“We have no territorial claims” – German President’s speech

German Federal President Johannes Rau gave the following speech to the “Homeland Day” of the Association of German Expellees, a group with a somewhat unsavoury political past in Germany which has campaigned since the end of the Second World War for the return of Germans to those parts of Eastern Europe (principally Poland and Czechoslovakia) from where they were expelled (as actual or suspected Nazi collaborators) after the war. The speech is long and maudlin in tone and seeks to ameliorate German atrocities in Europe by equating them with the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after the war. Rau even partly blames the Allies for Hitler’s crimes and attacks the Munich (1938) and Potsdam (1945) Agreements! Such ideas play into the hands of the worst elements of German Nationalism active in German politics today. Indeed in echoing word for word Hitler’s “We have no territorial claims” while insisting on demographic, industrial and political expansion eastwards perhaps Rau is himself one of those unsavoury elements. This is a translation of 80% of Rau’s speech -significant parts are in bold print.

President Rau:

“Dear Mother. I lie here in the hallway of a hospital. Tomorrow I have to go on because everything is full and the Russians are coming…Please, do not be afraid mother but I am not bringing Gabi with me. I have a frozen arm. Otherwise I might have been able to carry Gabi further. I wrapped her up and laid her down by the road deep in the snow. Gabi was not alone – there were thousands of other mothers with children on the road and they also laid their dead in the ditches. At least there no carts or cars would drive and do them harm. It was terribly cold, stormy and icy. Snow fell and there was nothing warm, no milk, nothing. A woman from the Brandenburger Strasse lies here – she has lost all three of her children.”

Such terrible suffering lies behind the word “fleeing” and behind the word “expulsion” and behind the terrible word “ethnic cleansing”. There are millions of such tales of woe because millions of people driven out as refugees, last century especially in Europe today especially in Africa. Even in the future the world will doubtless be unable to prevent such evil, in spite of what we can and must do to prevent it. The suffering of refugees and expellees is first and foremost a personal suffering. Even when millions are driven out together – the fear, the pain, and the grief.

The longing for one’s home is always a personal suffering and each must come to terms in his life with the wounds and memories. The suffering of each and every one comes before all judgements, before any considerations of right and wrong, cause and effect. It is the duty of humanity to turn to this suffering and to empathize with those who must suffer.

Two generations ago, as part of the war which Germany had started, 15 million Germans were driven out of their homelands. (Note that these “homelands” were mainly in other nations!) That was a bitter injustice. They suffered immeasurable and unimaginable depravation – the enormous physical strain of the journeys, the merciless attacks and atrocities against the innocent and the defenceless, years of mere vegetation, their treatment as nothing but game and slaves, the suffering in the mass transportations. We can tell of these things and we can count them – just in the former German territories of the East and during the expulsion of the refugees there were over a million cases of rape (difficult to believe such efficiency of counting!).

But how great the depravations were and how the suffering affects those concerned today – that is unimaginable to us. Such horrors do not just affect the generation which suffered. The trauma of the expulsion and the loss of homeland have also had an effect on later generations.

I quote again. “I was four years old when there was a hammering of gun butts on my parents front door…Within 15 minutes we had to leave the house under armed guard…We were deported to Siberia…. There my mama and grandma dreamt never ending family history. During our six year stay there I was able to recall many family events as they occurred in the pre-war years. I knew exactly what my parent’s house looked like.” That was a Polish lady who after the division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin was driven from her home by the Soviets. Just as with this Polish family so it was for many years after the war for Germans: endless discussions at the dining table about happier days, the beauty of the homeland, their parent’s home, of the hope of return and finally full of sorrow about the disappearance of that hope…..But the expellees did not plant hatred in the hearts of their children, there was no thought of revenge but rather the conviction and the will to work for the construction of a better Germany and a peacefully united Europe. (Note how dangerous the word a “United Europe” can be and how many different meanings can be attached to it – peaceful co-existence between peoples, between nation states, or a peaceful unification of those states or an effective takeover of those states by removing all barriers and allowing the politically and economically powerful to assert their “rights” or the sense of an openly militarist take-over a la Hitler or Napoleon. For the German political class “Europe” has always meant the redressing of German post war grievances – at the cost of those who suffered from German aggression. At least the German expellees escaped Soviet tyranny and communist poverty and landed in the most successful post war European economy, unlike the Czechs and Poles who now see themselves under attack from German expansionism)

