Jason Cowley (“Forgotten victims”, April 5) writes movingly about the plight of Germans at the end of World War II, the ill-treatment meted out to them and the calls for “normalisation”, including Edmund Stoiber’s obscene demand for an apology to the Czechs. Please note that Stoiber’s stomping ground is Bavaria, the cradle of Nazism.
According to Cowley, the “great sufferings” were “inflicted on civilians whose only crime was their nationality”. Had Adolf Hitler’s madness not swept Germany, the events Cowley writes about would not have happened.
There is not one word in the article of Hitler and the Nazis’ atrocities against Jews in Germany (their crime: their religion), against others in Eastern Europe including the Czechs (their crime: their race) or against Russians, the “sub-humans” according to the Nazis (their crime: their race).
Not a word about the slave labour system to which these “sub-humans” were subjected in Germany and how women slave labourers were systematically raped by Germans in whose employ they were.
How could the Germans not have expected retribution after the war that was not based on race and nationality?
I take issue with Cowley’s assertion that the Germans have learned from their past. It seems they would simply like to erase those years, and that they now want to accept the role of victim.
Germany was treated far better after the war than any plan that the Nazis had for the countries that were subjected to their vicious and terrible rule.
I wonder if the Germans have ever accepted their whole-hearted endorsement of Nazism and the suffering they inflicted on others, or whether they are just starting to go public now about how they have felt all along. When one reads about William Shirer’s travels in Germany after its defeat at the end of World War II, one shares his vivid realisation after talking to many Germans that the Germans were sorry only about one thing that they had lost the war and were suffering for it. Read his End of a Berlin Diary (1947) to get the feel of Germany then.
Any talk of German victims must be preceded by much talk of Hitler, Nazism and the suffering they inflicted on others “whose only crime was their nationality” and, in the case of German Jews, their religion. JK Hansen, Belville