In case you missed it, yesterday, June 20, 2021, was World Refugee Day, as proclaimed by the United Nations. This commemoration gave potentates, great and small, the opportunity to wax sentimental about the plight of the world’s 82 million refugees and displaced persons and to hector their constituents to do ever more for the woebegone masses.
The Day also gave professional celebrities like Angelina Jolie an opportunity to signal their pulchritudinous virtue by visiting places like Burkina Faso for some hijab-covered photo ops. After speaking to the downtrodden, Ms. Jolie met with Burkina Faso president and former banker Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, to whom she promised support for the Burkina Fino movie industry(!)
Otherwise, in a less-widely-noted event, German Chancellor Angela Merkel prepared to announce, today, the opening of the Documentation Center for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, a new Berlin museum that will tell the story of the millions of Germans forced by the Allies to leave eastern and central Europe at the end of World War II.
Described as a “sensitive” project involving “an impossible balancing act,” the museum was 13 years in the making. Its director, Gundula Bavendamm, says the project had to answer the difficult question, “How can the exodus and expulsion of Germans at the end of and after World War II be portrayed without raising the slightest doubt that this country is aware of its lasting responsibility for the German crimes of World War II and the murder of European Jews?”
Though no one paying any attention could possibly entertain such a doubt, that’s what the Germans have had to struggle with as they have sought to portray the history of the displacement of their own civilian population following the country’s defeat in the War. According to the Center, at least 14 million Germans were forcibly removed from their homes in the immediate postwar period. It is estimated that as many as nine million died, of starvation and disease. Those refugees suffered every bit as much as today’s refugees with no World Refugee Day to call attention to their plight.
The Center is the brainchild of Erika Steinbach, a German politician and formerly a member of Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Union party. In recent years, Ms. Steinbach has fallen out with Merkel over the admission of large numbers of migrants from Syria and elsewhere. She was not invited to today’s event.
For more, see the Associated Press.