World War II's latest 'victims'

In the winter of 1945, 5-year-old Friedrich Vetter and his family were forced out of their home in what is now Poland and resettled in western Germany. The anguish of that upheaval has never left him.

"Of course, it's difficult to talk about it," says Mr. Vetter, who is now a geographer. "I cry almost every time."

He is one of 15 million ethnic Germans who were pushed out of their homes in Eastern Europe by the Polish and Czech governments as retribution for Nazi aggression.

Now, the expellees want a memorial to their sufferings. But the idea has poured salt on wounds still open more than 50 years later - even as Poland and the Czech Republic prepare to join Germany as members of the European Union.

The issue was expected to intrude on EU entry-preparation talks Monday between Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

Critics worry that the sufferings of countries victimized by the Nazis will be overlooked.

"No sympathy with the Germans!" was a typical headline in Polish newspapers recently. Last week, the head of the German League of Expellees was depicted in an SS uniform on a Polish magazine cover.

The League's proposal comes as Germans are starting to talk more openly about the plight of German civilians during and after the war. For decades, such discussion was taboo, considered by many as an echo of right-wing nationalism.

But now the concept of Germans as victims is being broached even by the left. In his 2001 novel "Crab Walk," Nobel-prize winner and leftist Günter Grass described the sinking of a Nazi vessel that was rescuing German war refugees from the advancing Soviet Army. There have also been recent documentaries on the victims of allied bombings in Dresden and Hamburg.

Josef Joffe, editor-in-chief of the German weekly Die Zeit, calls Grass's book a "tipping point" that occurred after decades of pent-up stories never told: "You take something and make it vivid, and that captures the imagination more than tomes and tomes of historical writing on what happened and its consequences."

He also attributes the new outlook to another phenomenon. "Call it post-modernity," he says. "Everybody wants to get recognition now, every group. The quest for victimhood has become an almost universal quest throughout the Western world."

"It's OK to discuss their own position as victims - but they were victims of their own war," says Tadeusz Cegielski, a Warsaw University professor who signed his name to a petition of international academics, journalists and artists against the center in July. "They were victims of the operation they started, and that's the problem."

The League of German Expellees, which represents two million German expellees and their descendants, has also drawn fire - from Poles, Czechs, and even Grass - for proposing to build the center in Berlin, once the capital of the Third Reich. The group has also been criticized for focusing on Germans only, rather than examining expulsions in a broad European context.

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