At a commemoration held on Saturday in Elek, in Békés County, on the occasion of the Memorial Day of the Deportation of Ethnic Germans, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén described the deportation of members of the German ethnic minority as a historical sin.
The government shares the pain of local communities, said Mr Semjén in his speech delivered in front of the memorial “Deportation”, stressing that persecution and deportation are historical sins which were committed to the detriment of an ethnic group which had been an integral part of Hungarian history and the Hungarian State for centuries.
The Deputy Prime Minister highlighted that, from 1946 on, deportations had affected all regions inhabited by Germans, with the exception of the country’s North-East part. Deportations took place in three rounds, between 19 January 1946 and 15 June 1948, and affected some two hundred thousand people, including almost five thousand Elek residents.
He said the word ‘deportation’ was the official term. “In actual fact, it meant the branding, humiliation and deportation of ethnic Germans and Swabian Germans living in Hungary”, he added.
With reference to the world history context of the deportations, Mr Semjén highlighted that the story of deportations was not specific to Hungary only. It was decided already in 1943, before the Tehran Conference, that with the designation of Poland’s new borders, the great powers agreed on the deportations. In consequence, 9 million ethnic Germans were forced to leave their native countries in total.
He said “there are places in the European Union where to this day politicians are not willing to remove the Benes Decrees from the legal system. The decrees which declared the collective guilt of the German and Hungarian populations.” “This is completely incompatible with the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, but Brussels fails to see this”, he stated.
After his speech, Mr Semjén laid a wreath at the memorial.
Before the commemoration, Bishop of Szeged-Csanád László Kiss-Rigó celebrated Holy Mass in the Sarlós Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Elek. The bishop stressed that we must remember the deportation of the Elek Germans in order “to prevent the repeat of similar atrocities”.
(MTI)
