Frau Steinbach again?
Yes! ;D ;D
CDU Lawmaker Steinbach's World War II Remarks Prompt Westerwelle Criticism
By Patrick Donahue - Sep 9, 2010 6:19 PM GMT+0200
German politicians attacked remarks by a lawmaker in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party who stirred debate on the country’s responsibility for starting World War II, saying Polish forces mobilized before the 1939 invasion.
The Christian Democratic lawmaker, Erika Steinbach, 67, said her remarks were never intended to deny that Nazi Germany started the war. Still, she stood by her statement that the Polish military mobilization six months before the invasion was a “fact,” opening her to critics who said she had trivialized Nazi Germany’s war role, Deutsche Presse-Agentur said.
“Ambiguous statements that place Germany’s grave responsibility in the outbreak of World War II in question are unacceptable,” Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said in an e- mailed statement today. He said such statements can harm Germany’s standing in Poland as well as internationally.
Steinbach, who leads a lobby group representing Germans who were banished from territory that became part of Poland and the Czech Republic after World War II, made the remarks yesterday in a party meeting attended by Merkel, according to the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper. She was defending two members of the lobby group who had made similar statements.
Steinbach, 67, withdrew from the CDU’s board, saying she wouldn’t run for the position again at a party congress later this year, Die Welt reported today. Steinbach’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. She has represented a district in Frankfurt since 1990.
The CDU’s parliamentary caucus chief, Volker Kauder, sought to squelch any debate about the Nazis, saying that Poles “had every good reason to mobilize in self defense” in 1939. Any other interpretation is “ridiculous,” he told reporters today.
The head of the Social Democrats’ parliamentary caucus, Thomas Oppermann, called Steinbach’s comments “unbearable” and demanded the CDU distance itself from them. 
Erika SteinbachErika Steinbach (help·info) (born 25 July 1943) is a German conservative politician who has been representing
the Christian Democratic Union (
CDU) and the state of
Hesse as a member of the Parliament of
Germany, the
Bundestag, since 1990. She is one of two MPs representing the constituency of Frankfurt, and is the spokeswoman of the
CDU/CSU parliamentary group on human rights and humanitarian aid. She is also a member of
the national board of the CDU. Since 1998, she has been the president of
the Federation of Expellees (
Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV)).
Erika Steinbach studied music and was a member of concert orchestras before becoming a politician.
Early lifeSteinbach's father,
Wilhelm Karl Hermann, was born in
Hanau (Hesse, western-central Germany) but his family had come from
Lower Silesia. In 1941 he was stationed within Nazi occupied
Poland in the town of
Rumia (German: Rahmel).
Wilhelm Karl Hermann served there as an airfield technician with the rank of a
Luftwaffe Feldwebel. Steinbach's mother,
Erika Hermann (née
Grote), was ordered to work in the town after the annexation.
Steinbach was born there as
Erika Hermann.
In January 1944, her father was deployed to
the Eastern Front. In January 1945 during East Prussian Offensive of the Soviet Army, Steinbach's mother together with her children, fled to
Schleswig-Holstein in
northwestern Germany. In 1948 the family moved to
Berlin, where Steinbach's grandfather had become mayor of one of the districts.
In 1949,
Wilhelm Karl Hermann returned from Soviet captivity. In 1950, the family moved to
Hanau,
Hesse where
Steinbach finished her education and started studying the violin. In 1967 she abandoned her music career due to an ill finger. In 1972, she married
Helmut Steinbach, the conductor of a local youth symphonic orchestra.
Steinbach graduated from a school of civil administration and moved to Frankfurt, where she started working for a Communal Evaluation Office.
Political careerCareer in the CDU, Member of ParliamentIn 1974 she joined the
Frankfurt branch of the
CDU party. In 1977 she was elected a member of
the Frankfurt City Council and held that post until 1990.
She was elected a member of the Bundestag in 1990, one of two representatives of the constituency of
Frankfurt In 1990 she voted against
the German–Polish Border Treaty (1990). In 1997 she criticised the approval of
the Czech-German Declaration of Reconciliation.
Since 2005, she has been a member of
the German parliamentary committee for human rights and humanitarian aid and
spokesperson for human rights and humanitarian aid of
the CDU/Christian Social Union fraction. She is also a deputy member of the parliamentary Committee for the Interior.
Since 2000, she has been a member of the national board of the CDU (German, CDU-Bundesvorstand). In addition, she is on the boards of the Goethe-Institut, the national broadcasting company ZDF, and the Territorial Association of West Prussia.
In 2009, she was offered the position of Secretary of State in the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, but declined.
Federation of ExpelleesSteinbach joined the German Federation of Expellees in 1994. In May 1998 she was elected President of the organization, and was re-elected in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008. The Federation of Expellees has approximately 2 million members. This figure was disputed in January 2010 by the German news service DDP, which reported an actual membership of 550,000.
The German Federal Expellee Law of 1953 defines as expellee all German nationals and ethnic Germans with a primary residence outside post-war Germany, who lost this residence in the course of the World War II-related flight and expulsions.
Steinbach has distanced herself from the Prussian Trust, that aggressively seeks restitution of German properties in Poland.
Centre Against ExpulsionsErika Steinbach is the founder, along with
Peter Glotz, of
the foundation Centre Against Expulsions (German:
Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen), which is working to establish a museum for the victims of "
Flight, displacements, forced resettlements and deportations all over the world in the past century", a project of the German federal government on initiative and with participation of the Federation of Expellees. The museum will contain a permanent exhibition to document expulsions including the expulsion of Germans after World War II.
