Expellee leaders weaponized rights rhetoric to mask annexationist aims toward the East.

Evidence

At first sight, all this rhetoric had a rather naive and idealistic ring, but more ominous overtones lurked below the surface. As the Silesian leader Walter Rinke indicated in 1950, he and his colleagues viewed the arguments regarding the Heimatrecht and self-determination primarily as a “weapon” in the battle over the old territories, a weapon which Rinke expected to be “more effective than the nuclear bomb” over the long term. A joint declaration of the VdL and BvD in June 1956 spelled out the end goal of such judicial brinkmanship: self-determination for the expellees along the lines of the formula applied to the Saar, where the German population had rejected a separatist solution in a plebiscite and thus effected the region’s return under German rule. The expellee organizations’ calls for self-determination were thus never far removed from annexationism, and the same could be said about their advocacy of European unity. In the words of Waldemar Kraft, the founder of the GB/ BHE, the main expellee objective in the unification process was to ensure that ”… the whole east and southeast European region, i.e., all the areas where Germans used to live, will again be opened to us.” — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 61

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Speaks to the manufactured-enemy reading purpose: here the ‘threat’ prompting German territorial claims was real enough, but the rhetoric of Heimatrecht/self-determination was consciously instrumental — a pattern that parallels how resentment-fueled solidarity frames interests in moral terms.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s case study — shows an expellee organization whose grievance over the ‘lost homeland’ was the foundation of its existence and claims, relevant to what happens to such a group when the grievance loses salience. — connects to: Expellee rhetoric of rights and Europe disguised irredentist territorial claims. — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 67

Related

• Expellee rhetoric of rights and Europe disguised irredentist territorial claims. (similarity 0.85)
• All three major West German parties competed in declaring the expellee cause sacrosanct. (similarity 0.82)
• Unrealistic irredentist goals alienated expellee members and marginalized their organizations (similarity 0.80)
• West German governments codified expellee homeland rights as preconditions. (similarity 0.80)
• Adenauer supported expellee demands instrumentally to shore up his Western policy, not from conviction. (similarity 0.80)
• Expellee elites framed their lost-homeland cause as pan-European unification that would erase borders. (similarity 0.80)
• Expellee organizations lost all influence once the territorial goal became moot (similarity 0.80)
• Adenauer weaponized expellee grievances to stall reunification and extract concessions (similarity 0.79)
• Pertti Ahonen — Domestic Constraints on West German Ostpolitik The Role of the Expellee Organizations in the Adenauer Era (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Expellee rhetoric of rights and Europe disguised irredentist territorial claims. #corroborates (0.95) — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 67