April 27, 2006
Excerpts published with a twist
German Community shocked by National Geographic's comment to GWA Letter
As a response to a story about genocide in its January issue, Kearn Schemm, President of the German World Alliance, wrote a letter pointing out that the article did not mention the genocidal expulsoin of the easten European Germans.
National Geographic did publish a short excerpt of the letter in its May issue. It then quotes "Yahuda Bauer" as saying that the expulsion was not genocide, leaving the reader with the impression that the 100% expulsion of a people from their hmeland could somehow be something othe than genocide.
Dr. Schemm's comment: "I am truly shocked at NGs dishonesty. There is truly a couble standard for acts against Germans, be it expulsion or internment or whatever."
Below are the complete letter, a link to NGs publication, as well as a letter by Dr. Alfred de Zayas that NG decided not to publish.
Letter by Dr. Schemm
Dear Sirs,
I write as the President of the German World Alliance, the world's largest
human rights organization for Germans, with members in the United States,
Canada, Austria, Argentina, Germany, Switzerland, Serbia and Poland.
I was shocked to note that your article "Genocide and the Science of
Proof,"(January 2006 issue) did not mention, in any way, either in text or
in your graph, the genocidal expulsion of the Eastern European Germans from
the final days of WWII into the 1950s. According to experts, 2,500,000
persons, mostly women, children and the elderly, died in the expulsion.
Many more, perhaps hundreds of thousands more, died as a result of the
"living conditions" in the bombed out Germany into which they were expelled.
The graves of these German women, children and elderly cover most of
Eastern Europe, but are most concentrated in present day Russia, Poland,
Serbia and Czech Republic. In all of these countries government-run
concentration camps for Germans existed. The Czech government, for example,
continued to use Theresienstadt as a camp for Germans.
The expulsion of the Germans was an act of genocide unparalleled in
history; with the exception of the Holocaust. Raphael Lemkin, the
Polish-Jewish scholar who coined the word, said specifically in the 1950s
that the expulsion of the Eastern European Germans was genocide, but your
article fails to mention the loss of 2,500,000 human beings who happened to
be German.
Your omission is one that occurs too often. For a magazine with the
reputation that National Geographic enjoys, it is an unforgivable one.
Please correct the record by publishing an article on the genocide against
the Germans. The German World Alliance can put you in touch with scholars
and survivors of the expulsion, who can give you ample information for an
article of appropriate length to remedy the situation.
Sincerely,
Dr. Kearn C. Schemm, Jr.
Pres. German World Alliance
Letter by Dr. de Zayas
Geneva, 12 January 2006
To the Editors
Forum
National Geographic Magazine
PO Box 98199
Washington DC 20090-8199
Re: GENOCIDE AND THE SCIENCE OF PROOF, January 2006
Dear Editors,
As a professor of international law (I hold a J.D. from Harvard and currently teach at the Geneva School of Diplomacy) and history (I hold a Ph.D. in history from the University of Göttingen and currently teach the history of genocide at the American College of Switzerland), I find the article by Lewis Simons disappointing and well below the standard of what National Geographic readers may expect.
Forensic medicine is a tool in determining certain aspects of war crimes, but the crucial test of genocide is the "intent" to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic or religious group. The gross human rights violations and crimes committed by Saddam Hussein do not add up to "intent" to commit genocide on the Kurds. The special tribunal established to try him does not satisfy the minimum criteria laid down in article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as already noted by many distinguished legal experts, including Professor Cherif Bassiouni of Chicago. I say this also as a 22-year veteran of the UN Centre for Human Rights/Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, where I served until retirement as Secretary of the Human Rights Committee and Chief of the Petitions Department.
When it comes to "intent" to destroy a group, you find strong examples of genocidal animus in the policies of the Ottoman Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha and Minister of War Enver Pasha with regard to the extermination of the non-Islamic population of the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians, the Assyrian Christians and the Greek orthodox 1915-1922.
A particularly grotesque example of "ethnic cleansing" in the 20th century, which Mr. Simons completely ignores, was the destruction of the 700-year old German settlements in Central Europe through the brutal expulsion of 15 million men women and children from their homelands in East Prussia, Pomerania, East Brandenburg, Silesia, the Bohemian Sudetenland, the German villages and towns of Moravia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania. More than two million Germans perished in this largest demographic catastrophe in the 20th century.
As abundantly shown in the available archival documents, in the public statements of President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia, President Boleslaw Bierut of Poland and Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, and in the execution of the expulsion policy - including the internment of tens of thousands of Germans and the deportation to the Soviet Union as forced labour of over one million of them as "reparations in kind", there was clear intent to kill many Germans civilians. Without a doubt, many more Germans were killed during this ethnic cleansing than during Milosevic's wars against the Bosnians and the Kosovars, many more than were killed in Saddam's campaigns against the Kurds.
Genocide, of course, is but a new word for an old phenomenon. Noone should
suggest that it is an invention of the 20th century. Surely one of the
worst examples of genocide is the Spanish, British and French colonization
of North and South America. Indeed, the entire indigenous population of the
Antilles - Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and Santo Domingo), Jamaica, Puerto
Rico -- was wiped out. The decimation of the Aztecs and Incas also qualify
as genocide. In North America the indigenous were more thoroughly
exterminated than in South America, and we recognize their traces in names
like Massachusetts, Narraganset, Cherokee, Chicago, Dakota. It is surely
not a page of glory when we reflect on the politics of "manifest destiny"
and realize that it too amounted to genocide, and that the intent to
eliminate, extirpate, displace the native Americans (whom we called "Indians") was quite brazenly articulated by many Americans from Cotton
Mather to George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt and Oliver
Wendell Holmes.
Sincerely yours,
Alfred de Zayas, J.D., Ph.D