"The Palestinian Arab reaction has inspired us to cope with our legacy of suffering in the same way."
Berlin, June 23 - German government officials announced today that henceforth, the country will observe the ninth of May to highlight the displacement and suffering of Germans that occurred in the aftermath of German surrender to the Allies in the Second World War and of the Holocaust, following the Palestinian model of a national day of grief and vengefulness on the day after the anniversary of Israel's declaration of statehood in 1948 that also resulted in massive displacement amid a regional effort to exterminate Jews.
The Federal Republic's Minister of Interior Affairs Krei Bulli convened a press conference to inform journalists and the public of German Nakba Day. "We have deemed it appropriate to emulate the reaction of others who have undergone similar experiences," he stated. "Others have brought calamity on themselves by attempting to eliminate Jewry, even if those others did not succeed in making the impact that the Third Reich did manage to achieve in that respect. Palestinian Arabs, with whom Nazi Germany allied during the war, and whose other Arab allies enjoyed close ties and training with the Nazi military apparatus, underwent experience that resonates with us as perpetrators of such a genocide; the Palestinian Arab reaction has inspired us to cope with our legacy of suffering in the same way."
"Palestinian leaders selected the fifteenth of May for their Nakba Day," he continued, "because it immediately follows the date of the Jewish State's founding, and they tie their suffering to that event, suffering that came about because of failed Arab attempts to commit genocide against the Jews. We, too, note Germany's surrender on the eighth of May, 1945, precipitated by an ideology that demanded geocide of Jews, and the consequent German suffering that grew out of that genocide, and declare 9 May 'German Nakba Day.'"
Historians noted that in both cases, the flight and permanent displacement of Palestinians and Germans began well before the symbolic date of the observance. "Ethnic Germans started fleeing where they lived outside Germany as the Red Army advanced" in 1944-5, explained WWII historian David Glantz. "The displacement continued for several years afterwards, as well, ultimately affecting tens of millions of Germans. As for Palestinians, many of them began heeding Arab leaders' advice to get out of the way of the ostensible Arab military juggernaut that would cleanse 'Southern Syria' of Jews, long before May 14, 1948. May 9 and May 15 are symbolic, not literal." Glantz also noted the parallels between displaced Palestinians who hoped to claim the property of ethnically-cleansed Jews in Palestine and eventual German refugees who had settled in ethnically-cleansed properties in Poland.
Minister Bulli also floated the idea of a United nations agency that could keep the descendants of those WWII refugees stateless until they reclaim the places they had lived beforehand, like the one the Palestinians have.