Volume I Issue 2


REDISCOVERING THE HISTORY OF WWII EXPELLEES


Jasmin Wertz “H


e saw everything, those horrific pictures...naked women, dead, raped,


girls, children, the elderly, every- one. He experienced the panic and anxiety. I always imagine that he was 17 years old. Seventeen years old, no idea of the world, no idea of nothing.” While Sonia Kessler-Scheil


describes her grandfather’s mem- ories of World War II, I have to re- mind myself that his perspective is that of a victim. The pictures elic- ited in my mind when thinking of World War II are those of Germans constructing concentration camps, Germans waving their flags to the speeches of Adolf Hitler, Germans aggressively pushing forward the war that was among the most di- sastrous conflicts in human his- tory.


The thought of Germans as


victims feels awfully inappropri- ate in the face of these atrocities. But Sonia’s grandfather was one of the 12 million Germans who expe- rienced the war from a perspective that is not intuitively associated with the “nation of perpetrators.”


Europe: Germany


When Germany was defeated by the allies in 1945, he was expelled from his home and shared this ex- perience with millions of other Ger- mans who fled or were displaced from the Czech Republic and the pre-war East German provinces, located in Russia and Poland. But even though German


expellees made up almost a fifth of the German population, the is- sue of German expulsions has ever since been treated with discomfort by the German public. Associa- tions advocating the remembrance of the expellees such as the Ger- man Federation of Expellees (BdV) have been criticized as reactionary. The topic is delicate, as it poses an awkward question: to what extent may the nation that jubilantly sup- ported Adolf Hitler, in his efforts to establish the Third Reich, mourn its own victims of World War II? Sixty years after the end of


the war, this question has now reached new relevance, initiated by plans of establishing a perma- nent exhibition in Berlin, dedicat- ed to the subject of the expulsion. The Flight, Expulsion, and Recon-


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