Word: oder
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Erhard wanted assurance that De Gaulle, on his visit to Russia this spring, would not recognize East Germany or compromise the disputed Oder-Neisse border. Privately, De Gaulle was quite willing to offer such assurances. Not publicly, since that might dampen his Moscow welcome. The solution? A graceful (but fleeting) toast in champagne (Laurent Perrier '55) to "a united Germany...
...decades after World War II-still poison the atmosphere among its peoples. Poles still recall with white-hot hate the six million dead left in the wake of Hitler's occupation. For their part, millions of West Germans bitterly demand back the "lost territories" east of the Oder and Neisse rivers taken away from Germany by the Communists after World War II. Voices of reconciliation have been few, but of late new gestures have emerged, and they have come from quarters that should be expected to produce them: the Christian churches...
First came last October's startling memorandum from the West German Evangelical Church partly justifying the loss of the Oder-Neisse region in terms of German war guilt. More recently, it has been the Polish Catholics who have seemed to seek a new basis for understanding...
Though the document defended Poland's postwar acquisition of the Oder-Neisse territories as a "basic question of existence," it sought forgiveness for the suffering of German refugees and expellees forced from their homelands in the Polish takeover. Such sentiments had not been heard by Germans from Poles since the war, and the German bishops were delighted to accept the invitation. In their response, they carefully explained that when Germans speak of their Heimatsrecht to the eastern territories, "it does not-with a few exceptions-signify aggressive intentions" but merely a feeling of remaining emotionally "linked to their homeland...
...Strauss & Co., Schroder is also suspect for his views on Oder-Neisse, although his public words on the subject have been conventional enough. Recently, he expressed the government's view on the church memorandum: "We must not abandon or weaken our position in regard to the German eastern territories," he said, "unless there is a relation to the reunification problem." His colleague in the C.D.U., Hamburg Party Chairman Erik Blumenfeld, went a long step farther. "A solution of the border question," he said, "can only be reached by balancing the interests of the two parties involved. The overwhelming interest...