25.05.2005 23:06

Quel horreur!
Together with Wo I have been trying to make such a list some weeks ago on the occasion of the memorial day for the Armenian genocide.

Interesting is nr. 9. I wouldn't have expected the expulsion of Germans from Eastern European countries to appear on this list.
I don't want to defend any of these "Landsmannschaften" and "Vertriebenenverbaende" (associations of those people and their descendants) here in Germany, most of them are far right wing, but I guess almost nobody except for them and some historians would place this event on such a list, this clearly shows a bias on our view on the history of WW II.
There is something else. Germans are responsible for the holocaust. Even nowadays post war born Germans still are Germans and as such they carry a responsability for what their ancestors did. Being German, you are sometimes blamed for the atrocities even though you personally didn't do anything. I mean, Germans are confronted by a kind of suspicion which they have to fight all the time. This German=Nazi topos just survives and comes up from time to time. But you would never think of a Russian or any other former Soviet Union citizen of being responsible of the millions that were killed in the Gulag. Why not? In the perception of the people there seem to be genocides with culprits and such without or with one person, like Stalin, who takes it all. I guess the reason is, that in the case of Germany, it were the Germans who killed the others, the Jews. (These two groups are then taken to be disjoint.) But in the other case, it were the Soviets who killed the Soviets. As (non-jewish) citizen it was a much more quiet life in Nazi Germany than in the Soviet Union, since not being Jew and keeping quiet, they would let you live (except of course for dead in the battlefield) but with a Regime who kills more randomly like for instance the Khmer Rouge, your life is permanently in danger.