There's currently a debate going on in Central Europe about a possible memorial for those Germans who were expelled or fled during and after WW2.

Related article at CNN.com (http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/08/18/german.memorial.ap/index.html)

As you can see in the article, there are some fundamentally different positions on this, going from "it is self-evident that a people should commemorate its own victims" to "They do not deserve mercy".
What do you think?

From the CNN article

"Germans paid with their expulsion for supporting Hitler," Marek Edelman, 82, told the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. "They do not deserve mercy."

I fully agree. Over 90% of the Sudetendeutschen (expellees) voted for Hitler. They got what they wanted and they should shut the f*** up and be happy that they survived, unlike the ~ 10.000.000 victims of the Holocaust and all the victims of the World World in which they took the position of the aggressor.

Most of these expellees were arch-enemies of freedom and democracy. Free democratic Germany should never build a memorial for them.

I don't really care, though. All these memorials are totally unimportant. Let the German people vote on the issue.
The way the people think won't change because of this. All this post-"we want total war" self-pity is all around in Germany. A stinkn' piece of stone, build or not, won't change anything.

Originally posted by Mario Feldberg
I fully agree. Over 90% of the Sudetendeutschen (expellees) voted for Hitler. They got what they wanted and they should shut the f*** up and be happy that they survived, unlike the ~ 10.000.000 victims of the Holocaust and all the victims of the World World in which they took the position of the aggressor.
I fully disagree. Collective responsibility and guilt (aka "Sippenhaft") is something I think everyone who values humans as individuals has to despise. So:

1. Even if 90%+ of the Sudenten Germans voted for Hitler that would leave roughly 10% who deserve alot of pity in fact.

2. Alot of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe never voted on anything, in this case parts of my immediate family belong to the specific group.
I don't really care, though. All these memorials are totally unimportant.
Personally I agree with that, but tell that to the symbol minded.
Let the German people vote on the issue.
That's another way of saying "yes". ;)

Even if 90%+ of the Sudenten Germans voted for Hitler that would leave roughly 10% who deserve alot of pity in fact.

Ok, but the talk is about building a memorial for ALL of them.

Well a memorial is one thing, as you said they are unimportant in terms of effective action.

The point is that there have been German victims of the war and what came along with it, people who became victims because of being German (aside from those who became victims because of political etc. reasons and also have no memorial).
To say that a certain group of people of which many never even voted for anything in Germany would "rightfully pay the price" for something others of their ethnicity did is not acceptable.

I agree with Hitro here.

I don't know if there should be a memorial, but I do know it shouldn't be declined because of what MF says. See, that territory they lived on, was even in my eyes German.

Most of these expellees were arch-enemies of freedom and democracy. Free democratic Germany should never build a memorial for them.

Eeer....where did that come from? See, my grandparents were born and raised in Sudetenland. It was their home. And there are some big misunderstandings in the world. Some say they didn't want to live with the Chez people. That's bull. The right word is used here, they were expelled. They had no choice. They had to leave their homes. They had to leave ground that had been theirs forever. For some reason I even sympathize a bit with the idea that those areas do belong to Germany. Why were the Germans kicked out of those parts of Germany that's now Poland? Because of Russia, they took some land from Poland, and gave some of Germany's in return. That's stupid.
My grandmother was happy with the government (at first), but about everyone was back then. She didn't like the war, but all of her teenage years she was told how good the nazi government was. I don't think the population in Sudetenland and Poland were any different from the other German people. I even think they were less pro-nazi. My grandma once said: We all wanted to go home into the Reich, but when we were there, we didn't want anything else than get out.

(This is about people that had to leave Sudetenland and Poland right?)

Eeer....where did that come from?

Check the history books. The Sudetenscum was by far the most pro-Nazi group. The over 90% support for Hitler is an historic fact.

We needn't pick one of many wrongs, and call it right. Memorials needn't be all glory. The point of those stinkn' pieces of stone is to make people stop and reflect.

