So you think I'm being too tough on my countrymen. Might be, my sympathies with the "Vertriebene" (displaced Eastern-European German population) were never great, I don't see much of a difference between being evicted in the aftermath of WW II from the eastern parts of the former Reich to losing your house in an airraid over Cologne in 1944. Both the bombs and the eviction were a direct result of what had happened in the German name from 1939 onwards. That doesn't create individual guilt, but it explains causation. No attack on Poland = the house in Cologne would still be there and the house in East Prussia would still be owned by Germans. And the causation here was so one-of-a-kindish, it cannot possibly be ignored for what happened afterwards. And Nazi imperialism didn't come over Germany like a black cloud overnight, it had pre-Nazi origins and was built on a supremacist attitude against anything east of Germany's border. What happened in the mass displacements after the war was chickens coming home to roost or "payday".
Ethnic cleansing is per se bad, but in the aftermath of WW II, given how Germany minorities had been convenient excuses for Nazi expansion pre-war (Czechoslovakia), the start of the war (Poland) and how Germany had intended to enslave Poland and Russia, planning and executing the starvation, eviction and plain genocide of great parts of the populace there, I can understand the reaction of the Eastern European nations. There are few examples in history where the initial aggressor (and his total lack of justification) can be identified more clearly than at the advent of WW II.
That said, Jim, your view is perfectly mainstream with what a lot of people think in Germany and what - to my chagrin - has become the more assertive school of thought in recent years. You're not German so none of this applies to you, but I'm wary of those views when my countrymen voice them. It smacks of disengaging themselves from our collective past. Like Nazism, the Red Army and its atrocities didn't come out of nowhere either.
Uwe