Weighing into the debate on his country??s role in the second world war, Rau also criticised the allies for seizing territory, forcing 12m Germans to flee their homes in eastern Europe.

Rau, 72, a veteran Social Democrat, likened the suffering of the expelled Germans ?? a powerful lobby known as the Vertriebenen ?? to the fate of victims of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s.

The president criticised foreign leaders, including Neville Chamberlain, who ??extended their hand?? to Hitler at a meeting in Munich in 1938. Their agreement handed Hitler part of Czechoslovakia.

Rau, who retires next year, also decried those ??who in central and eastern Europe, first, working together with the Germans, deprived the Jews of their rights?? and afterwards deprived the Germans of their rights, too. He pointed in particular to the 1945 Yalta and Potsdam conferences at which the allies gave German land to Poland and others.

??Hitler??s criminal policies do not exonerate anyone who answered terrible wrongs with terrible wrongs,?? Rau declared. ??The pan-European catastrophe can only really be understood in its entire context.??

The speech, delivered earlier this month to the annual meeting of the Bund der Vertriebenen (Expellees Association), has gone largely unreported in Germany.

It coincides with a heated argument about plans for a centre in Berlin to remember the Vertriebenen, which has caused alarm in eastern Europe.

His attempt to link the fate of the Vertriebenen with that of the Jews appears to mark a fresh stage in what Antony Beevor, the historian, has criticised as a Opferkultur, or victim culture, among Germans.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Forces chief faces new battle - the economy
• Seven days that shook the world
• Icelanders wake up and smell ... the fish