Poland refuses to join Berlin project remembering Germans driven from homes after WWII

Poland refuses to join Berlin project remembering Germans driven from homes after WWII


2008-02-05 18:59:49 -

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Poland has refused an offer to collaborate with Germany in developing a center to commemorate the suffering of Germans driven from their homes in eastern Europe at the end of World War II, officials said Tuesday.
However, the Polish government said individual Polish historians could participate in the planned museum _
a sign that Warsaw and Berlin were taking steps to work through an issue that has strained ties for years.
Germany is planning a permanent exhibition in Berlin that would document the suffering of the millions of Germans driven from their homes in eastern Europe at the end of World War II, when borders were redrawn by the victorious Allies.
The plan has stoked widespread anger in Poland, where many view it as a German attempt to commemorate war-era Germans that would amount to rewriting history by turning perpetrators into victims.
Germany subjected Poland to a brutal occupation during the war, killing 6 million Poles, half of them Jewish. And Poles, as well as Ukrainians and others, were also uprooted from broad swaths of territory in the East when the borders were shifted.

In an attempt to persuade Poland to accept the plan, and even cooperate in it, Germany's culture minister, Bernd Neumann, met in Warsaw with Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, 85, an Auschwitz survivor and former foreign minister who is a key adviser to the Polish government on relations with Germany.
In a joint statement, Neumann and Bartoszewski said that: «The Polish side does not intend to take part formally.» However, it also said that this «doesn't rule out the participation of Polish historians.
They said they also explored the possibility of Berlin and Warsaw working together on other projects meant to remember the war, such as renovating a memorial at the Westerplatte peninsula in Gdansk, where Germany fired the war's first shots against Poland; and by possibly creating together a museum of «War and Peace in the 20th Century» in Gdansk.




Poland refuses to join Berlin project remembering Germans driven from homes after WWII

 

Not surprised really....

 

Why would they? The Germans should not have invaded in the first place. There were no Germans in Eastern Europe except those who relocated after the invasion and took away homes that belonged to others. So, yes, they should be expelled. Now are they talking about Polish Nationals with German ancestry?

 

They should get over it...

We're almost 70 years LATER.. Everybody had their revenge to get them back after Germany surrendered.. AND they DID!

Are you hearing Germany complaining about what the others did after the war with the Germans? The only thing they get is only more hate.

And "They shouldn't have" or "They should have" come on you didn't live in the Situation while then. It's easy to say that but you should know what the situation was while then and not how the situation is now. It's like that America 'should not had to invade Iraq' after 9/11 because 'look now what'.

UN asks Iran to stop their Nuclear plan. They recieved already 2 warnings. Do they listen? They even told that they didn't give a f.ck what UN says or does..

Turkey and Kurdish Iraq.. Same situation..

We could compare ALOT of situation like that ...

 

Im afraid the situation is far more delicate......

Poland and her people cant just simply forgive and forget ( and I dont blame them ).
Especially not while there are still survivors from the period.

As Kai said, no surprise there.

 

They are actually talking about German nationals that lived in Germany both prior to and during WWII. The areas were East Prussia and Pomerania. After the war, any remaining Germans were forcibly removed to East Germany. Their homes, businesses and farms were taken by Polish (Soviet) authorities. The area was given to Poland and resettled by Byelorussians and Ukranians. All traces of Germany were removed...villages and towns renamed, cemeteries razed and turned into parks, etc.

I actually lived in one of the small villages for several years and learned about how the resettlement occurred from some of the older residents. Today, Germans are trying to exert their rights to some of the properties and many have moved back to their ancestral homelands. They are not allowed to own farm land, but can lease it from Polish owners.

 

Well, they did not afford the Polish the same courtesy in 39'. They lost the war, get over it and move on.

 

Germany and Poland to end row over exhibition on post-WWII refugees

Warsaw/Berlin - Germany and Poland have come closer to ending a row over a planned German exhibition on the fate of refugees and displaced people during World War II, following a meeting between top-level officials of the two countries in Warsaw on Tuesday. The permanent exhibition, planned by Germany as a "visible sign against flight and expulsion," had prompted opposition in Poland, where the forced migration of millions of German nationals and ethnic Germans following World War II has remained a thorny issue.

