Overview

• Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz and BdV President Bernd Fabritius presided over a Festakt in Stuttgart’s Neues Schloss to mark the Charta’s 75th anniversary.
• Merz praised the integration of Heimatvertriebene as a major success story that helped lay the economic and social foundations of the Federal Republic.
• Critics from the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Baden-Württemberg and Green Party figures continue to challenge the Charta’s one-sided victim narrative and its omission of German wartime guilt.
• Bernd Fabritius framed the Charta as a forward-looking blueprint, calling for a penalized prohibition on forced expulsions to safeguard current displacement crises.
• Historian Mathias Beer underscored the document’s unresolved tension between the aspiration for a united Europe and the unfulfilled right to homeland experienced by millions of expellees.