THE GERMAN WORLD ALLIANCE CALLS UPON GERMANS WORLDWIDE TO COMMEMORATE WORLD REFUGEE DAY
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has designated June 20th, 2005 as International Refugee Day, a day to rerflect on the situtation of some twenty million human beings who today suffer homelessness as refugees or internally displaced persons, whose human rights are continuously violated and who remain exposed to grave dangers even to their survival.
The German World Alliance takes this opportunity to remember the more than 15 million German refugees and expellees who lost their homes at the end of the Second World War. GWA draws attention to the fact that in 1945, millions of Germans became refugees as a direct result of the policies of the United Nations, being subjected to forced "population transfer" from their 700-year old homelands in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, East Brandenburg, Danzig, Memel, Sudetenland, as well as more millions of ethnic Germans who were brutally expelled from Romania, Yugoslavia and Hungary. More than one million were deported to other countries where they were subjected to forced labour for many years. More than two million of these Germans, including women, childen and elderly persons, did not survive their tribulations. They perished as a direct result of rape and other violent acts, internment in unhygienic temporary facilities, they died of starvation, exposure, disease, mistreatment, fatigue and other causes. Another two million ehnic Germans whose ancestors had migrated to Russia in the 17th century, the Russian-Germans of the Black Sea and of the Volga Soviet Republic, had already been deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Soviet Asia, where they lived in extreme poverty.
Very few voices in the world, notably Victor Gollancz, Archbishop Bell of Canterbury, U.S. Ambassadar Robert Murphy, took notice of the fate of these Germans, who were not guilty of anything. They were subjected to this
inhuman and criminal treatment only because they were German. They were made to pay for the crimes of the Hitler regime. Many of the survivors of the
expulsion continued living the traumata of their expulsion. Many migrated to the United States, Canada and Australia. More than 12 million rebuilt their broken lives in Austria, the Federal Republic of Germany and the former German
Democratic Republic. Sixty years after their expulsion, the German refugees and their descendants demand recognition of their status as victims of a grave
political injustice.
Germans, more than any other people on the planet, know the meaning of losing their homeland and becoming refugees through ethnic cleansing. Germans worldwide support the efforts of the UNHCR on behalf of all refugees, to coordinate volunary repatriation and to enforce the right of return for today's refugees.
As the first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jose Ayala Lasso, said to the German expellees in 1995, "The right to one's homeland is a fundamental human right". GWA pledges its efforts to make the right to one's homeland a reality for all peoples of the world.
Alfred de Zayas