The federal government established the federal foundation "
Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung" which is intended to be the basis a future museum. The Federal of Expellees is entitled to appoint some of the board member, although they need to be confirmed by the cabinet.
On 4 March 2009
the Federation of Expellees decided not to nominate
Steinbach to the council and instead left one seat unoccupied, after the social democratic party (SPD) threatened to veto Steinbach's appointment to the board. On October 19, 2009, after the SPD was ousted from government and replaced by a liberal-conservative coalition dominated by
Steinbach's party,
Steinbach announced her intention to take the seat at the board. However, objections against her were subsequently also raised by the new foreign minister
Guido Westerwelle of the liberal
FDP party. However,
Steinbach is supported by her own party and
the CSU party, both of which have called upon
Westerwelle to give up his resistance, and have cited earlier statements by
Westerwelle where he had praised
Steinbach a few years ago.
In 2006 she was involved in an exhibition on the expulsions in Europe in the 20th century. The exhibition deals with expulsions of German, Armenians, Poles, Turks, Greeks, Latvians, Karelians, Ukrainians, Italians and other peoples - topics many Europeans are unfamiliar with. The last item of the exhibition was a reconciliatory suitcase from Poland dedicated to a peaceful Polish, German and Ukrainian future generation.
International human rights activismAs the CDU/CSU spokeswoman for human rights, Erika Steinbach is involved in a number of activities promoting human rights worldwide.
She was an expert speaker at the International Cuba Conference of the International Society for Human Rights in 2006.
Franz Werfel Human Rights AwardTogether with
Peter Glotz, she was the primary initiator of the
Franz Werfel Human Rights Award, and serves as a jury member together with
Otto von Habsburg,
Klaus Hänsch and
Otto Graf Lambsdorff among others. It has been awarded every second year since 2003 in the Frankfurt Paulskirche. The 2009 recipient was
Herta Müller.
Political positionsErika Steinbach is viewed as conservative within the CDU in most fields of policy. Her work as a member of parliament focuses on human rights, and she is a strong critic of human rights violations in communist countries around the world. She is also a strong supporter of the process of European integration.
Steinbach endorses the Charta of the German expellees of August 1950.
Social policyErika Steinbach holds conservative views on social policy and opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, which sometimes has caused controversy.
PerceptionErika Steinbach is much more widely known in
Poland and the
Czech Republic than in
Germany. According to Cordell and Wolff (2005), the political importance the Federation of Expellees has in German politics is overestimated in Poland and the Czech Republic because of its unproportional media presence in these countries and campaigns of "
aggressively nationalist politicians".[21]
Criticism in PolandSteinbach's public pronouncements have been criticized for causing a deterioration in German-Polish relations. This controversy has led to
Steinbach's negative reputation in Poland,[improper synthesis?]where she and the Centre against Expulsions are sometimes associated with Nazism. One example of this was a 2003 cover montage of Polish newsmagazine Wprost that depicted her riding Chancellor
Gerhard Schröder while wearing an SS uniform. In 2007
Gazeta Wyborcza, a popular newspaper in
Poland, reproduced a leaflet presenting
Steinbach in the succession of
the Teutonic Knights and
the Nazis, and reminded of the full compensations never paid to Poland for losses caused by the
Nazi Germany.
Polish ambassador to Germany,
Marek Prawda, Poland's Foreign Minister
Radoslaw Sikorski and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk expressed unease with Steinbach's appointment to the board of the Center against Expulsions in February 2009.
Władysław Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor who is Poland’s commissioner on relations with Germany, said that giving
Mrs Steinbach a seat on the board would be akin to the Vatican appointing a Holocaust denier like
Richard Williamson to manage relations with Israel.
The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, privately warned Berlin that allowing Mrs Steinbach’s appointment would shake German-Polish relations “to their foundations”. Do people whose families lived there for generations want to be identified with a person like Mrs. Steinbach, who came to our country with Hitler and had to leave it with Hitler too ? Sikorski said in Brussels on Feb. 23 2009, referring to Steinbach’s father having moved to German occupied Poland during the war and asked her to follow the example of President Horst Köhler, who was born within family of wartime German settlers in Poland and never considered himself an expellee. The fact that Steinbach represents a person born to German officer stationed in occupied Poland has been described as one of essential issues for Poles.
In Germany the Polish criticism is considered to be part of an anti-German campaign in which Steinbach became the enemy stereotype and demonization of Steinbach a kind of reason of state. The way she is portrayed in Polish public had rather "
hysteric features" or is described as a "
psychosis". Especially conservative nationalists in the PiS are blamed to have used her as a bogey in internal politics to counter Donald Tusk ignoring Steinbach's real views.
Lecture controversyIn May 2008 Steinbach started a series of lectures about the "
German settlement in Eastern Central Europe" at the University of
Potsdam. However demonstrations by far-left students who protested against
Steinbach's allegedly revisionist view on German history by throwing waterfilled balloons and blocking the entrances compelled her to cancel the further lectures. On June 11, 2008, a full meeting of the students council decided (with 146 against 7 ves) to protect the right of freedom of opinion and speech and invited Steinbach again, if necessary under police protection. The local Mayor, supported by several political parties, expressed his displeasure about the incident and requested that the university council invite Steinbach again.
HonoursOn July 9, 2009, she was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit by Prime Minister of Bavaria Horst Seehofer for her work for the rights of the victims of the Expulsion[.
vastano.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/files/2009/11/steinbach_wprost11.jpg
