- Herbert Czaja
Dr. Herbert Czaja (
November 5 ,1914 –April 18 ,1997 ) was a German Christian Democratic politician and advocate for Germans expelled after World War II.Life
Czaja was born in Teschen in
Austria-Hungary . He became a Polish citizen at age four when part ofCieszyn Silesia became Polish. Czaja studiedGerman studies ,History , andPhilosophy inVienna andKraków , and was active in the political life of the autonomousSilesian Voivodeship of Poland, working as a teacher and a member of the German Christian Democratic Party.During
World War II , when theSilesian Voivodeship was annexed byNazi Germany , he was granted German citizenship and served in theWehrmacht (1943-1945). On the basis ofhigh treason committed during the war by military service in the army of the enemy state, Polish authorities expelled Czaja toStuttgart in 1946 during theexpulsion of Germans after World War II . He was a member of the GermanBundestag from 1953-1990, spokesman of theLandsmannschaft der Oberschlesier from 1969 and president of theFederation of Expellees ("Bund der Vertriebenen", BdV) from 1970-1994. From 1948 he was also member of the Central Committee of German Catholics.In the 1970s and 1980s Czaja's activities within the BdV were openly criticized in Poland and he was made the public enemy #2 by the communist propaganda, who often called him "
Führer 's heir" and "revanchist". He voted - along with several conservative politicians - against the recognition of theOder-Neisse line as the Polish border in 1990, and claimed the reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany with the territory of the formerGerman Democratic Republic was not a complete reunification according to the German constitution, as it did not include the areas forming Eastern Germany until World War II. However, he was active in Polish-German reconciliation in the 1990s, and worked for the authorities ofOpole Voivodeship inPoland .Czaja died in Stuttgart in 1997, survived by a wife and ten children. Dr.-Herbert–Czaja-Weg in Stuttgart was named in his honour the same year. His oldest daughter, Christine Czaja, who is the current vice president of the Landsmannschaft der Oberschlesier, has recently published his biography.
Literature
* Czaja, Christine (2003): "Herbert Czaja - Anwalt für Menschenrechte". Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
