Controversial Exhibition on Expellees to Open in Germany
February 1, 2006
The Federation of Displaced People, which has sparked tension with neighboring Poland by calling for the establishment of a center in Berlin to document the fate of "German and European" expellees between 1944 and 1946, said it was planning a three-month museum show from August.
Federation president Erika Steinbach told reporters that the exhibition would focus on international research on the subject of forced migration and "genocide" using 13 examples from 20th-century history.
These would include the massacre of Armenians in 1915 under the Ottoman Empire, the expulsion of Poles, Balts and Ukrainians during World War II, the forced displacement of Germans after the war and "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans in the 1990s.
No comparison of suffering
She insisted the show would not "compare the suffering of each affected group" but rather present the facts as documented by historians.
Last year, the Roman Catholic archbishop in Berlin rejected a request to host the exhibition in a local church because of criticism it would relativize the hardship inflicted on ethnic groups at various points in history.
Poland in particular has raised objections to the notion of a Berlin center for displaced people for fear that it would "unilaterally" spotlight German suffering, putting it on a par with that of Jews and other Polish civilians while playing down its origins in Nazi aggression.
Permanent center still planned
Steinbach told the news conference she was confident such a center would eventually be built in Berlin, an idea backed by Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel's partners in government, the center-left Social Democrats, have joined Poles and Czechs in saying they support the idea of a center that would honor the memory of all refugees from eastern Europe and be based in a city outside Germany.
At the end of World War II, at least 12 million Germans were displaced, deported or expelled from countries in eastern and central Europe as the Soviet army advanced, according to the federation.