Chancellor Schroeder rejects compensation claims of German post-WWII expellees

The German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has rejected compensation calls from Germans driven out of Czechoslovakia and Poland at the end of World War II. In an interview for the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the Chancellor said that there were no legal grounds for a settlement - either from abroad or from Germany. "There will be no domestic settlement" Mr. Schroeder told the paper "because that would mean that we would have to abandon our legal position that there should be no claims for reparations from either side". The Czech CTK news agency says this is a radical change in Germany's position on the issue. Previous governments always maintained that the expellees' compensation claims were "open to debate".