HUNGARY TO DEDICATE MEMORIAL TO ETHNIC GERMANS EXPELLED AFTER WORLD WAR II

AP Worldstream
Jun 18, 2006

Hungary on Sunday will dedicate a memorial to the thousands of ethnic
Germans who were expelled from the country after World War II.

The mass expulsion from Hungary of those considered to be Germans
began on Jan. 19, 1946, in the small town of Budaors on the western
outskirts of Budapest, the capital.

President Laszlo Solyom, Parliament Speaker Katalin Szili, and Ursula
Seiler-Albring, Germany’s ambassador to Hungary, are expected to
speak at the ceremony in Budaors’s Old Cemetery.

In just six weeks, some 7,000 people _ around 90 percent of the
population of the town known in German as Wundersch _ were forced
out of Hungary and deported to Germany.

"Without judgment on merits, almost all of the town’s population
was branded on the basis of the principle of collective guilt," the
town said in a pamphlet commemorating the expulsions. "All those
who considered themselves ethnic Germans or whose mother language
was German according to the 1941 census were among the guilty, among
those expelled."

In all, some 200,000 ethnic Germans were driven from Hungary until
1948.

Similar measures were also undertaken in the former Czechoslovakia,
where some 3 million ethnic Germans and 600,000 ethnic Hungarians
were expelled after the war under the decrees of former Czechoslovak
President Edvard Benes because many had supported Adolf Hitler and
the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe.

Today, ethnic Germans are one of 13 national or ethnic minorities
recognized in Hungary, also including Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks,
Roma (Gypsies) and Serbs.

An exhibition on the expulsion of the German population from Hungary
opened June 1, at the House of Terror in Budapest.