Over half of Poles believe Germans were victims of World War II: survey

WARSAW, Aug 28 (AFP) - More than half of Poles consider that the German population suffered during World War II alongside the Jewish, gypsy and Polish victims of the Nazi Holocaust, according to a survey published on Thursday.

A total of 57 percent of respondents believed that Germans were victims of the war, according to the poll conducted by the PBS institute in Poland and the Emnid institut in Germany, on behalf of the Polish Rzeczpospolita daily.

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Among German respondents, 36 percent considered Germans to have been victims of the war, while 52 percent disagreed and 12 percent expressed no opinion.

More than five million Germans were expelled from their homes after the end of World War II when a chunk of formerly east German territory was transferred to Polish and Soviet control, under the terms of the 1945 Potsdam Agreement.

Yet 58 percent of Poles said they would oppose the creation of a historic centre for the expelled German nationals, while in Germany, more than half of respondents opposed setting up such a centre.

In Poland, which was home to Europe's biggest Jewish community before the war, around six million people, three million of them Jews, were killed during World War II.

The survey of 1,999 people was concucted on August 23-24.

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