COMMENT: For decades, the Federal Republic of Germany has advanced an ostpolitik that is a continuation of Third Reich policy toward what it called “the Eastern Territories.” Advancing German claims to historical, economic and [consequent] political hegemony over much of the territory to the East, the prestigious German periodical Der Spiegel makes the case for a “Nuremberg II” war crimes investigation to redress “injustices” allegedly perpetrated against the German minorities in those lands.
Arguing this viewpoint places that estimable publication in the same camp as the SS-linked and inspired vertriebene groups and escalates the Pan-German viewpoint at a time when Germany in attempting to impose its political will on a Europe it has already subjugated economically.
In the last paragraph of the article that follows is a reference to the Fifth Column movements that Germany used to destabilize its neighbors in the run-up to war and occupation. (A good history of this is presented in The New Germany and the Old Nazis by T.H. Tetens, available for download for free on this website.)
NB: The excellent german-foreign-policy.com feeds at the bottom of the front page of the Spitfire website.
“Nuremberg II”; german-foreign-policy.com; 3/8/2011.
EXCERPT: . . . The journal [Der Spiegel] takes a conspicuous position in an article dealing with the prospect of prosecuting so-called crimes of expulsion of Germans in the aftermath of World War II. According to this article, the “expulsions” of Germans from East European countries in the immediate aftermath of the war, are acts that are “not at all so different” from the crimes that have been prosecuted in The Hague before the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia since the 1990s. The fact that these acts were not handled by an international court subsequent to the Nuremberg Trials that prosecuted the main Nazi war criminals has brought great displeasure to the West German population. It is therefore “understandable” that “many post-war Germans,” especially among the resettled, have characterized the Nuremberg Trial verdicts “victors’ justice” that “had not alleviated historical injustice but rather compounded it”.[6]
As Der Spiegel explains, those “crimes of expulsion” could still be prosecuted today citing the precedence of Estonia. In 1994 the possibility of prosecuting certain “crimes against humanity” were written into Estonian penal law, even though the alleged crime had occurred in the distant past. Under this law, two men were convicted, “who in 1949 had participated in deporting civilians to Soviet labor camps.” The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has subsequently ruled these and other similar verdicts to be legally binding, in spite of their being in violation of the prohibition on ex post facto laws. It would “be difficult to deny” that also “the expulsion of Germans” under current standards are clearly “crimes against humanity”. In light of the confirmation of the Estonian convictions by the European Court of Human Rights, “the genie of Nuremberg” is today, no longer to “be kept in the bottle.” “What Estonia can do, others can do too.”[7]
Camouflaged as suggestive questions, Der Spiegel concludes with the suggestion that an international tribunal should be established to prosecute those, who had committed the so-called crimes of expulsion against Germans — a “Nuremberg II”. This sort of tribunal could be based on “an internationally binding treaty with the former nations of expulsion” [8] — meaning the countries of East and Southeast Europe. In the aftermath of World War II, they, on the legal basis of the Potsdam Agreements, had resettled German-speaking minorities — who had been used as “fifth columns” by the Nazis to destabilize those countries — to what became West Germany. The journal’s case could be hinged on the fact that since 1949, every West German government has characterized this resettlement of Germans an injustice, which, in principle, should be prosecuted. Just last week, the German Bundestag voted in favor of declaring August 5, an annual commemoration day for the “injustice of expulsion”. Only a few years ago, this would have been considered just as unthinkable, as the creation of a tribunal for the “expelling countries” today.
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