While representatives of the resettled Germans have highlighted the plight of the refugees, Poland has stressed the prior suffering caused by the Nazi occupation of the country.

The planned exhibition would not be formally supported by the Polish government even though the participation of Polish historians was "not excluded," said German Minister of State for Culture Bernd Neumann after meeting Polish State Secretary Vladyslav Bartoszevski.

The controversy concerning the commemoration of Germans forcefully resettled after WWII is encapsulated in the use of the term "expulsion" which is rejected in many territories in Eastern Europe held or annexed by Germany before and during World War II.

German-Polish relations had been strengthened by the talks between the two officials, Neumann told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Germany had also agreed to sponsor the restoration of a museum on the Polish Westerplatte peninsula which saw Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 that started World War II.

Meanwhile, Poland's former prime minister Jaroslav Kaczynski of the nationalist conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) rejected the German plans for the exhibition as a "political trap" and said he was opposed to any Polish participation in the project.

An advisor to President Lech Kaczynski, the former premier's twin brother, also said Poland could not accept the project's underlying "ideological concept." Warsaw should join forces with Prague in opposing the exhibition, Marek Cichocki said Tuesday.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/...-to-end-row-over-exhibition-on-post-wwii.html

 

Actually, the Germans who were forcibly resettled didn't just come from territory that was officially German in 1938, before the war. The situation was FAR more complex than that. Eastern Europe has seen massive population migrations through time, as well as an evolution of cultures, the same as everywhere else in the world. At the start of WWII there were millions of Germans living in Poland. In fact, to truly understand the situation you have to go back to the period before the end of WWI when Poland didn't exist. What is now Poland was divided between the Prussians and Russians at the end of the 18th century when the medieval Polish kingdom was carved up by these two empires. Germans had been moving east since the Middle Ages and East Prussia was almost entirely German. West Prussia was mixed, while a German majority also existed in Pommerania and Silesia. However, all of these areas had significant Slavic minorities, not all of them Polish. However, there were very large Polish populations in West Prussia and Posen and so when Germany lost WWI the Allies, hoping to cripple Germany and hold it in check to keep it from starting future wars, sliced off West Prussia and Posen and a good chunk of Silesia and gave these to the newly reformed state of Poland. Likewise, the Czechoslovakian republic was founded out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a signficant German population remained in the new Czech state. They were mostly concentrated in the border area and this was the Sudentland that sparked the war crisis of 1938, leading to the Munich Pact.

Hitler used the same excuse of reuniting a persecuted German minority to spark the war against Poland. The Poles, realizing that their German minority was favorable to Hitler, persecuted them, and this gave Hitler his casus belli. Hitler then invaded Poland, took it over and dissolved the Polish state, and proceeded to persecute the Polish majority in Poland to an even greater degree. There were also many Germans who had migrated to Russia in the late 18th and 19th centuries and when Germany started losing the war in the East, the Nazis relocated these Volksdeutsche on to formerly Polish land in the borderlands of former Poland that had been absorbed into Grossdeutschland. Then the Russians came through and the Germans living in what was then eastern Germany bore the brunt of the Russian atrocities as these were the first native Germans, living on German soil, that these Russian soldiers had come across, and the Russians were looking to pay back the Germans for the atrocities against Russians that the Germans had committed earlier in the war. The Poles, being liberated, took their revenge on the Germans who hadn't been smart enough to flee ahead of the Red Army and after Russia moved Poland's borders west (to compensate Poland for the USSR keeping its ill gotten eastern half of Poland in the 1939 pact with Hitler) all Germans in these newly Polish lands were expelled.

That's what happened and it was a very complex situation. Germany lost around 1/3 of its territory and all those Germans, over ten million, were expelled under frightful conditions. Did they deserve their fate? Well, to see the inherit unjustness of what happened to them one need only look at the fact that if this was punishment to the German people in general, it only affected those living in the east. Western Germans were not deprived of their homes and forced to travel under awful conditions to find new homes at a time when western Germany couldn't even house its own population. The Allies themselves recognize the inherent immorality of ethnic cleansing when they declared it a war crime and then punished leading Nazis for carrying out such inhumane practices. Yet the Allies then condoned this very kind of act by allowing the Russians, Poles, and Czechs to expell all of their German minorities. If it was a crime for the Germans to ethnically cleanse Poland during the war then it was equally a crime for Poland to expell the Germans after the war.

