The controversial project in Germany to build a museum depicting the expulsion of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe won Friday its first government grant under an accord with the state of Hesse, according to dpa. Erika Steinbach, chairman of the museum foundation, handed a certificate in Wiesbaden to Hessian premier Roland Koch declaring Hesse an official project sponsor. Hesse, one of the 16 German states, promised 100,000 euros yearly for the next three years. Germany's federal government is expected to announce terms in the next few weeks for funding any museum, which faces fierce criticism from Poland and the Czech Republic. By German estimates, some 15 million German speakers were expelled from their homes during or after the Second World War, with 8 million ending up in West Germany and 4 million in the formerly communist East Germany. Up to 2 million are thought to have died as a result of the expulsions. Critics fear that a memorial to them in Berlin might reduce German sorrow for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. A temporary exhibition in a government palace last year demonstrated the planned concept: to depict the German ordeal as one among more than a dozen 20th-century ethnic mass expulsions.