Certainly in the beginning one heard in expellee circles calls for revenge, who can deny it? But most expellees knew that this way led only to more suffering and failure. They chose the way of a peaceful new beginning. That was the central message of the Charter of the German Expellees of 1950…… But today there is no longer any significant difference between the German citizens who suffered expulsion and those who did not. This attitude of the expellees is certainly one of the pre-conditions for them settling down to their homes in the new environment and establishing new roots. (So why this emotive attempt to stir up the resentments of the past? – because it serves the geopolitical aims of the German State)

III

…….. In Scheswig Holstein in 1947 nearly one in two inhabitants were expellees and even in 1950 every third person. I myself in 1946 acquired two younger brothers. My parents took in two boys from East Prussia. They had buried their mother and three other siblings on their journey. The father had disappeared. Until well into the 1950s there were refugee camps on the edges of towns. In the autumn of 1949 just in Bavaria there were 94,000 people in 465 refugee camps………….

All that cannot be, must not be forgotten. Only if we remember what happened then can we realise how much Germans have achieved together at that time. They rebuilt the country and founded a new stable order. Our people came to terms with the crimes including genocide committed by Germans. We therefore struggled to atone for those crimes and step by step win back the trust of the world. In all these achievements the expellees played their part.…….

But at first every expellee at some time or another experienced how other Germans behaved badly towards them, rejecting them with prejudice – later in particular jealousy of the special help for which they qualified and jealousy of their industriousness. Often that rejection was unbearable. As a refugee child to have to wait in front of the door of the neighbour while the other children were invited in – such things are not forgotten. Nor does one forget begging in vain for milk for a sick child, as you experienced Frau Steinbach (the aggressively nationalistic leader of the German Association of Expellees, notorious among the Poles and the Czechs!)………………

There were also some 800,000 from the western parts of the Reich (sic!) who, prior to the allied bombing raid had fled to the East, who experienced expulsion. Even those who on the Rhein or the Ruhr lived among the rubble which buried their friends – they also lost a piece of their homeland. (Now the resentment shifts to the totally different question of the war itself and from the East to the West). The author Dieter Forte has for me grippingly, portrayed that suffering in his novels about childhood among the sea of rubble which was Dusseldorf………………

Many said that the fate of the expellees was in fact the receipt for National Socialism and for the fact that Germany had started the war. That was not just heartless it was stupid. I have never understood such an attitude. Since then thank goodness much has happened in the minds and hearts of Germans. I am convinced – never were the times so favourable to take up the subject of the expellees within Germany and in Europe with our neighbours and to bring compassion and understanding to the question.

VI.

First, as regards Germany. Our nation has achieved unity and freedom (In fact of course Germans themselves have lost their democracy and their freedom through the constitutional surrender to the European Union but the German political class has gained immeasurable power over those very “neighbours” from who it now seeks understanding!) Now the expellees in the Eastern block and in the former East Germany can tell their story – how long they had to live under the consequences of the war unleashed by Germany.

But far too little research has been done into the close connection between the politics of expulsion and the Holocaust. At least as positive as the newly awakened interest of academics is the great participation of German citizens in this chapter of our history. In recent years we have seen an encouraging change: eyewitnesses and contemporary accounts of the expulsions, literary treatments of the subject as in the novel “Im Krebsgang” by Gunter Grass (NB like so many of the more aggressive political proponents of German national aspirations Grass is on the left not the right) and even television documentaries enjoy large and interested audiences. People react in astonishment and sadness at the portrayals of such suffering and many, especially young people recognise for the first time how badly affected even the Germans were by the Second World War. For this new engagement with these events there are certainly various reasons. Especially important seems to me to be: First, at the latest since 1990 the memories of the expulsions are no longer burdened with the East-West conflict or with controversial questions of German foreign policy. Germans – and the great majority of the expellees – wanted reconciliation with Poles and Czechs and with other middle and East European peoples and that we have achieved. Germany and our neighbours are agreed that they want to look to the future and not to trouble their relations with political and legal questions from the past. (This is of course not true and is typical wishful thinking by the Germans, see below)………………

