Germans' Sufferings

Stephan, a Saxon-Anhalt in our discussion on various Second World War issues, posed vaguely the world should know how the Allied Forces destroyed buildings and killed thousands of people ruthlessly.

There was frustration always in Germany though they apologized to the world for the massacres of Jews, Gypsies and other atrocities committed by Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Forces, the world has not so far apologized properly for the atrocities against the Germans around the world.

Germany apologized in 2004 for the colonial-era genocide, which killed 65,000 Herero people in what is now Namibia. Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's development aid minister, at a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the Hereros' 1904-1907 uprising against the German rulers said: "We Germans accept our historic and moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by Germans at that time".

German Chancellor Angela Merkel shared her grievances in front of Israel's national flag during a tree-planting ceremony near the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem on January 30, 2006 and laid a wreath for the six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

But the Germans had a general opinion of the world's resentment over the German people's sufferings.

Ethnic Germans were systematically targeted based on their ethnicity in various parts of the world. Anti-German hostilities had been developed after the major World Wars of recent past, for which the German state had been held responsible. The German populations were identified with German nationalist regimes of Kaiser Wilhelm or Nazis.

This was the case in the World War I era; persecution of Germans in the United States and in Eastern and Central Europe following end of World War II. Many victims of these persecutions did not in fact have any connection to those regimes.

In other cases, German populations had been persecuted because they were perceived as lacking proper ties to the country in which they lived. This includes the persecution of ethnic German Mennonite, Amish and Hutterite communities in the United States and of Tyrolean Germans in South Tyrol.

In the case of South Tyrol, these hostilities hit the historically German population of an Austrian territory which had been annexed by Italy after World War I. Following the rise of the Fascist movement of Mussolini, the ethnic Germans of South Tyrol faced growing persecution. Their names, and the names of the towns and places in the area, were forcibly changed to Italian.

In addition, Mussolini engaged in a vigorous campaign to resettle ethnic Italians in the region. Many Tyroleans fled to Germany during this time, and the matter of South Tyrol became a source of friction between Hitler and Mussolini.

After the end of World War II, the organised persecution of Germans in the South Tyrol largely came to an end, although ethnic strife continued for decades.