BERLIN, Sept 9 (Reuters) - A party ally of Angela Merkel whom Poland has branded a Nazi apologist has embarrassed the chancellor by defending a lobbyist who blamed Germany's neighbour for the outbreak of World War Two.
Erika Steinbach, who heads a league representing the 12.5 million Germans expelled from eastern Europe after the war, has come under fire in her own Christian Democratic (CDU) party for saying Poland mobilised its armed forces before Germany did.
Steinbach has been a figure of hatred in Poland for some time due to her strident promotion of the interests of expellees from that country and elsewhere in eastern Europe after the wartime defeat of Nazi Germany and her decision in the early 1990s to vote against recognising Germany’s border with Poland.
The new row has hit CDU leader Merkel at a bad time. She is already seeking to end a dispute over contentious remarks by Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin about Muslim immigrants and Jews that has split the nation and could cost her votes.
Steinbach, whom one German paper dubbed "the female Sarrazin", sparked outrage at a meeting of the CDU’s parliamentary party on Wednesday when she leapt to defend two members of the League of Expellees (BdV) that she chairs.
The league is the driving force behind a museum to commemorate the post-war expulsions, which has stoked tensions with Poland due to fears the centre would try to portray Germans as victims of a war Adolf Hitler began in 1939.
According to participants at the CDU meeting, Culture Minister Bernd Neumann distanced himself from comments by two senior BdV members, one of whom asserted that a Polish mobilisation in March 1939 prompted Germany to respond.
Steinbach then spoke up for the two, telling conservative daily Die Welt that Poland had been the first to mobilise, though she made reference to 1933, they year Hitler took power and six years before World War Two began.
"Unfortunately, I can’t change that Poland mobilised in March 1933," she told the newspaper. Steinbach added that she did not mean to call Germany’s war guilt into question.
There was no immediate comment from Poland on the matter.
MISREPRESENTING HISTORY
The war has cast a long shadow over German-Polish relations.
By the time the Nazis were driven out of Poland in 1945, some 3 million ethnic Poles and 3 million Polish Jews had been killed, many in extermination camps such as Auschwitz.
Relations began to thaw after West German chancellor Willy Brandt spontaneously sank to his knees in 1970 at a memorial to the 500,000 Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw murdered by the Nazis.
But since Germany reunified in 1990, Steinbach has fanned discord with its eastern neighbour, and once tried to make Poland’s membership of the European Union contingent upon the country paying compensation for the expellees.
This and other disputes have led Poles and critics in Germany to accuse Steinbach of trying to rewrite history.
One of the two she defended, Hartmut Saenger, wrote last year in a newspaper that Poland’s aggressive behaviour, mobilisation and common front with Britain and France had pushed Hitler into an alliance with Stalin, igniting the war. Andreas Schockenhoff, a deputy leader of the CDU in parliament, condemned Steinbach for her intervention.
"It must be clear that we’re not talking about a difference of opinion here. This is a misrepresentation of history," he said, adding such views had no place in the CDU.
Steinbach also used the CDU meeting to vent her anger about the treatment of Sarrazin, whom the Bundesbank has voted to dismiss after he said Muslim immigrants to Germany were making the country less intelligent, and abusing the welfare state.
In front of Merkel, who has forcefully condemned Sarrazin, Steinbach said the 65-year-old was the victim of a witch-hunt.
