Germany’s chancellor has reiterated her support for a memorial to Germans who had to relocate from Eastern Europe after World War ii.

Following the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, Germany’s eastern border was pushed westward. Millions of ethnic Germans from the lost territories and East European countries were viewed as traitors by their former countries of residence, and were expelled or fled to what remained of Germany after that nation’s defeat by the Allies.

The Federation of Expellees, a group backed by the German government, is now moving forward with plans for a memorial in Berlin for these dispossessed. The Center Against Expulsions is to be opened by 2013. On August 22, German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed her support for the project, telling the federation at its annual meeting that the center was an appropriate way to commemorate what happened to the expellees. “It is a part of our national identity,” she told the group, “and part of our shared cultural memory.”

The federation’s website says that the memorial was founded “in the spirit of reconciliation with all neighboring peoples. It declares its solidarity with all victims of expulsion and genocide.”

Topping the list of the memorial’s four “equally ranking” objectives is that it commemorates “more than 15 million German victims of deportation and expulsion from all over Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe ….

“Many thousands of them suffered years of forced labor and internment. Almost 2.5 million children, women and men did not survive the pains of displacement, torture, forced labor or months of being raped. People must not be left alone with this fate. It is a task for the whole of Germany.”

The memorial will also include information on expulsions of other people throughout history, including what the third objective listed on the website calls “the singular persecution and mass destruction of Europe’s Jews by National Socialism.”

Despite the inclusion of non-Germans in the memorial, Poles and other Eastern Europeans are worried.

A 2003 petition initiated by Hans Henning Hahn, Eva Hahn, Alexandra Kurth, Samuel Salzborn and Tobias Weger has been signed by several hundred people, primarily Czech, German and Polish historians. These opponents of the memorial expressed fears that the center would “establish and popularize a one-sided image of the past, without historical context.” The signatories called attention to the danger of “de-contextualizing the past” and of “ethnification of social conflicts.”

“The great danger posed by this proposal,” the petition continues, “is the emergence of an officially sanctioned reinterpretation of the past—indeed a historical revisionism ….”

At the Federation of Expellees meeting, Merkel addressed these concerns, saying, “We will not forget: This was a direct consequence of the German war and the Nazi tyranny. [W]e admit out responsibility for the darkest chapter in Germany’s history—there is no reinterpretation of history.”

Merkel’s acknowledgment of German culpability in starting the war notwithstanding, this is clearly another attempt to represent Germans as victims—on a par with the Jews. This is not to say individual Germans didn’t suffer. What is at issue is the increasing tendency to portray the aggressors in a war as the victims.

This trend has been gaining momentum in Germany for some years. Consider the mentality displayed in a speech by then-German Federal President Johannes Rau made to the Association of German Expellees in 2003: “The suffering of each and every one [alluding to Germans] comes before all judgments, before any considerations of right and wrong, cause and effect” (emphasis ours).

Commentator Rodney Atkinson wrote that, in his speech, Rau sought to “ameliorate German atrocities in Europe by equating them with the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after the war. Rau even partly blames the Allies for Hitler’s crimes ….”

Rau’s speech, like the planned Center Against Expulsions, reflected a mindset that has continued to gather steam in Germany: victimhood.

In 2002, a fast-selling book depicting Germans as war victims hit German bookshelves. Der Brand, or The Fire, detailed Allied bombing of German cities during World War ii. In 2003, Die Welt reported the creation of a “Prussian Claims Society” in Germany whose purpose is to process legal suits for individual German property claims in territory belonging to Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia. At that time, the Society was distributing claim forms for Germans to claim their property in “East Germany” (i.e. Poland, etc.). In 2004, Germany’s foreign minister tried to depict Germany as the victim of British memories of its militarism, while the biggest national German newspaper suggested Queen Elizabeth of Britain should apologize for British war-time bombing.

The crux of this trend is that victimhood in Germany is feeding an awakening of German national pride. Historically, this has had global repercussions—and biblical prophecy tells us it will again.