GWA Press Release December 10, 2004
Human Rights Day
The German World Alliance joins civil society in all countries and in particular the NGO community and other human rights agencies in celebrating International Human Rights Day and reaffirming the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948.
GWA would like to identify two primary objectives of this international day of remembrance and action:
the level of public awareness and understanding of human rights must be enhanced through education and training. Both are essential for the promotion and achievement of stable and harmonious relations among communities and for fostering mutual understanding, tolerance and peace.
Germans world-wide recall that human rights and human dignity do not allow for privileges in the treatment of victims. There cannot be politically correct victims and those who can be safely ignored. Each victim of a violation of his or her human rights is entitled to our solidarity and compassion. Each victim deserves respect and attention. Thus, the German World Alliance insists that Germans victims of grave human rights violations not be ignored, as if their suffering did not count.
60 years after the expulsion (Vertreibung) of 15 million Germans from the 700-year old homelands in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, East Brandenburg, the Sudetenland, as well as from Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia – a process that took the lives of more than two million of these unfortunate men, women and children – must be addressed. This was ethnic cleansing in a massive scale, many times worse than what we have all seen in Yugoslavia.
The noted British publicist Victor Gollancz described the expulsions in his book “Our Threatened Values” as follows:
If the conscience of mankind ever again becomes sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered to the undying shame of all who committed or connived at them…The Germans were expelled, not just with an absence of over-nice consideration, but with the very maximum of brutality. (p. 96)
U.S. Senator Langer rightly called the expulsions “a crime against humanity”. And yet, the expulsions are largely unknown outside of Germany and Austria. This is attributable to a failure of the press to report on it while it was happening and a failure of historians to come to grips with it – perhaps because it was so horrible, so inhuman, so disgraceful.
No one can deny these German expellees their status as victims. No one can deny them respect and compassion. The German World Alliance wants to contribute to the dissemination of information on this subject.
In keeping with the goals of this year‘s Human Rights Day, the GWA demands that schools, especially those in Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic, but also in the United States and Canada teach about these matters. The GWA insists that the school curricula deal with the Expulsion, and suggests that Volksdeutsche survivors should be called upon to retell their stories in the classrooms.
It is not possible to continue the false and immoral practice of systematically ignoring the many millions of victims of genocides in the twentieth century – as if there were a monopoly of suffering. Human rights activists and believers in the equality in dignity of all human beings, believers in the equality of all victims – they know that the genocide against the Armenians, the genocide against the Volksdeutsche, the genocide in Cambodia, the genocide in Rwanda are important events in 20th century history that must not be ignored.
All victims of ethnic cleansing have a right to return to their homelands, a right to restitution for robbed property and a right to an apology by the states which profited from the ethnocide that was the expulsion. As the first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jose Ayala Lasso, told the German expellees in 1995:
“I submit that if in the years following the Second World War the States had reflected more on the implications of the enforced flight and the expulsion of the Germans, today’s demographic catastrophies, particularly those referred to as ethnic cleansing, would, perhaps not have occurred to the same extent.”
The German World Alliance endorses this statement and asks human rights activists the world over to draw the necessary lessons from it.