Association of Displaced German Students

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Board member Walter Franz Schleser in June 1952 at the honorary doctorate of Father E. Reichenberger in Graz

The Association of Displaced German Students (VHDS) was an interest group of displaced students after the Second World War . It existed from 1950 to 1964.

Areas of activity

Social work at the university location

With the currency reform in 1948 , the social situation of the displaced students deteriorated. With a view to an anticipated "emergency aid" regulation, the expelled students at the universities of the western occupation zones joined together in the winter semester 1948/49 with the support of the General Student Committees (AstA) to form interest groups. Refugee units were set up at the AstA and the elected chairmen of the refugee students were appointed. These alliances became one of the two germ cells of the VHDS, along with the country-based student communities.

In cooperation with the Association of German Student Associations (VDS), the main office for emergency aid and later the Federal Compensation Office and the members of the German Bundestag dealing with the matter were successfully presented with the demands of the displaced students for study funding resulting from the social situation. Appropriate regulations were made in accordance with the law to mitigate social emergencies (Emergency Aid Act) of August 8, 1949 (WiGBl, p. 205) through the Burden Equalization Act of August 14, 1952 (BGBl I, p. 446).

For the students who fled from the GDR , a "refugee advice center" was set up at the VDS and staffed by Theo Tupetz . Later Tupetz was head of the social welfare office at the German Federal Student Union and managing director at the Otto Benecke Foundation . We owe his efforts in particular to the fact that insufficient refugee aid resulted in general student funding based on the so-called Honnef model .

Theo Tupetz was managing director of VHDS from December 1952 to March 1954 and subsequently chairman until June 1957.

Culture, homeland and Ostpolitik

In addition to the social work outlined above, because of a self-evident preoccupation with cultural as well as local and eastern political issues, there were mostly national team formations at universities and colleges. During discussions between students of these groups and young academics and scientists who had been displaced from their homes in January 1950 in Markgröningen / Wttbg. one recognized the need to form active local minorities who, out of an inner obligation, stand up for the entirety of the displaced. In order to create an organizational framework, an East German student meeting took place at the invitation of the German-Baltic Youth and Student Association from October 9th to 12th, 1950 in the Hessian Landvolkshochschule Neustadt near Marburg / Lahn (host: Wilfried Schlau ). The 50 participants decided to found the VHDS.

VHDS career

The VHDS was founded as the “Association of German Students Displaced from Homeland” with the legal form of an eV and headquarters in Marburg an der Lahn .

It was explicitly emphasized that the new association should not disturb the existing harmony and the collegial coexistence of locals and expellees at universities and colleges.

The association was founded

  • to preserve the East German cultural heritage,
  • for the purpose of training managers to represent interests,
  • with the endeavor to publicize the problem of displaced persons at university level at home and abroad and to enforce that the concerns of the millions of German displaced persons are recognized as pan-German and European concerns.

The management activities described below by the managing director Walter Fr. Schleser served the latter purpose in the development phase 1951/52 :

  • the organization of trips by German professors to lectures at German universities and colleges,
  • the wide distribution of a four-page leaflet "German Homeland in the East"
  • a discussion on Hessischer Rundfunk on July 25, 1951,
  • In September 1951 a conference was held on the Czech border in Furth im Wald with 60 student representatives and editors of student magazines from 13 countries. Keynote speaker: State Secretary Ottomar Schreiber from the Federal Ministry for Expellees.
  • participation in the World Conference on Moral Rearmament in Caux sur Montreux at the end of September 1951 with the guest of honor Tadeusz Komorowski (General Bór-Komorowski), the Polish commander of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, subsequently
  • a conversation with the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees ( UNHCR ) in the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva about the problems of displaced persons and refugees in Austria who (in contrast to the displaced persons in the Federal Republic of Germany) were also under his care,
  • Participation in a conference of politicians in exile in London in January 1952. On this occasion, VHDS board member Schleser was able to speak to politicians who were responsible for evictions: for example, the Polish Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk and the former Czech Ministers Ripka and Jaroslav Stránský . Stransky, Minister of Justice in 1945, was presented by Schleser with the "Sudeten German White Book" on ethnic cleansing in the CSR in 1945 and the "Charter of German Expellees" of August 5, 1950. In addition, an open letter to the leaders of the conference was signed, in which the authors and a. opposed people attending a conference who should be heard before a tribunal for human rights violations. Prof. Stransky later accepted Schleser's invitation to an open “academic conversation” with some Sudeten German students, politicians and journalists on July 23, 1952 at 5 pm in the “Hotel am Zoo” in Frankfurt / Main. The scheduled stay took place while Stransky was passing through from a visit to Munich for the International Congress of Jurists in Berlin, before which he was supposed to give a lecture. With regard to the unpublished “Academic Conversation” in Frankfurt, the Hessian Interior Minister Heinrich Zinnkann did not speak out in favor of an arrest of Stransky that was up for discussion; However, he issued a speech ban against the Czechoslovak Justice Minister of 1945 for reasons of public security and order. According to the Ost-West-Kurier , the Sudeten German party friend MdB Richard Reitzner intervened . The ban on speaking was announced by detectives in the hotel on July 23 at 5 p.m.
  • In June 1952, on behalf of all German expellees associations, participation in the honorary doctorate of the pastor and "father of expellees" Emmanuel Reichenberger in Graz, who worked in the USA . The ceremony and rally were broadcast by the American-controlled radio Rot-Weiß-Rot .

