Date of Report 12 September 2003
Translated 12 September 2003

Translators Note:
The Role of the German Federal President

In case anyone should think President Rau's speech to be an expression of personal opinion or of slight political importance, the President's own website http://eng.bundespraesident.de gives the following information about the functions of his office

"REPRESENTING & INTEGRATING"

The President embodies the state every time he appears in public, every time he participates in an event, assumes a patronage, makes a speech, conveys congratulations, takes part in a tour or a wide range of ther actvities. He thus sets an example of recognition, goodwill or particular support. Nonetheless there is a limit to what events the president can take part in. They have to be of national relevance and particular significance".

So his speech to the "Bund der Vertriebenen" is:

1. An expression of the will of the German State and not his private opinion

2. Signifies the "goodwill and particular support" of the state for the
irridentist claims of the Bund and similar organisations and

3. has "national relevance and particular significance" .

The speech to the Bund appears on the German section of the website but not in English translation (18 September)

Introduction by Rodney Atkinson: Having used the European Union (and the naïve and historically ignorant political classes in Britain and America) to re-write much of the Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War, the German political class now seeks – in remarkably aggressive terms which reflects the confidence of their growing power – to re-write the Potsdam Treaty which ended the second World war. President Rau’s speech to the annual conference of the "Association of German Expellees" (many of whose founders were intimately associated with the worst excesses of Nazi domination in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the War) is the latest in a series of German Ministers to associate themselves with groups which for much of the post war period were regarded as extremists.

In 1999 I translated a 1998 motion passed by the then coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats in the German Parliament (click here for Der Drang Nach Osten). That motion was a clear warning to the rest of Europe and the USA that German politicians were going to use the carefully constructed logic of the European Union (European "citizenship", free movement of people and capital, the withering of national borders etc etc) to re-occupy with both German business and German families those parts of Eastern Europe from which Germans had been expelled after the last war. Since it was Germany’s both present and wartime fascist allies Bosnians, Albanians and Croatians who have been responsible for the some of the most despicable ethnic cleansing in Europe, even during the 1990s, it is rank hypocrisy for the German political class to object to the expulsion of Nazi collaborators after the war. With the declaration of 5 wars since the 1860s and bearing unambiguous responsibility for the deaths of over 50 million people in two world wars, the loss of their – usually disputed – "homelands" in eastern Europe is a not unreasonable price to pay.

President Rau’s speech, reported in part below, is just the latest example of the new aggression in German foreign policy and in German politicians use of the German dominated Euro-State they have assiduously created.

BERLIN (own report) In a public speech the German head of state has attacked the victorious powers of the Second World War and accused them of "dreadful wrong". The supposed wrong was inflicted on those Germans who were "expelled" from central and eastern Europe. The accusations are directed against fundamental parts of the Potsdam Treaty . To this day, the validity of the borders between Germany and it neighbours rests on these agreements.

The German Federal President, Johannes Rau (Social Democrat Party) accuses Great Britain and France because they "shook hands with Hitler on the Munich agreement". Furthermore the USA and USSR had charges to answer. As "participants in the conferences of Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam" they could not plead innocence to the consequences of a policy "which deprived German people of rights". He was speaking of supposed Germans who were, in reality, citizens of non-German states and were implicated in the Nazi occupation of their homelands.

THE GUILT...

This attack by the German head of state is also directed against those persecuted by the Nazis, who were forced to flee Germany. Because, in exile, they reflected how the provocations of German "Minority Policy" might be ended, Rau characterised these as "those who, already in exile for years, planned the expulsion" (of German minorities). According to Rau, the expelled minorities deserve the "status of suffering" accorded to persecuted Jews.

...OF OTHERS...

The high point of this speech by the highest representative of the German state is a relativised comparison in which the crimes of Hitler's Germany are placed on the same level with the "wrong" perpetrated by the anti-Hitler coalition. Word for word, it goes "Hitler's criminal policy does not excuse anyone who responded to dreadful wrong with dreadful wrong".

..MAKES YOU FREE

Rau's arguments have adopted the basic principle of political discourse which was developed after the war in the milieu of German revisionism and the extreme right. Its main element is the blurring of historical causes and the resulting consequences which affected the aggressor. These effects are described as morally abhorrent and therefore solved outside the context of their political origin. The purpose is the waste disposal of the past crimes of German power politics, which requires a thoroughly sanitised past for its present plans.

In spite of the significance of the attack on parts of international law, the actions of the German head of state have provoked no controversial echoes in the German public and media.

This report is fully documented in the announcement "A dreadful Wrong", (Furchtbares Unrecht) on german-foreign-policy.com