It's educational how Germany's East / West division reverberates in this speech with the special relation to the USSR. The apologetic tone, appeasement, justification.
One can only hope that this would no longer be necessary nowadays.
One can only hope that this would no longer be necessary nowadays.
One can only hope that apologies like these will never again be necessary.
Had Nazi Germany prevailed, it is estimated about 30 million of all Slavs in Eastern Europe would have been cleansed, as per the stated goals of Generalplan Ost [1]. Getting rid of "undesirables" and "surplus population" on one of the widest scales mankind had ever seen was one of the main goals of Nazi expansion. They started to carry out this plan, but thankfully losing the war put a stop to that.
On the other hand, the USSR did prevail, and made East Germany into a puppet state. We can see the results without speculation. Indeed this resulted in repression and suppression and execution of political dissidents, let's not mince words here. But there are still Germans alive, aren't there? Had Nazi Germany prevailed, there would be few, if any, Slavs -- Russians, Poles or whatever -- alive today.
The two cases aren't even remotely comparable.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...
In particular, postwar Poland basically moved west: the Soviet Union kept the 77.6 thousand square miles of Polish territory it had captured when both Germany and Russia partitioned it in 1939, while Poland was given 48.1 thousand miles of German territory. The Soviet-backed Polish government cleansed the formerly-German territories of ethnic Germans.
Given the far worse behaviour of Germany during the war (I believe most Germans survived the ethnic cleansing committed by Poland, while the goal of Nazi Germany was extermination of the Poles), it can be a bit difficult to care about the suffering of Germans. But consider that IIRC roughly two million Germans died in the expulsions from Poland and other countries, and no doubt at least a few of those were innocent women and children (as, of course, were many of Nazi Germany's victims). Two wrongs do not make a right, and mass murder of innocent civilians is always wrong.
Fully agreed. It's hard to see the two events as similar, though. The scale (and intent) alone is mind-boggingly different. The Germans intended to wipe out Slavs (and other undesirables), and you couldn't opt out of this by swallowing the party line or swearing allegiance to Germany (just as you couldn't opt out of being a Jew -- Nazis didn't care about your religious beliefs, if any; they considered Jewishness a "race" to be exterminated). At best you could hope for their bullshit racial policies to deem you "Germanic", if you looked white enough and weren't Jewish.
Compare this with Germans under the Soviet sphere of influence. Puppets, maybe, but alive as long as they cooperated with the ruling ideology. There was no plan to ethnically cleanse them to make room for Soviet citizens in German land.
The USSR declared Germans in the annexed territories illegal residents. Going by Wikipedia, in 1947/48, officially, 102,125 Germans got shipped from East Prussia to the Soviet Zone, though only 99,481 arrived there (one reason for this was that food wasn't always provided on a journey that took 4-7 days by train). The GDR attributed this discrepancy to a 'calculation error'.
There's also the issue of German orphans that were left behind (which are known as 'Wolskinder'). The lucky ones got adopted (eg by Lithuanian farmers), changed their names, and pretended not to be German. The unlucky ones were exploited as cheap labour, starved or got killed. His criticism of the treatment of German civilians was one of the things that got Solzhenitsyn arrested.
Did the Soviets exterminate all Germans in their sphere of influence once they won the war? What were the Nazi plans had they won (and which they partially implemented during the war)?
This doesn't excuse even a single German civilian killed by the Soviets. But the scale and planning are tremendously different, which is why the comparison makes little sense. I think the latter day equivocation that both sides were more or less the same is a regrettable artifact of Cold War thinking.
Do the words "East Prussia" ring a bell? How about "Königsberg"?
We know this. How? Because the Nazis stated they wanted Slavs killed, but when the Soviets took over East Germany, they didn't wipe out all Germans (as they would have done, had they been bent on racial genocide as the Nazis were).
This is the one example were we can clearly compare plans and see outcomes, and how they differed. Even the scales are orders or magnitude different!
I was referring to trying to justify Soviet Union's attacks on Poland and Finland as well as annexation of parts of Romania. E.g.'The Soviet Union was prepared to allow other nations to fight one another so that it could have a share of the spoils'. It was not 'other nations' fighting and Soviet-German alliance provided room for Soviet expansionism.
Assuming of course I can only apologize for something where I was somehow involved in the first place.