I agree with Hitro and I think there is no point in paying injustice with injustice. The extradition of germans from Eastern Europe was partly a genocide. but from the point of view of the Allies and the eastern-european countries it was understandable. It prevented that germany would ever claim that land to the east again.

Their support was basically due to their wish of belonging to the German state, not because of being hardcore Nazis. That kind of Nationalist thinking was (and usually still is), despite being stupid in my opinion, completely normal in the world.
It's also a historic fact that the Sudetenland was an area with a big German majority. Today NATO is fighting wars to ensure the "self determination" of such majorities...

It's also a historic fact that the Sudetenland was an area with a big German majority. Today NATO is fighting wars to ensure the "self determination" of such majorities...

Really? You mean the NATO is waging war against Russia to help the Islamic rebels? You mean NATO tanks are crossing the Spanish border to support the ETA?

If the Germans want to put up a discrete memorial to the innocent men, women and children who were killed in the chaos then, that is alright by me.

But the survivors should be content with surviving.

And by the way, it was the fault of the Germans; not the Russians, Poles or Czecks. Remember it was the Germans (not the Czecks, Poles or Russians) who decided they were going to change the borders; it simply didn't work out how Germany had planned.

Originally posted by Sean Lindstrom
We needn't pick one of many wrongs, and call it right. Memorials needn't be all glory. The point of those stinkn' pieces of stone is to make people stop and reflect.
A big Holocaust Memorial is currently built in Berlin.

But it will be only dedicated to the Jewish victims. There is no memorial for: political victims, Roma/Sinti victims, christian victims, homosexual victims et. all.

originally posted by SanPellegrino
I agree with Hitro and I think there is no point in paying injustice with injustice. The extradition of germans from Eastern Europe was partly a genocide. but from the point of view of the Allies and the eastern-european countries it was understandable. It prevented that germany would ever claim that land to the east again.


In the war years, German males were needed for military service. A big part of germany's agricultural and industrial works was performed by slave workers from the east.

Do you really expect the Polish, the Czech or the Russian people to say: OK, you germans have been overstepping your bounds, now get back where you came from? Do you expect they'd ignore that Germany robbed them of about 5 years live-time, robbed their fathers clock and raped their womens?

Living close to German/Czech border, I often wonder what makes me so different to the guy over yonder?

The only answer I can give is, that I am not different. But some Landlords or Kings or Chancellours are trying to trick me into believing this.

Could any monument help to change the way people are thinking?

Go to the allied soldier's mass graves, go to a concentration camp. That's enough of a memorial to me.

Every hick town here in Bavaria has a memorial site, listing any name of it's dead sons from WW I and WW II.
(I could come up with some digi-cam shots)

I have never seen a memorial to the foreign enemies, that have been killed by our countries' sons.

Therefore this special "expelles memorial" would be utter hipocrasy.

Moved to History, after overnight exposure in OT...

Another great move by XIII! :p

Every hick town here in Bavaria has a memorial site, listing any name of it's dead sons from WW I and WW II.
(I could come up with some digi-cam shots)

The village I live in (in central Franconia) even lists their dead of 1870/71...

I sympathize with the idea of building a European centre/memorial for expellees. This would include the Germans, but would give you the whole picture or whatever.
Apart from that, I think that when Poland and Czech republic will enter the EU, all those refugees who want to can return (except for those who lived around Kaliningrad, of course), and that will hopefully make those nasty Sudetendeutsche in Bavaria shut up.

Originally posted by Stefan Haertel
I sympathize with the idea of building a European centre/memorial for expellees. This would include the Germans, but would give you the whole picture or whatever.
That's what I'd favour too.
Apart from that, I think that when Poland and Czech republic will enter the EU, all those refugees who want to can return (except for those who lived around Kaliningrad, of course), and that will hopefully make those nasty Sudetendeutsche in Bavaria shut up.
I don't think so. Many of today's "activists" never lived there, after all.
Originally posted by -PI^2
Moved to History, after overnight exposure in OT...

