Germany re-opens the Sudeten German question
As the Czech Republic goes to the polls on 14th and 15th June, the country faces the question of its EU membership with increasing unease. In May, the European Parliament adopted a resolution demanding that the Benes decrees be examined for their compatibility with EU law. At the same time, the Chairman of the EP, Pat Cox, has set up a three-man commission to examine the question. With these two events, the EU has made the issue of the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945 into a European issue, connecting it organically with the Czech admission to the EU. This is precisely the outcome the Czechs wanted to avoid, preferring to keep the issue bilateral between the Czech Republic and Germany, Austria and Hungary.
Prior to this, in an almost incredible renversement des alliances the German Interior Minister paid a visit to the congress of the Sudeten Germans Association on 18th May. For decades reviled as a bunch of Nazi irredentists, the Sudeten Germans are now suddenly in vogue with the New World Order, as it prepares to gobble up the Czech Republic. The demand, pushed largely by German and Austrian politicians, and supported by Members of the European Parliament (including by the British Conservative Party MEPs, who have collaborated in the German-Austrian carve-up), that the Benes decrees be rescinded if the Czech Republic is to join the EU, can only have as a consequence that this small country will be swamped with claims for property restitution by the descendants of the 3-million Germans expelled after the war.
Now even an old leftie like Otto Schily - who is the former lawyer of Horst Mahler, the founder of the Baader-Meinhof gang - has visited the Sudeten Germans' Congress to lend his and the German government's support to their long-standing demand that the decrees be abrogated. Schily told the Sudeten Germans that it was ,,unjust"to drive out whole populations: this is the one thing the Sudeten Germans have been going on about for years. While the expulsion may indeed have caused injustice, it is of course also the Sudeten Germans' desire, once the Benes decrees are rescinded, to reclaim the property that was taken from their ancestors sixty years ago. This could well give rise to fresh injustice. The president of the Bavarian parliament, Johann Böhm, has said that there is much land which ,,used to be German and which now belongs to the Czech state".
The Sudeten German Congress was also addressed by the Christian Democrat candidate for Chancellor, the Bavarian prime minister Edmund Stoiber. Stoiber used his speech to pay homage to the 90 year-old Siegfried Zogelmann, a campaigner for the rights of Sudeten Germans who, having joined the Nazi party as a Czechoslovak citizen in 1938, worked in the office of the Nazi Governor of the ,,Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia"Reinhard Heydrich. Stoiber naturally promised to make the Sudeten question a European issue.
There is now therefore an organic link between EU policy towards the Czech republic, and German policy towards that country. The Federal Chairman of the Sudeten German Association, Bernd Posselt, a MEP, was appointed on 7th February to the post of Vice-Chairman of the joint committee of the European Parliament and the Czech Parliament: the purpose of this committee is to oversee the process of Czech admission to the EU. Posselt, who became a CDU MEP in 1994, has for years been active in the radically euro-fanatical association, Pan Europa. In 1998, he was appointed the president of Pan-Europa Union Deutschland. One of the goals of that association is to promote group rights for ethnic minorities in states on Germany's borders, including those of the ,,Sudeten Germans": Posselt also works on minority languages in the EP. In 1994, he called for the establishment over the Sudetenland of ,,a supranational legal order based on the traditions of the Holy Roman Empire."He said that such a supranational order could ,,end disputes about areas of national sovereignty and state borders"- even though there is not supposed to be any border dispute between Germany and the Czech Republic. It has always been one of Posselt's main policy goals to link the abrogation of the Benes decrees to the admission of the Czech republic to the EU.
European Foundation Intelligence Digest Issue No. 144 June 2002