01.07.2005

Open letter to Germany’s Chancellor Schröder

750 years "Kalinigrad"/Königsberg: Commemorate as well the tragic fate of the civilian population of Köngisberg, Mr. Chancellor!

Dear Mr. Chancellor,

 

On this coming Sunday, you will be expected in "Kaliningrad" to celebrate the "750 years of history” of the city together with the Russian president, Putin, who is at waging a war in Chechnya. Strictly speaking, this history is composed of the 690 years of German history of Königsberg, the three years of liquidation, deportation, and expulsion of the local East Prussian population, and then the 58 years of "Kaliningrad”.

 

"For me, Kaliningrad is a city without a past, a city without a soul,” Lew Kopelew wrote. Kopelew was incarcerated in a Soviet prison camp because he had turned against the killings in East Prussia. Today, many of the city’s new residents, and last but not least the youngest among them, are searching for Königbersg’s soul. They simply call the city "Königsberg” again while quite a few of our media still only speak and write about "Kaliningrad”. Many joint projects bring together current and former residents of the city.

 

It is indicative that the city in ruins was named after Mikhail Kalinin, the former head of state of the Soviet Union under Stalin. He is jointly responsible for countless millions of victims of Soviet gulags. He signed the order to deport the Volga Germans, one third of whom did not survive eviction. He undersigned the order to execute about 4000 Polish officers and soldiers in what the world public refers to as the massacres of Katyn. Another 9 000 to 12 000 people were murdered in the camps Starobielsk and Ostaszow.

 

There exist universal standards to assess and to condemn war crimes, genocide, mass expulsion, mass rape, and deportation to camps in which human beings died one way or another. Unforgotten, prominent personalities have condemned the crimes of deportation from 1945/46. Among them are Viktor Gollancz and Robert Jungk, H.G. Adler and Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russel and Alexander Solschenizyn. The newly created tribunals and courts of justice follow these principles to avenge war crimes. Human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV)* follow such fundamentals. These standards are also valid for crimes in recent years. Otherwise, our coming to terms with the past would be senseless.

 

"Hitler wanted to cleanse Europe from the Jews, Stalin wanted to cleanse East Prussia from the Germans,” Michael Wieck wrote. Even if the former is not comparable with the latter, both are condemnable. Wieck was the last Jew to survive in Königsberg and is today a concertmaster in Berlin. He wrote a shattering book about the fall of Königsberg which he fortuitously survived just as he beforehand had escaped the deportation of the Jewish citizens of Königsberg.

 

Mr. Chancellor, I should like to remind you of the horrible fate of so many residents from Königsberg by sampling a few groups:

 

  • 100 000 of the 120 000 to 130 000 people who stayed in Königsberg and in its environs died of hunger and epidemics or where murdered. Among the 15-20% of those who survived, there were, after their evacuation after 1948, hardly any children or elderly people.
  • 44 000 young East Prussians from Königsberg and its environs, mostly 14 to 35 years old, were deported to Siberia as work slaves along with half a million east German women and men. Only half of them survived and returned years later. They were then expelled to the Federal Republic of Germany or to the German Democratic Republic.
  • Among those who were deported to gulags, who survived and subsequently were expelled, there were tens of thousands of girls and women who had been sexually abused and, in many cases, traumatised for the rest of their lives.
  • After the death of their parents, hundreds of children from Königsberg fled to nearby Lithuania where they were taken in or adopted by Lithuanian families. Today, these "Wolfskinder” have joined together and are searching for the identities of their parents and families.
  • Tens of thousands of residents fled the city on ships. Günther Grass described their fate: 6 000 died on the Goya, 6 000-7 000 on the Gustlow.
  • Hundreds of Königsberg’s residents found themselves among the 13 000-17 000 east German refugees in Denmark who were doomed to die because the medical teams and the local Red Cross denied them medical treatment. Countless children and elderly died as a result of expulsion or of starvation after their arrival in the west.

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    It is for this reason that I am calling upon you to address the fall of a former German province and the horrible fate of its inhabitants upon your visit in Königsberg. It is time for a German chancellor to kneel down and to commemorate those who were murederd, raped, deported, and died of hunger. Helmut Schmidt, at that time Germany’s chancellor, responded to our appeal and officially acknowledged the genocide of Roma and Sinti.

     

    A significant proportion of the new population in Königsberg will express compassion, just as the millions of Russian victims of national socialist crimes are remembered in Germany. The survivors of the expulsion are waiting for a commemoration of their fate as well.

    Respectfully

    Tilman Zülch

    General Secretary

     

     

    *In 1996, you, Mr. Chancellor, presented the signatory with the Award for Journalism of the federal state of Lower Saxony. The jury supported your choice, among other reasons, because the awardee had the moral courage at times to disregarded politic correctness in his human rights works.