Volume I Issue 2
expulsions. “We create the myth of
poor, innocent German civilians who were treated so badly by the ‘Winners of World War II.’ Yes, it was tragedy for these families, but a tragedy which is hardly compa- rable to that one created by Ger- mans and Soviets for Jews, Poles, etc,” Przemyslaw says excitedly. “I feel deeply sorry for the expellees. Unfortunately, for me as a Pole, the topic of displacements is over- coming the suffering of my nation during the war.” For Przemyslaw, it is not
only the way the Flight, Expulsion, and Reconciliation Foundation re- fers to the expulsion that is prob- lematic. He also doubts its repre- sentation of expellees. “I wonder how Erika Stein-
bach [the head of the Federation of Expellees] became the voice of the expelees? She was born in Ru- mia in 1943 and her parents were moved there from other parts of Germany. Before the war, Rumia was a Polish city later taken by Germans. Two thousand Polish soldiers and civilians were killed when the German army entered Rumia in 1939,” says Przemyslaw. “Steinbach, and her family, were not displaced from the pre-war German territories; they were occu- pants on Polish soil. Now, she calls herself an ‘expelee’ and I think this statement is not justified. She has no rights to call herself a victim.” Przemyslaw compares the
case of Steinbach’s family to a former Chancellor of Germany,
disputed because of his member- ship in the Nazi Party, Hitler’s par- ty, until the end of World War II. “Even if he did not pull the trigger and kill anybody, he should have disappeared from the public life in shame. Mrs. Steinbach should do the same.” The negative attitude to-
wards Erika Steinbach and the BdV is also shared by Schröder. Al- though she appreciates the idea of remembrance, she especially views the affiliation with political parties – Erika Steinbach herself is a mem- ber of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) –with distrust. “In my view, because they are all so close to the Christian Social Union [the sister party of the CDU], it appears like they are a bunch of old Nazis who are not able to accept that they have lost their homes,” Schröder says. “And they are not like that, the people I know. For this reason, it conveys a wrong impression of the expellees. It appears like the expellees are to a high degree con- servative and nationalistic.” Schröder’s impression of
the organizations established by expellees as reactionary and even far-right is shared by Wetzel. “In these organizations, I would al- ways have a bit of a thought that that there are still today some Nazi groups who say, ‘We want to reclaim this part to the German Reich.’ That this is still a bit in there.”
Sonia Kessler-Scheil, the Ger-
man teenager whose grandfather was an expellee, does not doubt
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