitalism” and competitive market forces. Needless to say practising his corporatist form of capitalism has proved a disaster in Germany where unemployment is officially 4.3million – so the real figure is probably 6 million. There have also been recent political-business scandals in Germany, including the buying of positions on the “lists” for PR elections.
Here Stoiber is not just vote seeking among the Sudeten German Expellees from the former Czechoslovakia he is also promoting the ethnic and regional policies of the EU, designed to break up nation states and surrender sovereignty to the centre. By attacking the post war Benes decrees (which deprived the German collaborators with the Nazis of their property in Czechoslovakia and allowed the Czechs their well deserved freedom from German oppression) Stoiber (like the British Conservative Party which voted in the European Parliament against the Benes Decrees) seeks to undo the post war settlement and permit the re-occupation of the Czech Republic by Germans. To this end of course the whole basis of the EU’s “citizenship”, “free movement of people” and “free movement of capital” was designed.
At least, as we see at the end of this report from our German friends at german-foreign-policy.com, the RAF, if not the British political establishment, is supporting the Czechs by remembering why we went to war in 1939 – against Nazism and German Imperialism.
NÜRNBERG/CESKY KRUMLOV The President of the German State of Bavaria Edmund Stoiber speaking at a meeting of the German “refugee associations” again emphasised Berlin’s claims for property in the Czech Republic and sharply criticised the decrees of the post war Czech President Edvard Benes.
“Europe” must join in the German condemnation of the Benes Decrees and ensure that such decrees are abolished said Stoiber at the “Sudeten German Day” in Nuremberg. The matter would not go away just because the Czech republic had joined the EU – indeed the whole problem was just beginning.
As several prominent speakers at the “Sudeten German Day” conference emphasised the EU should force its two member states the Czech Republic and Slovakia to annul the Benes Decrees. The “European Law” would be “damaged and incomplete” so long as the decrees stood said the invitation to the rally. (1) Only a few days before the Bavarian President had been in Budapest for discussions over several days. The Hungarian Government was seen as a German ally in the matter of the Benes Decrees. (2)
The high point of the “Sudeten German Day” rally was a discussion for which the “Sudeten German Association” had invited as speakers several prominent politicians from the “conservative-ethnic” political spectrum. Bujar Bukoshi a former “President in Exile” of the Serbian province of Kosovo who in the 1990s had received political support in Germany. Tilman Zuelch General Secretary of the “Society for threatened Peoples” (3). The organisation is known for its racial/ethnic activities and propagates among other ethnic groups Chechens in Exile. Christoph Pan, head of the South Tyrolean Institute for Ethnic Groups, based in Bolzano, Italy, appeared to receive the Sudeten-German Culture and Welfare Association Prize. Pan was the president of the
Federal Union of European Ethnic Groups from 1994 to 1996. For his efforts, he received the Hungarian Minorities Prize. Pan is often included in the pan-German wing of German ethno-revisionism.
Ethnic Lebensraum
At the Sudeten-German Day events, of which the semi-official German television station Phoenix offered two-hours of live coverage, CSU (- Christian Social Union- the Bavarian partners of the German Christian Democrat Party) politicians intensified the age-old festering argument with the Czech Republic. The speaker , Johann Böhm, stated that Sudeten-Germans were driven into a Germany destroyed and exhausted after the Second World War, during which their living space had been stolen The former president of the Bavarian Parliament described The Czech Republic as a product of ethnic cleansing. Böhm’s verbal assault was based on positions that were supported by the German federal state. The General Secretary of the Union of Expellees demonstrated soon thereafter, that all the German parliamentary
governments since 1949 had declared the questions of property as still open. The Union of Expellees is supported by powerful politicians in the German government,
such as the SPD politicians Peter Glotz, who received a Culture Prize from the Sudeten German Culture and Welfare Association.
Deja Vu
Immediately preceding the Sudeten-German rally, Czech war veterans had unveiled the bust of the former Czechoslovakian president Edvard Benes. Benes stepped down directly after the Munich Accords of September 1938, as the governments of Great Britain and France allowed the German Reich the annexation of the so-called Sudeten lands. (Prime Minister Chamberlain’s “piece of paper” and “peace in our time”!) After the German capitulation, Benes, with the agreement of the Allies and by means of the presidential decrees, led the reconstruction of Czechoslovakia. The memorials at Cesky Krumov were set up by an initiative of pilots of the Royal Air Force, who also participated in last Friday’s celebratory display of the Benes bust.
See also on this site under Germany Calling:
1. Background Report. 2. Massive Resistance in Prague to Sudeten German “Embassy” (11/4/03). 3. Nazi friendly Germans re-invade Czech Republic (28/3/03)
See also Home page button “Nazi Regions“
1) s. auch Stimmungslage: Revision und Bundesrat gegen ,,Benes-Dekrete” sowie Annullierung der ,,Benes-Dekrete”: ,,Weiterhin aktuell”
2) s. dazu Sonderstellung und Besser als wir
3) s. dazu Hintergrundbericht: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker und Berlin als Anlaufpunkt für ,,Vertriebene unterschiedlicher Volksgruppen”
4) s. dazu Deutsche Tschetschenen
5) s. dazu Hauptsitz
6) s. dazu Georg Herde/Alexa Stolze: Die Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft. Geschichte, Personen, Hintergründe – eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme, Köln 1987
7) s. dazu Hintergrundbericht: Die Föderalistische Union Europäischer Volksgruppen
8) s. auch Wert der Waffen
Quellen:
Tschechische Kriegsveteranen enthüllen Benes-Büste in Krummau; Radio Prag 28.05.2004
Sudetendeutsche senden versöhnliche Töne nach Tschechien; AP 28.05.2004
,,Wir werden nerven”; FAZ.net 31.05.2004
Stoiber will Streit um Benesch-Dekrete auf EU-Ebene lösen; AP 31.05.2004
