An exhibition in Berlin looks at the fate of ethnic Germans who were expelled from eastern Europe towards and after the end of WW II. Something that makes some of Germanys neighbours nervous. Some believe this is historical revisionism , others argue it contributes to a complete picture..

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...431115,00.html

What happened happened. The incredible crimes of this generation might relative it a bit, but taking away peoples homes always is a crime. Anyway, any attempt of making this undone would fall under the same definition. This is why the last bunch of germans living in the yesterday should get used to the idea that prussia now belongs to poland.

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Millions of people died or starved to death as a result of the expulsions. There is no reason why they should be ignored. Read the story of Nemmersdorf or the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff or the assault on tens of thousands of women or the destruction of Königsberg. These were real people who died ghastly deaths and who suffered terrible things. The fact that they were, for the most part, citizens of Nazi Germany does not make them less than human. It does not in any way lessen the horrors of the Nazis to acknowledge them.

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"Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety."

Macbeth 3:1

No never!!!! I want my ancestral homeland, the Masurian Lake region, returned to me as one of three living descendants of the Masur line. Of course I am kidding here, but I can see how this gets emotional.

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The universe grows smaller every day and the threat of aggression by any group anywhere can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all or no one is secure... - Klaatu

Exactly. They were victims of Nazism and Communism just like so many others. The fact that they were Germans does not make their suffering less worth.

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Agreed. In many occations victors history puts these things away. Good that they are remembered.

Agreed. Most german families know such or similar stories, and many now old people who never spoke about their experiences, not even to their children, only manage that fifty or sixty years later. There have been some publications in Germany recently on such buried traumata, which sometimes erupt many years later.
One of my grandmothers is from the modern Czech Republic. Actually she got off relatively well. She was driven off her home, lost pretty much everything and couldn´t return to the places where she had grown up for the next forty /fifty years. She saw and experienced horrible things on the refugee treck heading for Western Germany, but all her family members survived and were reunited later and they started a new life in Bavaria. One of her friends for example was while the treck was hiding from Red Army soldiers in a forest desperately trying to keep her baby from screaming ( which the Russians could have heard) and unintentionally choked it. Her older son died from freezings later ( It was winter). Her husband had been "missing in action" two years before. That is not an uncommon story and more than a million civilians ( If i am not mistaken) died on such refugee trecks. But it has never been an issue in Germany or anywhere until recently, because many were afraid to be accused of relativating Nazi war crimes. So these people were alone with their stories and apparently two generations needed to pass until such an exhibition could take place...

Thank you for telling your grandmother's story. Was she from the sudetanland? I am curious as to how the stories of people who experienced this were treated in West Germany after the war. You mention taht she was alone with her story - so I suppose it was just not acceptable to talk of it.

This is heartbreaking: One of her friends for example was while the treck was hiding from Red Army soldiers in a forest desperately trying to keep her baby from screaming ( which the Russians could have heard) and unintentionally choked it. Her older son died from freezings later ( It was winter)

How do people go on after that? yet they do, somehow...

I read a book called "East Prussian Diary" by Hans Graf Von Lehndorff. He was a surgeon who stayed in Königsberg after the Russians came. The Nazis killed some of his family because they resisted them - then the Russians killed others because they were German. He was caught in between - it's a remarkable day-by-day account. He eventually escaped to the west.

__________________
"Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety."

Macbeth 3:1

[quote=Tim;830377]Thank you for telling your grandmother's story. Was she from the sudetanland? I am curious as to how the stories of people who experienced this were treated in West Germany after the war. You mention taht she was alone with her story - so I suppose it was just not acceptable to talk of it.



I was making a generalising statement, but thought again i guess it is correct. I know accounts of people who didn´t even talk to their children about what what they had seen or experienced. A friend of mine only found out that her grandfather had seen the sites of mass executions of Jews in Belarus ( he was an army cook and did not participate and it apparently deeply traumatised him ) when the old man was suffering from Alzheimer and somehow this buried memory came up.
The return to normal life in western Germany was partially achieved by a kind of public amnesia. There obviously had never been Nazis, everybody had just been abused, forced and not known anything, and post-war Germans were probably also too busy rebuilding their country than to spend a lot of time on talking about their traumata. You have to see that somehow almost everybody had something to cope with. War experiences, the loss of relatives or friends, the bomb war, beeing expellees from the parts of Germany east of the river Oder or eastern Europe and so nobody was seriously interested in what the refugees had to tell. Actually they were often quite unpopular. If I am not mistaken they were about 13 million ( one million , mostly children, old people etc, died on the way) and they obviously needed housing, food, jobs , because most, like my grandmother arrived with basically nothing.
They were placed all over Germany where people were barely able to make a living anyway, and then also had to take up the refugees. The problem dissappeared with the economic recovery but then there were more "important" things to talk about than war traumata. The incumbent president of Germany , Horst Köhler, is a representative of these expellees by the way, his family is from modern Moldavia. ( He was a young boy then)




This is heartbreaking: One of her friends for example was while the treck was hiding from Red Army soldiers in a forest desperately trying to keep her baby from screaming ( which the Russians could have heard) and unintentionally choked it. Her older son died from freezings later ( It was winter)

How do people go on after that? yet they do, somehow...



