Putting History in the Right Place

Everyone agrees that it’s a good idea. Germans and Poles alike feel it’s important to document the destiny of millions who lost land, property and businesses in eastern Europe at the end of World War II.

But a dispute has surfaced on where to do so. Germany’s "Bund der Vertriebenen" (BDV) – or coalition of the displaced – has for years promoted the idea for such a museum. It is promoting Berlin as the ideal location.

Markus Meckel, who heads the German-Polish parliamentary group in the Bundestag, doesn’t share this opinion. The politician has recommended the Polish city of Wroclaw, much to the BDV’s dismay.

The capital of Silesia, formerly known as Breslau, was the largest city affected by displacement policies.

Repatriation to promote uniformity

In the closing months of World War II, the Germans were driven out of all of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Red Army. Poland was to be restored, but its borders were changed radically.

All of its pre-war eastern territories beyond the San River were annexed to the Soviet Union, while in the west and north, lands formerly belonging to Germany (Silesia, Pomerania, Danzig and part of East Prussia) became Polish.

Poland and the Soviet Union - like many other countries at the time - felt that the problem of national minorities was a primary cause of the war. In order to avoid future international conflict, they decided that these minorities should be moved, or "repatriated", in order to make lands within new boundaries ethnically homogeneous.

None of Germany's business

In the past years, the Polish stance towards its role in displacing millions of ethnic minorities has seen an about-turn. For decades, the topic was taboo.

Since the mid-1990s, however, a public debate on Poland’s historical guilt and responsibility towards displaced persons has developed. Journalists and historians have spewed out reports, television documentaries, academic studies and documentations on the issue.

Many Poles were initially displeased with Social Democrat Meckel’s suggestion. They felt Germany was sticking its nose into a domestic issue.

A "sign of renewal"

But now, more and more people are in favor of Wroclaw becoming home to a documentation center.

In an open letter to German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller, two leading Polish journalists called for Wroclaw.

"It would be neither a museum of German suffering, which converts perpetrators into victims, nor would it be a Polish martyr museum," wrote Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of Poland’s largest daily Gazeta Wyborcza, and commentator Adam Krzeminski.

"Rather it would be a museum of a catastrophe and a sign of renewal within our common Europe," they said in the letter published in the newspaper earlier this week.

After all, Germans were not the only group to be expelled from Poland. People of Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian descent were also "evacuated"' to the Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belorussia.