PzJgr would have the Germans get over it but he has no problem with the Germans paying for their war sins. This is simply might makes right, and leads to no true justice. If the Poles got the right to expell the Germans because they won the war then the Germans had the right to expell the Poles when they had the chance and the Germans can't be held to have acted immorally. You can't have it both ways. However, PzJgr's attitude is the very simplistic one held by a lot of people of all eras; unthinking nationalism. That kind of attitude is what led to the Germans acting as they did in the war. It is not alright to hold those attitudes today, even if we simply transfer such mindless nationalism to our own countries. ("U-S-A! U-S-A!", etc.) Think, don't just believe.

 

the invasion of Poland was part of Hitler's plan on taking Europe back to what it once was, Germania. -I'm Not defending Hitler, just saying that was his reason for going into Poland.

 

Welcome back Marienburg.

 

I'm going to that castle on my Germany trip!

 

You forget that many so-called ethic Germans that were repatriated were not actually German. Perhaps it is also worth mentioning that many of these new Germans spoke hardly any German and it is correct to say they were brought in from different parts of Europe. Many were then given Polish houses and businesses that had forcefully claimed by the Nazi's.

It also very much depends on what three regional area's the so-called ethic Germans were repatriated too. In the North, if were Polish but looked "German",you were given papers to say you were German. However, in the South it was a differnent story all together.

I personally think I was morally justified to throw those so-called ethic Germans out of Poland because they stole the lives and heritage of Polish people.

 

sorry double post

 

I'm not so certain about that. There were plebiscites held (requested by the Versailles treaty commission) in Upper Silezia, Marienwerder, Allenstein etc.. in the 1920s, that is way before the Nazis came to power. Up to 98% of the population wanted to stay German. Pomerania was German, East Prussia had been German for 700 years. Some of these territories have never been polish before 1945. Danzig had a German population , so had Memel etc..
The poles have the right to have a territory, but it is Stalin who kept Eastern Poland (Brest- Litow, Lwov) and therefore having not much Polish territory left he moved the borfers to the Oder Neisse.

As some of you said , the war is over now and thnigs have been done, but it is time to recognize these 6 million German civilians as Refugees too . They are in fact indirectly victims of Nazism. They have been deported, sometimes, raped or killed , humilatied, spoiled of their goods etc... They are victims and deserve a memorial. What else should they be called? Would they be denied of this title just because of their nationality?

 

The war is indeed over and it is funny to think who really won in the long run. Today in Pomerania, you see Mercedes and BMWs tooling through the countryside driven by Germans while the majority of the rural Polish civilians are riding bicycles, buses or walking. I know this is the result of the Cold War and Capitalist vs Communist economics, but it strikes me as ironic that the vanquished are now returning to the scene of their demise.
On another note, the land claims by dispossessed Germans were a major pain-in-the-butt when we were running our farming operations. As we bought land under the guise of Polish ownership, we had to wait months and sometimes years to clear all the claims to the land filed by previous German landowners. To settle several rather contentious claims, we allowed German families to lease the old ancestral homes set amid our farms. Most were used as vacation homes or hunting retreats.

 

Well said Grossborn. This used to be a difficult matter. But things can be put in an easy way.
Are these deported Germans to be considered victims or not? I think the answer is yes and I believe that soon or late the Polish govenrment will agree with this. maybe it's just one generation too early. Same thing for the lease deal. While it is understandable that the Poles do not wish the Germans to buy their land back, they should one day be allowed to buy land where they wish. If not it would be a dicrimination against them because other nationalities can buy land in Poland. I think belonging to the same Union will help both countries a lot .

 

Then you better make a right turn into Poland.

 

Huh???

Fortress Marienberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ahhh... burg and berg...quite confusing...

Malbork Castle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Unless I am mistaken Marienburg's, avatar is the former head quarters of the teutonic knights now known as Malbork castle.

Malbork Castle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia