PRAGUE, 8 September 2003 — Eight months before the creation of an enlarged, 25-nation European Union, the bad memories left by Hitler’s Third Reich still persist in Eastern Europe, where reconciliation with Germany is far from reaching the level achieved among the EU’s current 15 members.
Almost 60 years after the Nazi defeat, German leaders on trips to the countries of Eastern Europe always feel obliged at some or another to slip in a reference to the horrors and consequences of World War II.
Yet the looming prospect of entry into the EU has touched off fears among many people that the Germans are going to come to dictate to them once again, or at least seek to recover the houses and land of their parents or grandparents.
Germany is the biggest country in the European Union both in terms of its population and its economy and, since the fall of Communism, it has invested massively in Eastern and Central Europe.
Before World War II, 16.6 million Germans lived beyond the frontiers of modern-day Germany. Of those, 60 percent lived in land that then belonged to Germany, and the rest were scattered in minorities installed for many centuries in independent countries from Estonia in the north to Romania in the south.
In Poland and the Czech Republic, the smallest spark is enough to revive fears of Germany, which treated those two countries with particular cruelty during the war.
And there is no shortage of firebrands. In particular, in Germany and Austria, there are numberous associations representing some 12 million Germans who survived the great exodus at the end of World War II.
Most of them fled before the Red Army, which was avid for revenge, while others like the Germans of the Sudentenland, which was then in Czechoslovakia, were expelled from their native land and had their property brutally expropriated.
Associations of refugees in Germany, generously subsidized from the public purse and supported by the conservative political parties, continue to demand the restitution of their lost patrimony.
Last year, they campaigned in vain for the Czech Republic to be made to abolish the 1945 expropriation decrees before being allowed to join the EU.
In recent weeks, the federation linking most of the expelled Germans, the BvD, ruffled feathers in Poland by proposing with the support of Christian Democrat politicians to build a documentation center in Berlin to the memory of all German and European people expelled from their homes in the conflict.
In Warsaw, the political class has risen as one to denounce the project, which the historian and former Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek warned would sow chaos among peoples. It risked, he warned, “diluting responsibility for the most terrible crimes carried out by the Nazis.”
In the midst of this whirlwind, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer have sought to defuse the tension by recalling once again the “historic fault” of the Third Reich and the many millions of deaths it caused.
Some Czech intellectuals say that such breast-beating tends to exonerate Czech authorities for the brutal actions committed against ethnic-German citizens at the end of the war, and they would like the government here to own up to some responsibility for the brutal ethnic-cleaning of the Sudentenland region.
“It’s regrettable the politicians, intellectuals and journalists in Germany align themselves with those who falsify history and deny all responsibility,” said the Czech political scientist, Bohumil Dolezal.
