Heinz Nawratil

Heinz Gottfried Nawratil (born June 18, 1937 in Zauchtel ; † May 15, 2015 ) was a German lawyer and publicist . His Black Book of Expulsion is an important point of reference for the associations of expellees . Nawratil gives the number of Germans affected by the displacement as 20 million. Historians have described this information as far exaggerated and criticized Nawratil's calculations.

Life

The son of a doctor first attended the elementary school in Zauchtel, then after the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1946 the elementary schools in Tegernsee and Hausham . In 1948 he moved to the upper secondary school in Miesbach , where he graduated from high school in 1957. He then studied economics and law at the universities in Munich and Saarbrücken. In 1961 he passed the first state examination and in 1962 became a trainee lawyer at the Munich Higher Regional Court . After receiving his doctorate in 1964 with Theodor Maunz , Nawratil established himself as a notary in 1970 . He wrote introductory textbooks and exercise books with BGB Made Easy (1965) and HGB Made Easy , which have been reissued regularly since their publication. Nawratil was a member of the Witikobund and was involved in the Society for Threatened Peoples , for which he traveled to Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Publications on eviction

Nawratil gained particular fame through publications on the history of displacement. He sees the expulsion of the Germans as the "greatest displacement of peoples in world history" and the "greatest crime complex in post-war history". In doing so, he relies on the documentation published by Theodor Schieder on the expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe (1953–1961), calculations by the Federal Statistical Office on expulsion losses, and statements by Felix Ermacora , the UN Special Representative for Afghanistan . According to Nawratil, more Germans lost their homes as a result of the displacement than Indians and Pakistani on the Indian subcontinent in the wake of the partition of India in 1947. While historians assume no more than 500,000 to 600,000 victims, Nawratil gives the number of deaths during the displacement as 2.8 up to 3 million. For him, eviction is “a new type of state-directed liquidation policy”.

Nawratil's Black Book of Expulsion (1st edition, 1982) is an important point of reference for the associations of expellees. In a review for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1999, Erika Steinbach , chairwoman of the Association of Expellees (BdV), attested that Nawratil's tracing of the motifs shows “that the expulsion to war and Nazi terror is not like thunder on lightning followed, but was a diplomatically prepared and secured, planned and consistently carried out major crime ”.

However, Nawaratil's calculations have been criticized by historians. Ingo Haar accused Nawratil of avoiding a serious discussion of the results of statistical surveys by the Church Tracing Service and the German-Czech Commission of Historians . Although Nawratil refers to the studies of the Church Tracing Service from 1965, he ignores its differentiation between known deaths and unknown fates and does not show the individually comprehensible loss statistics of the Church Tracing Service of 0.473 million victims. By accepting Nawratils “misinterpretation” as a scientific reference, according to Haar, the BdV is not only basing itself on the outdated numbers of earlier statistical surveys from 1953 and 1958, but also denies the competence of the Church Tracing Service and the Federal Archives , which were independent in 1965 and 1974 of each other, the number of victims of direct violence was much lower than that of Nawratil.

Martin Broszat , director of the Institute for Contemporary History and once collaborator on the documentation of expulsion , had already used the term “expulsion crimes”, which was also used by Nawaratil, on the occasion of the first edition of Nawratil's Black Book , which was published in 1982 under the title Expulsion Crimes against Germans . often vague, far too general and not clearly defined under criminal law ”. The term adheres to the "smell of the intention to set off". Broszat named publications by Nawratil and Alfred Schickel as "[n] your polemical treatises from the right-wing national corner, which absurdly expand the definition and extent of the 'eviction crimes'". On the basis of a report from the Federal Archives from 1974, Broszat gives the number of displacement victims as 100,000 (minimum number) and 250,000 (maximum number) with a total loss of two million people, without the exact number being able to be determined.