Due to the socio-political activities outlined, the association quickly developed into a large German student union with around 6,000 members (with 15,084 displaced students at West German academic universities in the winter semester of 1952/53). It was made up of 12 regional associations and university groups at 34 universities and colleges. In Austria, the Association of Catholic Danube Swabian Students and student groups at the universities of Vienna, Graz and Innsbruck were members. From 1954 onwards, groups of students who had fled from the GDR could also belong to the renamed Association of Homeland Displaced and Refugee German Students (VHDS). In 1954 the "Working Group of Exile Student Associations" in Germany also became a member.

On December 6, 1952, the VHDS was so well established that its chairman, Schleser, attended a reception in the Adam-Stegerwald-Haus in addition to members of parliament, senior officials and representatives of friendly organizations, as well as the federal ministers for expellees and for all-German tasks, Hans Lukaschek and Jakob Kaiser in Koenigswinter am Rhein.

From a political point of view, the delegates of the 5th VHDS General Assembly on June 30, 1957, under the leadership of Honorary Chairman Walter Fr. Schleser in Königstein / Taunus, decided on a “Königstein Resolution” with proposals for the reunification of Germany.

Further information can be found in the VHDS publications named below, Das Freie Forum (1955) and Beyond Elbe and Oder - 10 Years of VHDS (1960).

The student association VHDS was replaced in 1964 by the Ostpolitischer Deutschen Studentenverband (ODS), which was dissolved in 1984 in 1985 by the Federal Ministry of the Interior as a right-wing extremist all- German student association (GDS).

See also

literature

  • Walter Fr. Schleser: German Homeland in the East (four-page leaflet with a map of the former German eastern areas and former German settlement areas in Eastern and Southeastern Europe as well as a three-page article The purpose and purpose of the VHDS ); Print: Marburger Presse, Marburg / Lahn Jan. 1951, DNB 1007247223
  • The Free Forum. Organ for German Students , ed. for the VHDS by Walter Fr. Schleser, Theo Tupetz and JA Stupp, Bonn 1955, DNB 1010166573 . With an article by Walter Fr. Schleser Ich Herr - Du Herr. Thoughts on a conversation between Germans and Czechs , published in Czech on May 15, 1954 in the exiled Czech newspaper Bohemia in Munich: Digitalisat , Link
  • Festschrift Jenseits von Elbe and Oder - 10 years VHDS , L. Müller printing company, Erlangen 1960, 111 pages. Edited for the VHDS by JAStupp with the participation of Erhard W. Appelius, Fritjof Berg and Walter Fr.Schleser. DNB 1007247614 . The Festschrift contains u. a. Reflections by Fritjof Berg and HG Parplies, articles on 12 country team member associations (pp. 85–104) and 13 home regions (pp. 38–69), a GDR chronicle in key words (pp. 70–75) and lists of names of the mandataries in the VHDS organs (pp. 108-109).
  • Günther Reichert: The organizational system of the German expellees. In: 50 Years of the Confederation of Displaced Persons , BdV District Association Zweibrücken 2000, published online ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
  • Uwe Rohwedder: Cold War and University Reform. The Association of German Student Associations in the Early Federal Republic (1949-1969) , Essen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8375-0748-5 .
  • Marianne Krüger-Potratz (Ed.): Foundation for integration! 50 years of OBS - commitment to qualification and participation . V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8471-0397-4 . In this commemorative publication for the 50th anniversary of the existence of the OBS, the essay From Help for Refugees to Promotion of Participation Society - History of the Otto Benecke Foundation by Hans-H. Reich and Uwe Rohwedder on pages 11–18 also honored the social work of the VDS and the Federal Student Association prior to the establishment of the Otto Benecke Foundation.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The largest community of interests with approx. There were 600 members at the TH Aachen. Robert Simons, a (West) expellee from Eupen-Malmedy, was chairman and VHDS student trust student .
  2. ^ According to Theo Tupetz: The refugee students at the universities and colleges of the Federal Republic and West Berlin and their integration into university life. In: Jenseits von Elbe and Oder - 10 years VHDS , pp. 25–32.
  3. ^ Walter Fr. Schleser (ed.): German home in the east! , VHDS, Marburg 1951, DNB 1007247223
  4. ^ Association of Displaced Persons: Charter in German In: bund-der-vertrieben.de , accessed on January 22, 2020.
  5. ↑ More details in the "Guide to Displaced Persons", Frankfurt / Main February 1, 1952, p. 1 u. 2. Regarding the expropriation and expulsion measures , reference is made to: the Bierut decrees regarding the Germans in the former Oder / Neisse areas , the Benesch decrees regarding the Sudeten Germans and the AVNOJ resolutions regarding the Yugoslav Germans
  6. ↑ See https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Str%C3%A1nsk%C3%BD
  7. ↑ More details can be found in the expellees' press after July 23, 1952 and in the leading article "The big ones are allowed to run" by HC Franz on pages 1 and 2 of PNP (Passauer Neue Presse) No. 89/1952 of July 28, 1952. ( online )
  8. ^ According to Walter Fr. Schleser: The Association of Homeland Displaced Persons and Refugees German Students eV , in: Jenseits von Elbe and Oder - 10 Years VHDS , pp. 76–83 and 107
  9. ↑ Rats of the Skies Der Spiegel August 14, 1989
  10. ↑ German Bundestag Printed Matter 13/1518 of 30 May 1995