Germany's new foreign minister Guido Westerwelle of the Free Democrats (FDP) has pledged that he will not allow Erika Steinbach of the Federation of Expellees to serve on the board of a new museum exploring the experiences of Germans and other ethnic groups expelled from their homelands in the wake of World War Two.

The FDP Chairman had made his views on Steinbach known in the past, but his vow this week in an interview with the influential news weekly Der Spiegel was different: he's now Germany's foreign policy chief and vice-chancellor.

“As foreign minister I will not allow the relationship between Germany and Poland, which is already burdened by history, to be disrupted by impulsive moves,” he told the magazine.

Westerwelle said allowing Steinbach to serve on the museum's planning board would disrupt the process of improving the two nations' relations.

Party Solidarity

Steinbach is a member of the Christian Democrats (CDU), and her party allies seem determined to see her sit on the museum's board, which will compile studies from historians across central Europe and meet under the rubric “flight, expulsion and reconciliation.”

Deputy CDU parliamentary group head Michael Kretschmer said that if the Federation of Expellees, which, as one of the driving forces behind getting approval to build the museum, is guaranteed a seat on the board, wished to see Steinbach as their representative, then their wishes should be respected.

And Horst Seehofer, chairman of the CDU's Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union, said turning down Steinbach's bid to serve on the board could be “a burden” to the coalition.

His party colleague Hans-Peter Friedrich called Steinbach's participation “non-negotiable.”

As yet, Chancellor Angela Merkel has stayed aloof from the dispute, refusing to take the side of her own party or that of the FDP, whose surprising electoral strength in September allowed her to break out of the grand coalition with the Social Democrats.

Objections from the East

Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minster, has expressed to Merkel his opposition to Steinbach's participation in the museum - a project which Poland has eyed warily ever since it was proposed.

Many in Poland view Steinbach's group, the Federation of Expellees, as attempting to claim victimhood for a group which was on the wrong side of the war, and for trying to stake a German claim to lands which are now in Poland.

Soon after being elected to the German parliament in 1990, Steinbach voted against a resolution to recognize the present-day German-Polish border along the Oder and Neisse rivers.

Steinbach's family comes from Silesia, a region that was once home to many ethnic Germans but now forms the bulk of south-western Poland. Her Federation advocates for the rights of those whose families were driven from Silesia and other regions like it - Pomerania (now in Poland), Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), and elsewhere.

The implication that such families could have a claim on those lands - be in spirit or in law - raises the ire of many, and Steinbach has been pilloried as a Nazi sympathizer in the Polish press.

The Federation of Expellees appeared this spring to give in to Polish pressure to drop Steinbach as its nominee to serve on the museum board, but ahead of a cabinet meeting on the matter scheduled for Tuesday, Steinbach has said she wants to serve.

mrh/Reuters/dpa
Editor: Michael Lawton