The Eastern European historians Eva and Hans Henning Hahn see Nawratil at the "interface to the right-wing radical milieu". Everywhere one encounters indications that Nawratil's interest in the expulsion was only secondary and that instead “the rehabilitation of the National Socialist chapter of German history” was valid. As evidence, they cite political proposals "without reference to reality" on the one hand, for example that Nawratil suggested the repurchase of East Prussia in the edition of his Black Book reviewed by Steinbach in order to found a new Volga German republic around Königsberg . On the other hand, they point to his disrespectful, even personal insults, dealing with people who think differently. In an interview with the National-Zeitung on the occasion of the publication of his book Der Kult mit der Schuld (The Cult of Guilt) , Nawratil explained that he wanted to combat the “cult with guilt” in Germany by remembering the expulsion. For him, “ left-wing radicalism ” and “anti-Germanism” went hand in hand. 75 to 80% of the mass media are more or less “left”. Germany is threatened by debt neuroses and self-hatred. In addition, the Hahns refer to relevant publications by Nawratil such as his contribution to the anthology 50 Years of Expulsion edited by Rolf-Josef Eibicht . They come to the conclusion:

“Instead of a discursive examination of existing historical sources, [Nawratil] constructs images of the past and the present from fragments of information that make the reader a judge apart from reality. That is precisely what gives him his high reputation in right-wing extremist circles. [...] His texts serve not only to try to contribute to the memory of the expulsion, but also as a first step on the way to a more far-reaching revision of all public life in Germany, including German foreign policy. "

- Eva and Hans Henning Hahn : The expulsion in German memory (2010)

Nawratil was a member of the board of the contemporary history research center Ingolstadt (ZFI) (as of 1996), at that time a “spiritual center of right-wing extremist circles for historical research”, which is assigned to historical revisionism . For the ZFI he wrote the German post-war losses among displaced persons, prisoners and displaced persons . In 1990, the Journal of Historical Review published his honor for institute director Alfred Schickel.

Nawratil published in the magazines we himself , academia and Junge Freiheit and in 1995 he directed an article in a special edition of the weekly newspaper Das Parlament with the title “Expulsion and Flight from Eastern Germany. Made into people without human rights ”. In 2005, Nawratil gave a lecture entitled "Civilian Population and the End of the War" at a conference of the Institute for State Policy in Eisenach . He also gave lectures at the Danubia Munich fraternity , the state and economic society , at the conference So that Europe blooms ... Light on the shadows of the past (2003) in the Evangelical Academy Bad Boll and in 2010 at the “Readers' Meeting” of the right-wing extremist publisher Dietmar Munier or at the invitation of its school association for the promotion of Russian Germans in East Prussia eV at Weissenstein Castle . In March 2012, Nawratil gave a lecture at the Spring Festival of the Silesian Youth on "Expulsion of Germans from the Eastern Territories" in the premises of the Memorial Association . While the Silesian Youth of Thuringia and the federal group closely related to it, according to the federal government, have connections between the Silesian youth to the neo-Nazi scene and the NPD and the Silesian Landsmannschaft therefore sought the exclusion of the Silesian youth in 2011 , according to the federal government, the Memorial Association also maintains connections to right-wing extremist organizations as well as the skinhead and camaraderie scene .

Fonts

• The balance between the municipalities as a task of the districts. A sub. to the problem d. Compensation function under special consideration. d. bayer. Legal position. Munich, Jur. F., Diss. V. November 23, 1964., Munich 1964.
• BGB made easy . 31st edition. Ewald von Kleist-Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-87440-227-9 .
• HGB made easy . 22nd edition. Ewald von Kleist-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-87440-245-3 .
• The cult with guilt. History in the subconscious . 5th edition. Universitas Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-8004-1439-0 .
• The German post-war losses / expulsion, forced labor, captivity, Stalin's German concentration camps . Completely revised and expanded new edition. Ares-Verlag , Graz 2008, ISBN 978-3-902475-49-7 .
• Black Book of Expulsion 1945 to 1948. The last chapter of the unresolved past . With a foreword by Erika Steinbach . 14th edition. Universitas Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-8004-1474-1 .
• The reconciliation trap / German diligence and Polish self-confidence . Universitas Verlag, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-8004-1497-0 .
• Heinz Nawratil: The crimes against the German expellees . In: Rolf-Josef Eibicht (Ed.): 50 years of expulsion. The genocide of the Germans. East Germany - Sudetenland. Return instead of waiver . Hohenrain-Verlag , Tübingen 1995, ISBN 978-3-89180-041-6 , p. 31-41 .
• The expulsion of the Germans. Europe's unresolved past . In: Cultural workbooks . 3. Edition. tape 29 . Association of Expellees , Bonn 1994, ISBN 3-925103-69-4 .