The level of historic education among the populace however leaves much to be desired. Particularly poorly covered is knowledge about the former German lands in the East. Of course there are exceptions. For example last autumn for the Federal Presidents History Competition I chose the theme “Leaving – Arriving. Migration in history”. Today the results of the competition are in. Many tell of Germans’ escape and expulsion and I find it impressive how compassionately and factually the young people dealt with the subject. But in general it is the fact that (as the historian Alfred Heuss complained as long ago as 1984) young Germans still know very little about the former German lands in the east and about the catastrophe which led to their loss. Today many do not know that Koenigsberg and Breslau were German cities just like Cologne or Munich and there is corresponding uncertainty about where Germans like Immanuel Kant or Gerhard Hauptmann were born lived and worked. Those who know nothing about the German East, as Heuss rightly criticized, cannot grasp what substantial losses the Germans suffered during the second world war and how “Hitler’s criminal principles were thereby turned against the Germans themselves”. But that is a decisive insight! Basically German policy after 1933 can be understood as the principle of national socialist, racist expulsion. This goal was pursued by the persecution and expulsion of the Jews even before the war and the Munich Agreement was served by the removal of the people of South Tirol and then the bringing of other German minorities “home to the Reich” (Note the same process was greatly trumpeted by Helmut Kohl in the 1980s and 1990s to encourage Germans from the East – including Russia – to come “home to Germany! – see the book Fascist Europe Rising pages 56-57)

Throughout the German empire ethnic minorities and whole peoples were persecuted, enslaved and expelled as soon as they came under the power of the Reich. So for instance straight after the occupation, more than a million Poles were deported from Western Poland to create space for Germans. And that was just the beginning. The plans to expel millions of Poles and Russians were prepared. In the “General Plan East” and in the “General Plan for Eastern Settlement” the SS calculated more than 30 million Russian victims of this land grab. In the extermination of the European Jews this racist and ethnic policy reached its most horrific form. Goetz Alv is right: The Holocaust belongs in the very centre of the historic constellation to which in the end even the German expellees fell victim. Many expellees saw with their own eyes how inseparable were German crimes and the expulsion of Germans……. Certainly ethnic cleansing and expulsions occurred before 1933 but with the Nazis the practice spread Europe wide in its unbridled brutality. The historian Hans Lemberg expressed it well: “So through Hitler the limit of inhibitions about what can be done with people and ethnic groups has been lowered as, through him, the pushing of boundaries got under way”. This insight divorces no one from the responsibility for his own actions – not those who at Munich shook Hitler’s hand and not the conference participants at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam; not those who in Middle and eastern Europe together with the Germans dispossessed the Jews and then the Germans and not those who for years in exile the expulsion planned.(This is a reference to Poles and Czechs presumably! This is a particularly objectionable part of the speech, “co-blaming” everyone in Europe for what Germany instigated as if since every nation has its thugs this somehow transfers to those nations the guilt for what the oppressive, totalitarian Nazi occupiers did. Particularly objectionable is the attack on the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements, thus exploiting – knowingly – the resentments of the worst nationalistic elements in German society today. The whole approach to the evils of German hegemony of the past is to reassign the responsibility for the suffering of WW2 and thus appeal for the relief of the supposed suffering today of the very Germans who perpetrated and collaborated with those evils. Rau also seeks to put the suffering of innocent families forward as an excuse for the toleration of German STATE expansion via a new movement eastwards of the descendants of both the innocent and the guilty)

Hitler’s criminal policies excuse no one who answered terrible wrongs with terrible wrongs. The whole European catastrophe can only be understood in its total context and that understanding I wish for todays and future generations in Germany and in the whole of Europe. For that we need a European dialogue and that will demand from all participants an unvarnished self-awareness.

