Chancellor Merkel Wants Center to Commemorate Deportees

German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed support Monday for a permanent center documenting the plight of Germans forced from their homes after World War II and other victims of expulsions, adding she hoped for help from European neighbors.

The chancellor was attending an anniversary gathering in Berlin entitled "60 Years of Deportation -- 60 Years of Paths to Reconciliation."

Merkel declined to comment on recent criticism from Germany's eastern European neighbors, where many of the German expellees lived before Hitler rose to power. She insisted, howevver, that the underlying cause of the suffering of World War II -- Germany's Nazi regime -- could not be forgotten.

She said, however, that an appropriate place in Berlin should be found for the proposed "Center Against Expulsions."

"(The center) should send the signal that every form of expulsion and ethnic cleansing in Europe and the world should be banned," Merkel said at the ceremony held by her Christian Democrats and their sister party, the Bavaria-only Christian Social Union in Berlin.

"…Germans never would have been expelled after 1945"

"Without the Nazis and the immeasurable crimes, suffering and destruction that they brought about, the Germans never would have been expelled after 1945," Merkel said.

Plans to build the Berlin-based center to commemorate an estimated 12.5 million ethnic Germans who were expelled from or fled Poland, then-Czechoslovakia and elsewhere when the Third Reich collapsed have been bitterly disputed.

Poland's conservative government and many Poles are against the center, as they believe it aims to portray Germans as victims of a war they started. The Polish government has claimed that Germany is trying to rewrite history.

Tensions between neighboring Germany and Poland recently prompted Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kacynski to threaten special minority protections for ethnic Germans still living in Poland.

Despite continuing critcism from Warsaw, however, German President Horst Köhler recently told the German Association of Deportees that the world must be assured that Germans do not want to rewrite history.

"There is no doubt that the responsibility for the expulsions lies with the criminal Nazi regime and World War II, which was started by Germany," he said.

"Ongoing phenomenon"

German Chancellor Merkel has also said that the center would not be limited to German deportees following World War II, commenting that there would be a focus on European expellees throughout the last century.

She pointed to the ethnic cleansing that occurred not long ago in the former Yugoslavia and the current crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of people have been expelled from their homeland, as evidence of the "ongoing phenomenon" of expulsion.