I guess i can´t say more than above..



I read a book called "East Prussian Diary" by Hans Graf Von Lehndorff. He was a surgeon who stayed in Königsberg after the Russians came. The Nazis killed some of his family because they resisted them - then the Russians killed others because they were German. He was caught in between - it's a remarkable day-by-day account. He eventually escaped to the west.[/QUOTE





I heard about the book but didn´t read it. But i´m surprised it appeared in English. Is it a worthy read ?

[quote=Voland;830669][quote=Tim;830377]Thank you for telling your grandmother's story.

Was she from the sudetanland?



Actually from here :


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hultschiner_L%C3%A4ndchen

IThe return to normal life in western Germany was partially achieved by a kind of public amnesia. There obviously had never been Nazis, everybody had just been abused, forced and not known anything, and post-war Germans were probably also too busy rebuilding their country




I think I should be clearer here. These are more or less my grandfathers words, and he was very bitter about that. Not only that few people were admitting their personal responsibility ( even when it was clearly proven) but also that even known Nazi war criminals made great careers in western Germany or elsewhere ( I was thinking of Wernher von Braun).
My grandfather had been a member of a soldiers resistance group. Not extraordinary personalities, but merely young guys, forcibly drafted into the Wehrmacht, who hated the Nazis from the bottom of their hearts and felt they needed to do something.
( My grandfather was the son of a lutheran priest from close to Erfurt in Thüringen, a state that was later encorporated into eastern Germany. The Nazis regarded his father as an enemy, and they were correct. So he was living under constant threats and was jailed at least once, if I remember correctly. I think he condemned the Reichskristallnacht publicly in his church, but i´m not totally sure. He was also (rightly) suspected of helping Jews and others who needed a place to hide, money etc. After the war he was jailed again once, this time by the communists, again for speaking up)
My grandfather and his friends were mainly helping jewish detainees of Ghettos and Concentration camps, organised food, money, medicine and at least once weapons. They warned them when the SS had plans for executions, and were able to let an unknown number escape. He was honoured by Yad Yashem , the Israeli authority for research on the Holocaust in 1986 in Jerusalem. He for the first time really talked about it when he had to explain what all these letters from Israel were for.
The Nazi era was a time which people who had survived wanted to leave behind as quickly as possible. The refugees and the resistance fighters were unpleasant reminders that others were worse off than oneself and that the invention of a completely uninformed majority that was only misled by the Nazis like cattle to the butcher doesn´t hold water....

[quote=Voland;830669] Extraordinary. I suppose the Germans of the post-war era were focused on the present and future, and the "expellees" were a constant reminder of the past? The resettlement of 13 million people is in itself a remarkable accomplishment. I suppose at this point the vast majority of them are dead - yet with people like yourself it remains a reality.





I think it is superb - quite unusual. It's a detailed diary, but the author remains an attitude of objectivity. Maybe that is the wrong word? What I means is: he is a doctor, and expresses horror at what is happening, but he does not indulge in a lot of rage. He seemed to be a man of outstanding character and spiritual depth. His account of the entrance of the Russians into Königsberg is unforgettable.

The translation of the book first appeared in the US in the 1960s. It is found in most libraries. I found it in a small used bookstore in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

I know that he wrote several other books about his life after the war. They are on amazon.com.de - all in German

__________________
"Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety."

Macbeth 3:1

Interesting. Are you familiar with the historian John Lukacs? He is a Hungarian historian who moved to the US. His books are outstanding; primarily on European history of the twentieth centuy. He made an interesting observation: the return of the Germans who had lived for centuries in central, eastern Europe and Russia to Germany after 1945 is one of the most significant under-rated developments in recent European history.

They had lived in Russia since the days of Catherine the Great - and in the Baltic states, Hungary, Romania and other countries for many centuries before that. I had not really thought of that before - it sounds like perhaps your grandmother's story is an example of that? In 1945, they all had to leave and return to Germany - but of course for them, it wasn't a return.

BTW - I would recommend Budapest 1900 and The Siege of Budapest, both by Lukacs.

__________________
"Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety."

Macbeth 3:1

I always felt it was important to remember the sufferings of the civilians of everyone. There are also some good stories of German resistance too that should be learnt. Many put their lives on the line to do it, and many in fact suffered and died in that resistance, such as for hiding Jews, etc., but they get a double insult of guilt by association due to their nationality with a sinister government they suffered and died to oppose. People like Sophie Scholl, Reverend Niemoeller, etc should be part of the study of the war itself when discussing resistance to the Nazi onslaught.

Yes, indeed - I found a book called "Dying We Live", which is a collection of the letters of those killed for resisting the Nazis. The book is out of print, but it is a treasure.

__________________
"Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety."

Macbeth 3:1