(dpa) - Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber on Sunday criticized the decrees legitimizing the expulsion of several million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II, DPA reported. "The Benes decrees are incompatible with the law, the spirit and the culture of Europe," he told a rally of the Sudeten German Association in the Bavarian city of Augsburg. Stoiber said human rights, freedom, justice and the right to a homeland were basic rights in the European Union. The future of Europe could be built on this, he said, not on a set of laws leading to expulsions. Laws proclaimed by the late President Edvard Benes led to the confiscation of German property and the deportation of Sudeten Germans, who were collectively accused of having been Nazi collaborators. Many died in the brutal expulsions and hundreds of thousands later settled in Germany and Austria, where they and their descendants still live, preserving their dialect and folk customs.
