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stevejdufour@yahoo.com (Steve Dufour) wrote in message news:<744cc401.0409142032.6665a9f8@posting.google.com>...
> Commentary:The Nazi past and modern Europe
> 
> 
> By Robin Shepherd
> UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
> 
> 
> Bonn, Germany, Sep. 14 (UPI) -- Gratuitous anti-Germanism is an all
> too pervasive pastime in modern Europe, and it shows few signs of
> dissipating.
> 
> From the inane chanting of "Two World Wars and One World Cup" by
> England's marauding armies of soccer hooligans to Italian Prime
> Minister Silvio Berlusconi's contemptible comparison last year of a
> German politician with a Nazi concentration camp guard, it demeans and
> disgraces those who indulge in it. Worse, in its implicit denial of
> the unprecedented success of the German nation's attempts to deal with
> the darkest period of its history, it sends a broader message that
> repair and reconciliation are unworthy of recognition. It trivializes
> war and Holocaust, reducing their significance to the level of the
> jibe, proffered to the Neanderthal crowd to buy a moment of ignorant
> applause.
> 
> This hardly helps then when we come to discuss the one outstanding
> issue from World War II that really is both significant and enduring
> and which, outside academic circles, neither Germany nor the wider
> Europe has yet seriously addressed.
> 
> Consider, with this in mind, some recent events in Poland and Germany.
> Last week, the Polish parliament passed a resolution - 328 in favor,
> one abstention and none against - calling on the government to seek
> further reparations from Germany for the carnage inflicted on Poland
> World War II. It also proclaimed that Poland had "no financial
> obligations whatsoever" to Germany for losses of life and property
> suffered by ethnic Germans expelled at the end of that war. That key
> clause in the resolution, the clause that explains why it was passed
> in the first place, was itself a response to events taking place
> across the border in Germany.
> 
> In that country a small organization called the Prussia Claims Society
> is poised to seek compensation in European courts for property lost by
> the 12.5 million ethnic Germans and their descendents who were
> expelled from central and eastern Europe at the end of the war. The
> group, and others that support its aims, has little support in
> Germany, and it is opposed by the German government. Nonetheless,
> public and political opposition inside Germany will not be enough to
> stop it pushing its claims in the courts.
> 
> The scale of the mass expulsions of Germans after the end of the World
> War II, mainly from Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, is little
> known in Europe. Who, after all, has been much interested in the
> sufferings of the people who started the war in the first place? If a
> third of the population of the present-day Czech Republic, for
> example, was expelled after the war en masse (3 million people in
> all), then was it not also true that those ethnic Germans collaborated
> with and exalted in the Nazi regime?
> 
> The trouble is that that charge of collective guilt, in normal
> circumstances, would not stand up in a 21st century European court.
> "What," a plausibly imagined plaintiff might retort, "about my family?
> Uncle Fritz fought the Nazis in the resistance. Cousin Hans spied for
> the British. Father and Mother were shot by the Gestapo. And yet our
> family was expelled and expropriated as surely as those who really had
> collaborated. Keep the property of the Nazis. But justice demands I
> get mine back."
> 
> "In any case," their lawyers might add, "since when has national or
> ethnic affiliation been an acceptable basis for a just outcome in a
> modern court of law?"
> 
> Phrased in that way, Europe's judges are not going to find an easy
> answer. Solutions, of course, will be found. The stakes are too high
> to allow such claims to succeed. Current legislation could be
> interpreted (possibly under political pressure) as suggesting the
> court claims in themselves amount to a form of subversion or threaten
> to incite national hatred - which they most certainly would. Statutes
> of limitations could be judged to have expired. In short, a whole host
> of legal and not so legal trickery can and probably will be employed
> to stop the claims in their tracks. The moral dilemma, however, will
> remain.
> 
> My own view on all this is that that dilemma is as acute as one wants
> it to be. It is true that innocent Germans -- hundreds of thousands of
> them, probably -- suffered greatly at the end of the war. But to keep
> perspective we have to part company, at least for a while, with our
> modern, individualist conception of law and justice if we are not to
> make the mistake of reading the expectations of the present into the
> realities of the past.
> 
> War, after all, is a collectivist enterprise. Nations fight nations,
> and individuals are part of the struggle whether they like it or not.
> This is especially true in an era of "total war," of which the events
> in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s comprised modern history's clearest
> and most awful example. The ethnic Germans of central and eastern
> Europe can, in some cases, claim to have been among total war's
> innocent victims. But many millions more suffered a far worse fate and
> are in no position to be compensated as a result.
> 
> The hard fact is that the presence of millions of ethnic Germans
> across central and eastern Europe in the first half of the last
> century was deemed, probably correctly, incompatible with stability,
> peace and therefore the broader context in which human rights in
> Europe could prevail. The consolidation of the German people inside
> clearly defined borders was a pre-condition for the rebirth of a
> continent based, eventually at least, on democracy, national
> reconciliation and the rule of law. It is not a conclusion that will
> suit those who yearn for simple answers to complicated problems, or
> who cannot live in a world without straight lines and sharp edges. Nor
> will it suit the German expellees and their descendents.
> 
> But if the rights we take for granted today have in some part been
> bought at the expense of the rights of other people in the past, then
> that is a contradiction that we in Europe will all have to live with.
> 
> -0-
> 
> Robin Shepherd is an adjunct fellow of the Center for Strategic and
> International Studies. His column appears weekly.

James