Herbert Hupka

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Dr. phil. Herbert Hupka (born August 15, 1915 in Diyatalawa, Sri Lanka, raised in Ratibor, Upper Silesia, Germany (now Racibórz, Poland); died August 24, 2006, Bonn) was a German journalist and politician (CDU, formerly SPD). As a German soldier, he was expelled from the Wehrmacht in 1944 because his mother was Jewish. She was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp but survived Nazi brutality. In the summer of 1945 Hupka and his Jewish-German mother were expelled from Polish-annexed Ratibor by the People's Republic of Poland. Hupka was a member of the German parliament 1969-1987 and president of the Landsmannschaft Schlesien 1968-2000. Herbert Hupka was also president of the Ostdeutscher Kulturrat (Eastern German Culture Council) and Vice President of the Federation of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen).

He was considered a main representative of the right wing of the Federation of Expellees. As an example, in 1984 he expressed the view, that German settlements outside of Germany (state borders of December 1937), even those between Baltic and the Black Sea, also constituted rightfully cultural parts of Eastern Germany. In 1985 Helmut Kohl refused to speak at the Silesian German Landsmannschaft's annual Conference if its theme "Schlesien bleibt unser" ("Silesia remains ours!") was not changed. Hupka was one of the Landsmannschaft's members who refused to change the theme, thereby conflicting heavily with Kohl, leader of the CDU.

Hupka, once the target of Polish and Soviet-Russian communist hate propaganda, was employed by the local government of present-day Silesia as an advisor and was recently made Citizen of Honour of Racibórz-Ratibor, the historic town of his youth.