Another great move by XIII! :p
Hey, this is a current event topic. :mad:
:p

Hello? This idea is just nuts!

A memorial for people who were expelled or fled? Why? What will it say?

"This memorial is dedicated to those Germans who lost their lands and homes, either through expulsion or because they fled in the face of retaliation for German aggression after Germany got beaten."

You can't have a memorial because some people lost some property. It's just pathetically lame. What would the memorial look like. Some chap looking backwards longingly towards his left-behind home?

Originally posted by polymath
Hello? This idea is just nuts!

You can't have a memorial because some people lost some property.

During the expell, many young german girls and women were raped and many men were killed. Either by Russian soldiers, or by angry civilians, having survived years of nazi atrocities.

We can debate for hours whether this was the fault of the german people themselves, but that is not the point I think.

Fact is that many people were raped, killed or expelled.

Originally posted by polymath
Hello? This idea is just nuts!

A memorial for people who were expelled or fled? Why? What will it say?

"This memorial is dedicated to those Germans who lost their lands and homes, either through expulsion or because they fled in the face of retaliation for German aggression after Germany got beaten."


I agree, this is absurd.

They're f*cking Nazis for Christ's sake. They don't deserve anything but death in a gas chamber.

As the most diehard of anti-nazis, I would look at this as harshly as you guys do; but my mother's parents came from East Prussia and Silesia. Therefore I could take such remarks:
They don't deserve anything but death in a gas chamber.
as a deeply personal insult. I don't, but it's bloody close.

Originally posted by Stefan Haertel
As the most diehard of anti-nazis, I would look at this as harshly as you guys do; but my mother's parents came from East Prussia and Silesia. Therefore I could take such remarks:

as a deeply personal insult. I don't, but it's bloody close.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you, unless you parents supported Nazis. If they didn't, then my comment doesn't have much to do with you now does it?

I truly don't feel 'an eye for an eye' is needed here. But there has to be some form of punishment (I am against the death penalty, believe it or not) and I don't think making a memorial is the way to start/conclude that punishment.

Again, I apologise for my remark.

My parents don't support the nazis (they were born after the war), as for my grandparents, I don't know to what degree they supported the nazis, all I can say is that they are none and were none. Most Germans supported the nazis to a degree, however.
Again, I apologise for my remark.
Don't worry about it :), I do understand you. It's only that it's very hard to cope with such things as a German, IMHO. You can't choose the country you're born in, after all, much less the city (in my case Dachau).

Originally posted by Stefan Haertel
My parents don't support the nazis (they were born after the war), as for my grandparents, I don't know to what degree they supported the nazis, all I can say is that they are none and were none. Most Germans supported the nazis to a degree, however.

Don't worry about it :), I do understand you. It's only that it's very hard to cope with such things as a German, IMHO. You can't choose the country you're born in, after all, much less the city (in my case Dachau).

Well, I certainly wasn't blaming you or holding anything against you personally. Your grandparents on the other hand...

I have a friend who is rabidly anti-German because of what the Nazis did. He spits on the ground whenever he hears the word 'German' and condemns the language as a 'Nazi tongue'.

I, on the other hand, love Germany and I went to visit last year. I have a good friend who lives there, and I love the language (It just sounds so industrious :) )

I try to convince him (my anti-German friend) every time I can that the Germans aren't like that anymore, but he is still very very skeptical, feeling that anti-Semitism has been around for centuries there and that's not a feeling that instantly goes away.

And the comment about most Germans supported the Nazis is true, but I hardly see how that helps your cause. There were some who rebelled and knew what was right. Not everyone had to be brainwashed.

%$#*&$#@!

I wrote a response to this thread but then accidentally hit the wrong button and lost everything!

