The following editorial was taken from the December 2007 Parish Notes, a monthly newsletter published by J. D. Lowe of Fredericksburg, Texas. Jim has a solid grasp of history and German culture, and an admirable writing style.
by Jim Lowe
In a recent letter, a new reader asked how Germans were treated in the Saar, Rheinland, Sudentenland, and in pre-1938 Austria.
Responding, in reverse order: Austria has been populated (almost) exclusively by Germans since 1919. Before that, the Austro-Hungarian Empire included other peoples – Slovaks, Slovenes, Poles, etc. But with the empire’s partition by the victors of the first World War, Austria proper was reduced to an (almost) exclusively German population. How the people were treated depended on their (indigenous) government of the moment. The 1938 Anschluss simply united the state with other German states to the north and west. (Some years ago, I walked across a bridge from Bavaria to Austria, and can attest to folks on both sides of the stream being essentially the same people. The border was ethnically artificial, going back to Habsburg-Hohenzollern politics.)
The Sudetenland, northwest area of primarily old Austria’s northernmost province of Bohemia, was populated by Germans, but was erroneously incorporated into a new Czecho-Slovak state by the WWI victors at Versailles. Thus its population suffered under the new polyglot state’s predominantly non-German government. After the Munich Agreement among England, France, Italy and Germany in 1938, the Sudentenland’s reassignment to Germany was greeted with euphoria among the indigenous population. Far more germane to the Sudentenland issue is how its original population is presently “treated.” To his credit, erstwhile Czech president Vaclav Havel is the only post-Communist leader who has at least apologized for the genocide that occurred in the post-1944 Sudetenland. Further details may be had from the Verband der Sudentendeutschen von New York und Umgebung. (For contact info, write to the Captive Nations Committee at P.O. Box 540, Gracie Station, NewYork NY 10028.)
Finally, the Rheinland and Saar were occupied by French and French colonial troops after 1918, and the population suffered the indignities and sometimes severe oppression and criminality of that occupation. The Saar plebiscite and the unilateral German reclamation of the Rheinland in the mid-1930s alleviated post-war conditions in those areas.
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Broad knowledge of history is important. But to the question, “How were Germans treated?” a description of post-1918 conditions pales in the face of that people’s holocaustian fate after 1944. The ordeal of Germany, especially East and West Prussia, Pomerania, the Sudetenland, Silesia, Gottschee, Donauschwaben, and others - was and remains of nearly apocalyptic proportions. As baptized by the firebombing of such cultural centers as Dresden, it was The Holocaust of the twentieth century. No greater crime was committed between peacetime England and France’s sudden war declaration of 1939 and the 1940’s incineration of German cities and towns, the savage rape and butchery of its civilians in 1945, the criminal decimation of its postwar POWs, and the genocide committed against the East Germans. Surely, many different peoples suffered during the war, with one non-German group even promoting itself as a primary victim – a blatant obscenity in light of the horrific atomic bombings suffered by the Japanese and the twentieth-century passion of the German people.
That people suffered far greater than any other, and it continues to suffer – many in exile, others under occupation-dictated law, media and education manipulation in new-world-order Europe. There is still no peace treaty with Germany, and still no removal of the barriers that withhold from East Germans their right to their homeland. Again, details on this volatile contemporary topic may be had from the Captive Nations Committee. (That organization, formed as a result of US Public Law 86-90 passed by Congress and signed by the President in 1959, has worked for decades for the liberation of Communist-enslaved countries, and just as fervently for the self-determination of peoples driven from their homelands by Stalin and his puppets, peoples such as the Crimean Tatars, the Cossacks, and the 17 million East Germans cited above whose homes, farms, schools, churches, cities and industries remain in the hands of “post”-Communist regimes 63 years after they were occupied by the allegedly defunct Stalinist empire.)
The reader whose letter prompted this column concludes, “I know the Allied side. I would like to know the German side.” In the pursuit of justice, “sides” are subordinate to truth. Much of the latter has been screened and altered, by Hollywood, other media, and even governments. A man must think critically, unimpeded by such lowest-common-denominator propaganda vehicles as television. He who, after weighing facts for himself, gainsays a biased writing of history, is on the path toward truth.
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