September 24, 2006
Press Release
German Parlamentarian Erika Steinbach, President of the German Association of the 15-million community of Expellees in Germany will speak at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh on 29 September 2006. The event is hosted by the Institute of German-American Realtions (IGAR) and the Department of History of Duquesne University. Steinbach, a native of West Prussia (now Poland) will speak about the sucesses in the integration of the post world war II German refugees and expellees, including German President Horst Koehler, who was also born in Poland. Steinbach's Centre Against Ethnic Cleansing (Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen) in Berlin is hosting an exhibit in Berlin which is being visited by tens of thousands of visitors and generating much debate in both Germany and Poland.
The Berlin exhibit focuses on expulsions, ethnic cleansing and genocide in the twentieth century. Its message is that compulsory population transfers are incompatible with international law and violate the fundamental human right to the homeland. It makes reference to the Nuremberg Trials and to the recent case law of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which has found ethnic cleansing to constitute crimes against humanity and, in some cases like Srebenica, genocide.
The Berlin exhibit covers the many demographic disasters of the 20th century, from the genocide against the Armenians through the Holocaust to the horrors of Rwanda, Cambodia and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo. It also documents the expulsion in the years 1945 to 1948 of some 15 million Germans from their 700-year old homelands in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, East Brandenburg, Sudetenland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, a "transfer" that more than two million ethnic Germans did not survive.
As the first United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Dr. Jose Ayala Lasso, said to the German expellees in 1995 and again in 2005, the right to one's homeland is a fundamental human right, and innocent persons should not be held collectively guilty for the crimes of governments.
At her Duquesne University speach, Erika Steinbach will report on the main goals of the Center, which are to educate and to contribute to a culture of human rights in which the right to the homeland of every ethnic group will be internationally guaranteed. Her speech with be in German, but there will be interpretation in English.
Duquesne University Professor Steven Vardy and the Institute for German American Relations already hosted in 2000 a successful international Symposium at Duquesne. The papers were published in book form by Columbia University Press in 2003 under the title "Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe". Professor Alfred de Zayas, an American expert in the field of population transfers, welcomes the Steinbach visit in the United States as "good for German-American relations and important for academia." He is an IGAR member and serves in the Advisory Board of the Berlin Centre.His book "A Terrible Revenge. The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans" has just been published by Palgrave/Macmillan in New York.
D U Q U E S N E U N I V E R S I T Y
Department of History
and the
INSTITUTE FOR GERMAN AMERICAN RELATIONS [IGAR]