OK, to business:

It is clear from reading the posts in this thread that this is still a very emotional issue for many. That alone should make everyone take a step back from their position and try to better understand the issue. Several of us have a personal connection to these events, and I am no exception: My family was deported from Soviet-occupied Lithuania as Poles, while my wife's family were moved into the Ziemie odzyskane, the "Recovered Territories".

Initially I would agree that a monument should be forthcoming. If we are to successfully repudiate the Nazi doctrine then labelling all German civilians as being collectively guilty for Nazi crimes is to accept and validate Hitler's twisted weltanschauung. I reject this; these people, regardless of their feelings about Nazism, were unarmed non-combatants and there was no legal basis for their being forcibly deported from their homelands. I repeat, this was a crime. Some 11.7 million Germans were deported from Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1947, almost 2 million of whom are estimated to have died or been killed en route. 9 million of these came from Poland. On 18. Novermber 1966 the Bishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyla (the future Pope) sent a letter, "Letter of Reconciliation of the Polish Bishops to the German Bishops" to Germany asking for forgiveness for this crime and starting a dialogue, so this has been acknowledged by at least some Polish authorities as the crime it was. As well, when on 14. November 1990 Poland and Germany finally signed the treaty ending World War II between them, the following article was included in the treaty (link here (http://www.un.org/Depts/los/LEGISLATIONANDTREATIES/PDFFILES/TREATIES/DEU-POL1990CF.PDF)) :

Mindful of the fact that 45 years have passed since the end of the Second World War, and conscious that the great
suffering caused by that war, including also the loss by many Germans and Poles of their native land as a result of expulsion or
resettlement, are a warning and a challenge for the establishment of peaceful relations between the two peoples and States...

However,

That the mere idea of such a monument still causes concern in Eastern Europe and elsewhere should give pause, and indeed there are some very legitimate questions about who exactly is demanding such a treaty. Those German civilians and their immediate family, who have suffered directly as a result of these crimes, do indeed deserve some sort of acknowledgement. Modern German nationalists who in recent years have increasingly been focusing on Germany as a victim of World War II and the immediate post-war years, do not.

Case in point: Throughout the war Germany carried out several acts of what we would call ethnic cleansing, ranging from the relatively benign and bloodless expulsion of all French from Alsace-Lorraine (c. 100,000) to the more gruesome expulsion of Poles from areas of occupied Poland outside the General Gouvernment. Some 6 million Poles died in the war, 3 million Polish Jews and 3 million Christian Poles; of the latter figure only about 600,000 were military personnel. Thousands of Polish villages and small towns were simply liquidated with their populations either dispersed or murdered; Warsaw by 1945 was nearly completely leveled with its per-war population of 1 million+ reduced to less than 100,000. According to UNRRA records (which as a history student I poured through), the Allies in 1945 found c. 13 million foreign slave laborers in Germany, 5 million of whom were Polish. To boot, Stalin's insistance on sticking in 1945 to his half of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led to the expulsion of some 2 million Poles from eastern Soviet-occupied Poland, my family among them. You can see why sympathy for the 1945 Germans may wane a bit.

Still, a crime is a crime. On 07. December 1970, Willy Brandt shocked Poland with a stunt that created an enormous groundswell of sympathy for post-war (Western) Germany. He was supposed to during a visit to the war monument in Warsaw lay a wreath, itself a major symbolic event, but he fell to his knees and expressed deep remorse for Germany's past crimes against Poland. This simple little stunt had a huge emotional impact on Poland, and it more than any economic argument is why Poles today look to Germany as a friend and brother in Western Europe.

I think the best answer would be a general monument dedicated to all innocent civilians who were forcibly deported or forced to migrate during or immediately after the war. I think it would be a brilliant symbolic move if Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and other effected countries could together mourn the losses of that period and collectively simultaneously commemorate them and renounce the doctrines that led to these crimes. Old enemies and friends standing shoulder-to-shoulder, remembering those terrible years and acknowledging how they hurt everyone.