Kill The German Your Homeland S Soil Pleads.

The discussion has begun. Hildegard Bublitz recalls how 10 Soviet soldiers raped a German teacher who had hidden in a cellar in East Prussia; the victim and her mother later committed suicide. Hilmar Pubantz says he saw a 60-year-old German farmer executed by Polish militiamen because he couldn’t raise a battered arm. Such accounts, largely ignored by Western scholars, tell of horrible suffering by Germans at the end of the war – most of them women, children, the sick and the elderly. “Kill the German – this is what your homeland’s soil pleads. Kill!” exhorted a pamphlet distributed to Soviet troops in 1945.

With a mandate from the great powers, Czechs and Poles ejected Germans from their homes and took their belongings. The numbers are in dispute, but hundreds of thousands were deported to forced labor in the Soviet Union or held in prisons where typhus, malnutrition and torture were rampant. “For me, hell began after the war,” says Dorothea Boreczek, who at 14 spent six months in Swietochlowice, one of the most notorious Polish camps.

Has the world paid enough attention to the plight of millions of Germans in the final months of the war? Or are Germans propagating a new myth, casting themselves as victims? Germany is divided over the answers. To commemorate VE Day, 300 prominent citizens issued a manifesto arguing that the date marked not a day of liberation, but “the beginning of the terror of expulsion and new oppression in the east.” The leftist Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung ran a sketch of its author, captioned “The Last Image of Hitler.” The issue is no less sensitive in the former East bloc. One of Vaclav Havel’s first acts as president of Czechoslovakia was to apologize to the Germans for their treatment by his countrymen; many Czechs resented the gesture and. last month Havel declared: “The time of apologies is over.” Any comparison of German suffering with the mass murder of Jews, intellectuals and others by the Nazis, says Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, is “an immoral, historically,unfounded and dishonest simplification.”

There are signs of reconciliation. German and Polish scholars are conducting joint research on the period. In Cheb, a Czech town near the German border, where Anna Baumruck recalls seeing militiamen “beating and kicking old people,” most residents aren’t ready to apologize to the Germans. But Jaromir Bohac, head of the town’s archive, recently organized an exhibit charting the town’s prewar history, when it was almost entirely German, and its postwar history, after the Germans had been expelled. “Czechs have to respect that a German Cheb existed, and Germans have to accept that a Czech Cheb exists,” he says. It may still be too early for a full healing, but confronting history is a start.