GERMANY: The president of the Bundestag has told Poles that Germany has a right to remember the 15 million "personally innocent" Germans expelled from its eastern territories in 1945.
The episode has always been a source of tension between the two countries but Poland is concerned that the current revival of German interest in the topic is an attempt to reverse the historical victim-perpetrator relationship. German officials reject firmly any suggestion of revisionism and have begun to counter attempts by the Polish side to revive the concept of collective guilt.
"Germany's historical responsibility for the outbreak and consequences of World War Two is indisputable. But the people who were personally blameless victims of political developments, state-sponsored aberrance or crimes have a right not to be left alone with their pain, with their fate. That's true for Poles as well as Germans," wrote Dr Norbert Lammert, Bundestag president, in the Polish tabloid Fakt.
Two new exhibitions in Berlin tell the story of the three million Germans who died on the march westwards from the territories Pomerania, Silesia and the Sudetenland, and the difficulties the 12 million survivors had integrating into the divided Germany.
The government plans to open a new museum and documentation centre on the period, something vehemently opposed by Warsaw. At the weekend, Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski called Germany's new examination of this period "one of the most unsettling events to take place in recent times".
He said there was a "large, state-supported group in Poland that tirelessly refers to the Polish territories that once belonged to the German Reich". A small organisation called Prussian Trust has, for years, threatened to seek compensation for land and homes lost by Germans in Poland. The German government makes clear on a regular basis that this organisation enjoys no political or financial support from Berlin.
"We have to make clear patiently that there is no serious political force in Germany that wants to rewrite history," said German president Horst Köhler in a speech at the weekend.
"We should not ignore [ our neighbours'] fears - even if we consider them unfounded. There is no doubt about what the initial cause for the fleeing and expulsion was: the criminal National Socialist regime in Germany."
Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper welcomed Mr Köhler's speech yesterday.
"It's sad that the reaction from Poland on German affairs recalls the practices of the [communist]People's Republic when ideological confrontation divided Poland and West Germany."