Chairman of Silesian expellees wants restitution
The Poles are starting to get seriously worried that their accession to the EU will cause their country to be re-colonised by Germans. They are concerned that Germans will call for property to be restituted which was seized from them in 1945. The Chairman of the Silesian Association (Landsmannschaft), Rudi Pawelka, has created for the purpose of property restitution a ,,Prussian Claims Society"(Preußische Treuhand GmbH) whose purpose is to collect and administer legal suits for individual property claims in territories which today belong to Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia (to which the former East Prussia currently belongs).
The Society is distributing claim forms for people to give details about their property in ,,East Germany"(i.e. Poland, etc.), and shares are being sold in it to raise the funds for the claims. The Society wants to organise exemplary court cases in the countries concerned. If there is no ,,politically acceptable solution"then the Society says it will pursue the matter in the courts up to the European Court of Justice. The Society also intends to bring class actions in the United States.
The President of the Expellees Association (Bund der Vertriebenen), Erika Steinbach, has said that the Society has nothing to do with her organisation, even though the Silesian Landsmannschaft, which Pawelka heads, is part of Steinbach's organisation. The deputy president of the Bund der Vertriebenen is also Pawelka's deputy on the board of the new Society. The Society is based in the Düsseldorf offices of the Landsmannschaft for East Prussia, which also supports the initiative. Pawelka has said that his Society has not yet collected half of the 1 million Euro it needs to start up. The Society is to deal with ,,soft"cases first, i.e. those dealing with people who emigrated from the countries in question in recent decades. Only later will it move onto the immediate post-war expropriations.
Expellees are also addressing their claims to the federal government in Germany, and a private Internet site is encouraging people to write to the Federal Finance Ministry before Poland joins the EU. When it does, cases will be justiciable before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. The spokesman of the Polish Foreign Ministry, Boguslaw Majewski, has spoken of ,,worrying signals"as Germany is increasingly being presented as a victim of the war. He said that Poland's bill for the Second World War was never paid, and that now was not the time to start opening new claims.