Crimes of expulsion – a chance missed

Dear Ms Christiansen,

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has been working more than any other human rights organisation in Germany and Central Europe in the nearly 40 years of its existence against the present crimes of genocide and expulsion – from Biafra to Bosnia and Darfur. For we are convinced that the mass murders of the past commit us to coming to the aid of the persecuted. For this reason too the Society for Threatened Peoples has always drawn attention to the crimes against Sinti and Roma, Armenians, the victims of Stalinism and German refugees and worked for the victims and if necessary for their descendants.

You have unfortunately missed a chance to take up a responsibility of this kind arising out of the past. The fate of over twelve million refugees, of the two million victims of expulsion, of the hundreds of thousands of young women and men abducted to the Soviet Union, of hundreds of thousands of slave labourers in the work camps and concentration camps of Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia and the up to two million victims of rape, called for more than stuffy political correctness and a moderator carrying on feelings of resentment against refugees.

The holocaust and the crimes of the Nazis came before the crimes of expulsion. Nevertheless Victor Gollancz, the famous British Jewish publisher and humanist, called the expulsion of the Germans from the east an „indelible disgrace for the allies”. For human rights workers mass murders, expulsion and rape are always and everywhere an inexcusable crime.

But you prevented a lively, open and controversial discussion by not inviting the spokesperson of the centre against expulsion and the refugee associations. Surviving victims of war crimes were not represented either, nor were deported persons or former prisoners of concentration camps or forced labour camps. Finally it is unforgivable that an important adviser to the controversial chauvinist Polish President, but no Polish refugee from previous Eastern Poland and no representative from one of the many German-Polish reconciliation initiatives of eastern German refugees and Polish new citizens had the opportunity of saying anything.

You introduced the programme with the „Sudeten Germans from Silesia” and evidently mixed up in the refugees the 3.5 million Sudeten Germans with the five million Silesians. No wonder that your questions were in the main so unimaginative and empty. Concern about conflicts over property came to the fore and the terrible fate of the refugees you turned into a minor problem. One refugee in the audience, who had fled from the East Prussian Goldap, you interrupted when she began to speak about her suffering in Danzig after the influx of the Soviet army. Here it would have been sensible to speak about the rights of the remaining German minorities in the areas where the people were driven out and about people who are still suffering today from the crimes of expulsion, such as the East Prussian wolf children. An opportunity missed – what a pity!

Yours Truly,

Tilman Zülch

Secretary General of the Society for Threatened Peoples