The new museum in Berlin is called the Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation, according to the report, and it documents up to 14 million ethnic Germans who fled or were expelled from “Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Baltic states, Romania, Slovakia and the former Yugoslavia between 1944 and 1950.”
This is a largely unknown story and one that has been controversial because some have been concerned that it shows Germans as victims and somehow balances the atrocities of the Holocaust.
However, the larger question it raises is about the politics of telling the refugee experience. Why are some refugees given more attention than others? Why is some ethnic cleansing and genocide highlighted, while the genocide of others, such as Armenians, or expulsion of ethnic Greeks by modern Turkey, considered “controversial”? How come ISIS members who travelled from wealthy countries in Europe to genocide Yazidis in 2014 are portrayed as victims in European documentaries and by Western media that demand more “rights” for the ISIS members than for the victims?
Unfortunately, some of the countries that carried out genocide continue to either deny it, or have only recently acknowledged it. Germany recently recognized the genocide of Herero and Nama people in Namibia, which took place more than 100 years ago, and has offered $1 billion in compensation, which is pennies in international trade. Most of the genocide carried out by European colonial powers is only barely recognized today. For instance the Canadian genocide against indigenous people continues to be revealed as schools have found mass graves at schools where kidnapped indigenous children were held.
ONE OF THE major population transfers in European history is now being revealed in Berlin. According to the report, some 600,000 Germans died being expelled from various countries after World War II. “Those who fled included people who had settled in Nazi-occupied territories as well as ethnic Germans who had lived for centuries as minorities,” the report notes.
Ostensibly, the expulsion of Germans was done because Nazi Germany had exploited the existence of German minorities in neighboring lands to create reasons for invasions and occupation. Because Germany carried out the Holocaust, the focus on suffering of the German minorities was largely seen as a far-right issue, that might “balance” the Shoah if it was revealed.
Similarly, Soviet crimes, which included the mass murder of millions, transferring entire nations, ethnic cleansing and Gulags, were seen as controversial “double genocide” reactionary discussions, because they asserted that the Soviet Union was as bad as Nazi Germany. For those groups that collaborated with the Nazis, the focus on Soviet crimes was a way of excusing collaboration.
These political questions about not wanting to commemorate victims for fear it would feed political discourses that minimize the Holocaust – or emphasize one victim over another or one totalitarian system over another – left commemoration of Germans forced to flee to the dustbin of history. The new museum's director Gundula Bavendamm was quoted by AFP as saying "we are not the only country that needed quite some time to face up to painful and difficult chapters of its own history.”
The report says the museum places the German suffering in the context of “Hitler's expansionist, genocidal policies.” The museum notably includes exhibits on the plight of other refugees from Vietnam, Myanmar, Lebanon and India after the 1947 partition. “A folding bicycle used by a Syrian asylum seeker crossing from Russia into Norway in the spring of 2016 resonates particularly in Germany, where more than 1.2 million people arrived at the height of that refugee influx.”
The refugee experience is universal. That is illustrated in the new museum by keys to a house in Koenigsberg, which is now called Kaliningrad. Palestinians often also show off keys to houses in old towns and villages that existed prior to 1948. The exhibit at the museum also has keys to a house in Aleppo, to showcase the Syrian refugee experience.
This museum is important because it is important to contextualize the history and story of refugees around the world. History has often focused on some refugees and not others. For instance, while Palestinian refugees receive a great deal of attention, a similar number of Jews were forced to flee or were expelled and persecuted in countries across the Middle East, from Iraq to Yemen. Those countries today often continue the genocidal policies against Jews by denying the Jewish history of their landscapes. For instance, in Iraq they don’t discuss the once massive Jewish community that lived in places like Baghdad. They have erased their Jewish history, much as ISIS sought to erase the Christian and Yazidi history, much as Saddam Hussein’s regime tried to exterminate Kurds.
In Yemen, the Iranian-backed Houthis use anti-Jewish views in their slogan, calling to “curse the Jews” and for “death to Israel.” Despite the hatred and Nazi-like slogan of the Houthis, their leader has received space for an op-ed in The Washington Post, illustrating how Western media celebrates some antisemitism while opposing other types of antisemitism. It was unclear why the Washington Post didn’t include the Houthi “curse the Jews” slogan in the op-ed to showcase the kind of hatred they were hosting. The Houthis have persecuted the last Jews of Yemen.
In 1881, a map of Istanbul placed online shows the diversity of the city. Large number of Greeks, Armenians and Bulgarians filled the homes and streets of the city. One in twenty members of the population were Jewish. Not so today. The genocide of Armenians, expulsion of Greeks and harassment of Jews has meant that almost none of these historic peoples exist in Turkey today. Last week, a far-right pro-government extremist stormed an office of an opposition party and murdered a 20-year old Kurdish woman named Deniz Poyraz. His hatred for Kurds was celebrated by some far-right Turks. It is a hatred that has direct commonalities with Nazism. Even today, Turkey bombs refugee camps for Kurds in northern Iraq and forces minorities to flee.
These continued attacks on refugees and minorities illustrate the importance of telling the story of these groups that Germany’s new museum has embarked on, but it also illustrates how these stories have become entangled with modern and historic politics and narratives. Even today in Turkey the Armenian genocide is denied. It is only by a twist of history that the Holocaust is widely recognized. Had Germany won the war in 1945, the Shoah would be treated like the stories of Armenians and Kurds and others in Turkey.