Neither Victors nor Vanquished
ZAGREB/ROME/BERLIN (Own Report) - After the failure of a claim for compensation for victims of German war crimes, compensation claims have been launched on behalf of war criminals. "Damages" and "Restitution of property" are demanded in a Europe-wide appeal by so-called expellees' organisations. In the Second World War they belonged to the camp followers of the Nazi occupiers and their allies or provided the culprits with the facilities in which mass crimes were committed. Their successors want to found a "European Union of Refugees and Expellees" at the end of March. The organisers announce that the proposed association, (which is under strong German influence) intends to register with the European Court of Human Rights in order to be able "to intervene at international level". A "Right of return" to the "EU states formerly in the Eastern Bloc" is also a demand. The campaign will come to full development at the end of March. Simultaneously, the Italian government began public attacks on Croatia. Rome is demanding money and repentance from the successor regime of former Yugoslavia. Croatia was occupied by Italian troops amongst others. The country which was attacked is being pursued by the attacker for damages because of the circumstances of their eventual defeat - under EU rules.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) recently recently refused to hear a case which would have punished a 1943 massacre by the Wehrmacht in occupied Greece.[1] Every right to the victims and their descendants was denied in favour of demands by the German Federal government. The massacre of Kalavrita, in which at least 696 people were murdered, was held to be the result of the exercise of sovereign power which did not oblige the culprit state to any compensation payments to private individuals. In this the European court has followed German legal concepts. All post war German governments, which claim to be the heirs of the Nazi Reich and the defenders of its property, have refused to pay damages for the mass crimes of their testator directly to victims. Stereotypically the German Foreign Office holds that Berlin is "immune" to such proceedings which can only be settled on a government to government basis. According to analysis of archives by Greek and German historians, Bonn and Berlin had already prepared some new dodges and wheezes to avoid liability at interstate level as well.[2]
Property Rights
The complete rejection of the victims' demands at EU level has coincided with EU-wide demands from circles representing the culprits of such crimes. It is coordinated by organisations whose founding members included heavily implicated officials of the occupation regime and its beneficiaries. On the German side, the "League of Expellees" (Bund der Vertriebenen - BdV) is accompanied by the former Italian Occupation auxiliary the "Union of Istrians". This association is devoted to the property rights of Italian citizens in formerly Italian Istria and parades with the flag of the former "Province of Istria". Both organisations enjoy massive financial support from their respective states. Already in 2005 the President of the BdV announced that she wanted to cooperate closely with the Italian sister organisation.[3] In the BdV's Berlin exhibition "Roads of Compulsion" the "Exodus of the Istrians" was given special place.[4]
Real Estate
The present campaign, called "The First International Congress of Expellees and Refugees in Europe" [5] is accompanied by increased political tensions. The participating associations want to meet in Trieste in March extremely close to the frontier, to make their demands for restitution against Croatia. They will address their principal demands collectively to the EU which, they hope, will award them heavy damages and recognise them as legitimate members of a community of victims of "genocide". According to their demands, this crime was committed against the "the expellees and peoples driven into exile" but the peoples are not named. A demand for a "Right of Return" arises because of "illegal deportations and the effects of ethnic cleansing in districts of origin". "Illegally confiscated and nationalised properties" must be returned or replaced with "the provision of equivalent properties". All of these demands are part of the standard repertoire of German "expellee" groups as well as to the fascist successor organisations of the former Axis regime under Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
To All Schools
The material demands are accompanied by an historical Diktat which would fix the memorialisation of the "expellees" by law under a Europe-wide central organisation. Accordingly "A European Directive" must institute "an annual memorial day to recall the 18 million refugees and expellees of the European continent during the twentieth century". The governments of all EU member states would be under a duty to enshrine this in their national laws. But that is not all. "The spreading of knowledge of the flight from and expulsions caused by the communist regimes in the former eastern bloc and by Turkey" must be made clear by "EU instructions to all schools". The historical core of the "EU instructions" is a demonstrable lie. None of the population movements were caused by the post war regimes in liberated Europe but by the victorious allied powers.[6]
Slavic
The present prime mover of this campaign, which is aimed at the complete destruction of the European post-war order, is the Italian centre-left government to which several former communists belong. Taking the opportunity of the sixtieth anniversary of the Peace Agreement of Paris (10 February 1947), which obliged Italy to pay compensation to attacked and occupied Yugoslavia, the Italian President started a campaign of vicious diatribes against the Yugoslavian victims on account of their "bloodthirsty rage".[7] State President Giorgio Napolitano (who previously served in the mid-Italy Central Committee of the Communist Party) said that they had conducted "ethnic cleansing" which was based on a "Slav plan". The provocative statements of the Italian head of state concern illegalities and acts of revenge by the Yugoslavian partisans, which went on in one form or another on all fronts of the Nazi defeat. The Croatian President Mesic countered the extreme attacks from Rome, which are enthusiastically supported by the successor organisations of Italian fascism, with the accusation that the Italian state leadership was following "a policy of open racism, historical revisionism and revanchism".
Praise
An EU spokeswoman for the Croatian President said that this portrayal of Croatia was "inappropriate" without going into details of the Italian attacks. The official EU position will permit conclusions to be drawn concerning the expected reverberations in Brussels to the meeting of the "expellees" in Trieste. The German press has taken the conflict as an opportunity to make a recommendation for all Europe. Under the title "In praise of Revisionism" [8] the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote "62 years after the end of the war (...) it is high time to alter that picture of history, which divides Europe into victors and vanquished".
[1] Pressemitteilung: Zum Urteil des EuGH vom 15. Februar 2007. Deutschland wird Immunität für Nazi-Verbrechen gewährt; Hamburg 15.02.2007
[2] Vgl. u. a. Hagen Fleischer: Das griechische Memorandum zur "Washington Conference on Holocaust-era assets"
[3] see also Pincer Movement
[4] Unione degli Istriani: Erzwungene Wege: l'esedo istriano a Berlino. No.10, Luglio-Agusto 2006
[5] Unione degli Istriani. Libera Provinvcia dell'Istria in Esilo: 1. Internationaler Kongress der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge in Europa
[6] see also Wiedergutmachung für "Völkermord an Deutschen", Großer Irrtum, Disputing Yalta and Hitler, Stalin, Churchill Roosevelt
[7] Mesic weist EU-Kritik zurück. Euro News, 18.02.2007
[8] Karl-Peter Schwarz: Ein Lob dem Revisionismus; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 16.02.2007
