Erika Steinbach: Difference between revisions

Erika Steinbach

Erika Steinbach (born July 25, 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 candidates elected directly from Frankfurt. She is also a president of the Federation of Expellees. Erika Steinbach studied music and was a member of concert orchestras before becoming a fulltime politician.

Offices

Steinbach has also been president of the controversial[1] Federation of Expellees (‹See Tfd›German: Bund der Vertriebenen, BdV) since 1998 (succeeding Fritz Wittmann). Since 2000, she has been a member of the national board of the CDU-Bundesvorstand. In addition, she is on the boards the Goethe-Institut, the national broadcasting company ZDF, and the Territorial Association of West Prussia. She also is chairwoman of the Centre Against Expulsions.

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 faction.

Biography

Steinbach's father, Wilhelm Karl Hermann, was from Hanau (in Hesse, western-central Germany). . He was sent in 1941 to German occupied Rumia in Poland to serve as a technician with the rank of a Luftwaffe Feldwebel (Non-commissioned officer in the German air force) at the local airfield during the war. Rumia had been renamed Rahmel and incorporated during the German occupation of Poland into Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia administrative district by Nazi authorities. Erika's mother, Erika Hermann (née Grote), lived in Berlin but visited the town occasionally. Steinbach was born there as Erika Hermann.

In January 1944, her father was sent to the Eastern Front. In January 1945 with the beginning of Soviet Army advances on German occupied territories in Poland, Steinbach's mother, three months before the advancing Soviet army reached the area decided to leave Nazi occupied Poland and went to Schleswig-Holstein together with her children. After several years of wandering through parts of Germany, in 1948 the family found refuge in Berlin, where Steinbach's grandfather had become mayor of one of the districts.

The following year, Wilhelm Karl Hermann returned from Soviet captivity and the family moved to his homeland in Hanau. There, Steinbach finished her education and started studying violin play. In 1967 she had to abandon her music career due to serious bone illness. In 1972, after knowing him for nine years, she married Helmut Steinbach, the conductor of a local youth symphonic orchestra. She then graduated from a school of civil administration and moved to Frankfurt, where she started working for a Communal Evaluation Office.

In 1974 she became the head of a sub-unit of that organization responsible for the computerization of all public libraries in Hesse. The same year she joined the Frankfurt branch of the CDU party. In 1977 she was elected a chairman of the city council and held that post until 1990, when she was elected a member of the Bundestag.

Federation of Expellees

Steinbach became noted by the press for the first time when she was among the strongest opponents of German ratification of the border treaty with Poland. In 1994 she joined the Federation of Expellees and in May 1998 became the head of that organization.

As Steinbach's parents had no roots of any kind in the area of her birthplace, and her father had been only deployed there as part of his duties in the German occupation force, her birthplace was considered an accident, and the legitimacy of her speaking on behalf of the German expellees was questioned. However, as the 1953 German Federal Expellee Law includes all categories of people who had to leave for whatever reason the areas held by Germany during World War II, she holds officially the status of an expellee. Nevertheless, the German law included two main categories: "Vertriebene" (expellees who usually had lived in Eastern Europe for centuries; Erika Steinbach's case is uncommon since she was born in the East, however to newly arrived immigrants of "free will") and "Flüchtlinge" (people who the Nazis forcefully re-settled to an occupied area and who were consequently expelled after the war). In proportion, the number of "Vertriebene" is much higher than the number of "Flüchtlinge". Whether Erika Steinbach's parents are part of any of these two groups is questionable. Erika Steinbach's father's ancestors have roots in Silesia (not in Pomerania), yet he did not grow up there.

Steinbach was re-elected as president of the Bund der Vertriebenen by an overwhelming majority on May 8, 2004

Centre Against Expulsions

Currently she campaigns for the building of a Centre Against Expulsions (‹See Tfd›German: Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen), a memorial devoted to the victims of forced population migrations or ethnic cleansing in Europe, situated in Berlin. Initially together with the late SPD politician Peter Glotz, she chairs the Centre Against Expulsions foundation. The initiative, supported by the CDU/CSU faction in the Bundestag, has caused much controversy, both in Germany and abroad, and has resulted in much criticism of Steinbach.

International criticism

Steinbach's position as head of the Federation of Expellees arouses much controversy in some countries which were occupied by Germany during the Second World War.

Steinbach's public pronouncements have been criticized for causing a deterioration in German-Polish relations due to stirring up controversy regarding the rights of Germans who were expelled from Poland after World War II.[2] This controversy has led to Steinbach's negative reputation in Poland, where she and the Centre against Expulsions are frequently 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. [3] In 2007 Gazeta Wyborcza, a popular newspaper in Poland, reproduced a fragment of an information leaflet presenting Steinbach as a descendant of the Nazis, and reminding of recompensations for Poland for losses caused by Germans.[4](original article in Polish).

In 2006 she was involved in a controversial exhibition on the expulsions in Europe in the 20th century. [5][6]. The exhibition was criticized by some before it even opened. However, most visitors have called the exhibition not at all "revisionist", though some called it "amateurish". It does explicitly mention the invasion of Poland and Nazis crimes as major part of the reason for the indifferentiated expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. Furthermore, it also treats the expulsions of 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 reconcilitory suitcase from Poland dedicated to a peaceful Polish, German and Ukrainian future generation. A group of Polish victims of Nazis visited the exhibition and pointed out that neither Death marches (Holocaust) nor expulsion of Warsaw civilians were mentioned [7].

External links

• Template:De icon Bundestag biography
• Template:De icon Federation of Expellees
• Centre Against Expulsions
• The Warsaw Voice newspaper article, "Border Dispute", 2003
• Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article about Centre Against Expulsions, 2003