VII
I believe that the conditions for such a European dialogue have never been so favourable. Germany is for the first time in its history surrounded by friends and partners and is making no territorial claims on anyone (this is an unfortunate phrase as it was once used by Hitler!) We Germans have witnessed with sympathy and full recognition how the peoples of middle and Eastern Europe have freed themselves from Soviet hegemony. That was an important condition for the success of the peaceful revolution in East Germany and for German unity. Our neighbours in the East approved of that unity and warmly congratulated us on our achievement. We will soon live together with them in the European Union in which borders no longer divide but unite. (Note here the devious comparison between the absorption of the former East Germany into the Federal Republic of Germany and the same process of non Germans in sovereign nations being absorbed into German Europe!)

Our children will decide the future of Europe together. In the former German territories in the East and in earlier German settlements in Middle and Eastern Europe there is a change in the attitude of the people to German cultural heritage. “I could write an article every day about the Germans in Breslau” said a journalist of a large Polish newspaper. She had recently published a photograph of four Volksturm (Nazi) child soldiers. Most readers full of concern wanted to know “whether the boys were still alive” Such a reaction would have been unimaginable before 1990. Our Eastern neighbours are also changing their attitudes to the expulsion of the Germans which has been the subject of thorough and very self-critical debate in Poland and in the Czech Republic. There are many expressions of regret and sadness at the memory of those wrongs (this is of course self delusion by Rau. The opposite is the case. Where the subject arises it is in connection with a new threat from German interests and German Europe’s new attempts to override Polish and Czech national sovereignty). And there are other voices – who would deny it? Many wounds still give pain to our neighbours and there is always the argument to hand that after all it was the Germans who brought Stalin as far as the River Elbe. Nevertheless it seems to me there is much thought about the wrongs and sorrow caused to the Germans since those countries have regained their freedom. (Only to lose it again because of the imposition of the constitution of Germany’s well crafted “European Union”)

The award of the Franz Werfel Human Rights prize to the initiators of the “Cross of Reconciliation” in the Czech village of Wekesldorf shows how much good has been achieved. (This has been a source of great controversy and bitterness among Czechs who recall the disgraceful collaboration of Germans with the evil Nazi regime in Prague. The Czech initiators of the monument received death threats. In November 2002 unknown vandals painted swastikas on it and in 2003 a bomb were defused just before it would have blown up the memorial. Those responsible had scrawled across the monument the words “Death to the Germans”. For this news item and other examples of German Czech antagonism. Click on title to read: NAZI friendly Germans “re-invade” Czech Republic – with the support of the EU (and the British Tory party!) , Massive resistance in Prague to Sudeten German “Embassy” and Czech attack on German ‘Reconciliation’ on this website). …….

In Germany a debate has broken out which causes our neighbours concern. It is about the proposed Centre against Expulsions. I admit that I am depressed by the tone and style of many contributions to this debate. When I see the prominent antagonists in this debate I see on both sides unquestioned democrats, upright Europeans and people about whose engagement for mutual understanding and reconciliation there can be no doubt. So how are they so irreconcilable? Why do so many doubt the good faith of their opponents?………………..

(We must find a solution to these problems) … in the spirit of cooperation and in consideration of our common future in Europe. Everyone should be invited, no one should be able to veto and no one should think he can suppress what has happened. But there can be no more room for mutual accusations of guilt, for the back and forth of claims of loss and counter loss and for each side to demand material compensation because all that is behind us and whoever seeks to resurrect such matters leads us into a vicious circle.

In the whole of Europe people pray for themselves and with other the Lord’s Prayer. They do so in German, in Polish in Czech and they ask “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us”. We all depend on forgiveness – even believers in other religions pray for that. Without forgiveness there is no future. (It is of course not forgiveness that the German political class seeks but land, re-occupation and many expellees seek large sums in compensation from relatively poor countries like Poland and the Czech Republic). Forgiveness does not deny the guilt and does not wipe the sins away. But forgiveness is a pre-condition for lasting peaceful co-existence. That is what we want in Europe.

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