Herbert Czaja

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Dr. Herbert Czaja (November 5, 1914 – April 18, 1997) was a German Christian Democratic politician and advocate for Germans expelled after World War II.

[edit] Life

Czaja was born in Teschen in Austria-Hungary. He became a Polish citizen at age four when parts of Cieszyn Silesia became Polish. Czaja studied German studies, History, and Philosophy in Vienna and Kraków, and was active in the political life of the autonomous Silesian Voivodeship of Poland, working as a teacher and a member of the German Christian Democratic Party.

During World War II, when the Silesian Voivodeship was annexed by Nazi Germany, he was granted German citizenship and served in the Wehrmacht (1943-1945). On the basis of high treason committed during the war by military service in the army of the enemy state, Polish authorities expelled Czaja to Stuttgart in 1946 during the expulsion of Germans after World War II. He was a member of the German Bundestag from 1953-1990, spokesman of the Landsmannschaft der Oberschlesier from 1969 and president of the Federation 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 the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish border in 1990, and claimed the reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany with the territory of the former German 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 of Opole Voivodeship in Poland.

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.