The wounds
inflicted by the crimes of the past can only be
healed if today’s ethnic German community is
given the help it needs, a government official
said at a commemoration in Mány, in northern
Hungary, honouring Hungary’s ethnic Germans who
were expelled from the country after the second
world war.
Speaking at a
memorial paying tribute to ethnic German
deportees, state secretary for church, minority
and civil society relations Miklós Soltész said
the reckless decisions made by the major powers
after the first world war had led to the rise
and horrible acts of Soviet Bolshevism and
German Nazism and the death of millions.
Following the end of the second world war,
ethnic Germans living in the region had to
undergo more suffering, he said.
Between January
19, 1946 and July 1948 nearly 200,000 ethnic
Germans were driven out of Hungary and hundreds
of thousands more were forced to live in fear
for decades, Soltész said.
He noted that in
the 1941 census, some 500,000 Hungarians had
said they were of German origin, but by 1949
their numbers decreased to just 2,600.
But today the
German minority self-governments are again free
to operate schools and institutions, the state
secretary said, adding that there are now some
186,000 ethnic Germans living in Hungary.
Imre Ritter, the
parliamentary representative of the German
minority, said ethnic Germans had waited seven
decades for a Hungarian politician to speak
openly about what had actually happened at the
time. Ritter noted that it was Prime Minister
Viktor Orbán who finally did so on the 70th
anniversary of the deportations in 2016,
“allowing those no longer with us to rest in
peace”.
German government
commissioner Bernd Fabritius said Hungary’s
commemoration of the victims of its own past
injustice demonstrated “a serious historical
conscience”. He said such a practice required
“serious dignity”, in which Hungary served as an
example to Europe.
Fabritius praised
Hungary’s current minority policy, pointing out
that the number of people who identified as
ethnic German rose from 62,000 in 2001 to over
185,000 by 2011.
In 2013 Hungary’s
parliament voted to declare January 19 the
memorial day of the deportation of ethnic
Germans from Hungary, as it was on this day in
1946 that the deportations began in Budaörs.