literature

• Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn: The expulsion in German memory. Legends, myths, history. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 9783506770448 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Heinz Nawratil in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage of Dr. Heinz Nawratil

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tobias Weger : “Volkstumskampf” without end? Sudeten German Organizations, 1945–1955. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-57104-0 , p. 349.
2. ↑ Coexistence of the nationalities works. (No longer available online.) Society for Threatened Peoples , January 25, 2007, archived from the original on July 19, 2011 ; Retrieved March 16, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Ingo Haar: The German expulsion losses. State of research, context and problems . In: Rainer Mackensen, Jürgen Reulecke, Josef Ehmer (eds.): Origins, types and consequences of the construct “population” before, during and after the “Third Reich”: On the history of German population science. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 9783531161525 , p. 372.
4. ↑ Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn: The expulsion of the German remembering. Legends, myths, history. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 9783506770448 , pp. 560, 585, cit. after p. 601.
5. ↑ Erika Steinbach: "In an orderly and humane manner". The expulsions at the end of World War II . In: FAZ, June 8, 1999.
6. ^ Ingo Haar: The German expulsion losses. Research status, context and problems , in: Rainer Mackensen, Jürgen Reulecke, Josef Ehmer: Origins, types and consequences of the construct “population” before, during and after the “Third Reich”: On the history of German population science. , VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 9783531161525 , pp. 372-374.
7. ↑ Martin Broszat: "Expulsion crime" - a misleading term. In: Martin Broszat: After Hitler - the difficult handling of our history. Contribution by Martin Broszat. Edited by Hermann Graml u. Klaus-Dietmar Henke. Oldenbourg, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-486-53881-0 , p. 302.
8. ^ Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn: The expulsion in German memory. Legends, myths, history. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 9783506770448 , p. 608.
9. ^ Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn: The expulsion in German memory. Legends, myths, history. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 9783506770448 , pp. 600-608. For the interview in the National-Zeitung of August 7, 2003 cf. ibid. p. 600.
10. ^ Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn: The expulsion in German memory. Legends, myths, history. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 9783506770448 , p. 606f.
11. ↑ Jens Mecklenburg (Ed.): Handbook of German Right-Wing Extremism. Elefanten Press, Berlin 1996, p. 211.
12. ↑ Bernd Wagner (ed.): Handbook right-wing radicalism. Networks, parties, organizations, ideology, centers. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, p. 164.
13. ^ Ingo Haar: The German expulsion losses. Research status, context and problems , in: Rainer Mackensen, Jürgen Reulecke, Josef Ehmer: Origins, types and consequences of the construct “population” before, during and after the “Third Reich”: On the history of German population science. , VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 9783531161525 , p. 373.
14. ↑ Parliament 45, No. 31-32, August 4, 1995.
15. ↑ March to the middle (page 3). Stern (magazine) , May 16, 2005, accessed March 16, 2011 . 
16. ↑ List of speakers from the Danubia Burschenschaft  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed November 4, 2012.  
17. ↑ Lecture events of the SWG Hamburg , accessed on November 4, 2012.
18. ↑ Steffen Windschall: Will Pommersfelden Castle become a neo-Nazi meeting place? In: Abendzeitung Munich , March 19, 2010. For connection between Muniers and the school association for the promotion of Russian Germans in East Prussia, see Thomas Grumke u. Bernd Wagner (Hrsg.): Handbook right-wing radicalism . People, organizations, networks. From neo-Nazism to the middle of society . Leske + Budrich, Opladen 2002, p. 447.
19. ^ Association of Memorials: Half-yearly program 2012 , p. 14; Kai Budler: Brown Network in the Thuringian Basin. In: Störungsmelder , July 3, 2012.
20. ↑ German Bundestag: Printed matter, 17/5725 (May 6, 2011; PDF; 155 kB), p. 6f.
21. ↑ German Bundestag: Printed matter 17/7622 (November 8, 2011; PDF; 69 kB), p. 3.