President Horst Köhler sits next to the chairwoman of the League of Expellees, Erika Steinbach, on Saturday.
Posted on 09/04/2006 10:44:57 AM PDT by lizol
New Setback in German-Polish Ties
German President Horst Köhler has angered the Polish government by giving a speech to a group respresenting Germans expelled from Poland after World War II. But German commentators have rushed to Köhler's defense, saying Poland's Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski was wrong to condemn a speech urging expellees to respect Polish concerns.
German President Horst Köhler has provoked the ire of Poland's Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski for addressing a gathering of 1,000 Germans expelled from Poland after World War II. In his speech Köhler urged Germans to be sensitive to Polish concerns about plans by the League of German Expellees to create a "Center for Expulsions" in Berlin, an idea condemned in Warsaw as a bid to portray Germans as victims.
Kaczynski, referring to Köhler's appearance before the League, said: "That's one of these disturbing events taking place in Germany these days."
The League's current exhibition in Berlin called "Forced Paths" about various major expulsions of ethnic groups including the case of Germans being thrown out of what is now Poland and the Czech Republic after World War Two has been an irritant to relations between Germany and Poland, which suffered under a brutal occupation by the Nazis during World War II.
(Excerpt) Read more at service.spiegel.de ...
President Horst Köhler sits next to the chairwoman of the League of Expellees, Erika Steinbach, on Saturday.
How about if the Germans refurbished Warsaw to its former glory?
WWII ended some 60 odd years ago, yet you can still see bullet holes (courtesy of the Wehrmacht) in numerous buildings in Warsaw.
Warsaw is one of the ugliest cities in Europe thanks to the remodeling job done by Germans - and never repaired.
Fixed your typo.
Will someone please tell me again how the Germans were the victims and how the Poles started the war...
Fixed your typo.
The Reds deserve partial credit for keeping the Poles in prison for 50 years. My father-in-law, however, worked as a slave in the kitchen for Germans when he was a young boy. Germans who called him "kinder-schwein" and murdered half his village. The Reds came later.
It's also true that during the Warsaw Uprising, the Reds sat on the "Praga" side of the Vistula river and did nothing while the brave Polish partisans were brutally put down by the Nazis. Some 300,000 were butchered. The Reds sat and watched from across the river.
The Reds also murdered nearly the entire Polish officer corps at Katyn...
But it wasn't just the Reds.
Incidentally, the term "Nazi" was invented as a substitute for "German" and popularized after 1945, by our allies the Russians, or more precisely by the KGB, when they needed to distinguish between the "good" Germans, that is their East German slaves, and the bad ones, that is the WWII Germans and their presumed inheritors in West Germany. That this term as a substitute for "German" has succeeded so well in the West is evidence of another triumph of the Communist propaganda machine.
From what I am told by the East Germans, the western sliver of what is now Poland was part of Germany. When the Soviets came, they annexed some territory for Poland and kicked out Germans who had been living and farming that land for generations. If this is true, then yes, I think the German families that once lived there were wronged.
On the other hand, that doesn't excuse Germany for WW2, and what is done is done. I don't believe a German politician has any business dealing with the League of the Expellees, since the logical conclusion of the group's message is that the land should be returned to Germany again. In other words, once again it's all about territory in Europe.
That's not a can of worms we want reopened.
Warsaw is indeed ugly, but it can only get better, Bon Mots, and it is (getting better.) The skyscrapers rising West of the city center are certainly an improvement, and talk is starting, when I was there this past summer, of replacing some of the Stalinist apartment and office blocks. It'll take time,and much was lost forever thanks to the remodelling crews from the West and East.
"Warsaw is one of the ugliest cities in Europe thanks to the remodeling job done by Germans - and never repaired."
Even worse for Poland was all those years of crappy Communist cement. The stupid communists couldn't even make decent concrete.
In the words of Tom Lehrer:
"Once all the Germans
were warlike and mean
but that couldn't happen
again
We taugh them a lesson
in 1918
and they've hardly bothered us
since then."
But it's charm for me is that it remains a very European city. Get off the wrong tube stop in London (as I have done) and you think you are in Nairobi. Take a bus through parts of Rotterdam or Paris and you are in the Meghreb. Walk through the Kreuzberg section of Berlin and you are in Istanbul. In Warsaw you are unmistakeably in Europe.
Well, here we go again. I intentionally refrained from posting the same article, because frankly, this time there is no doubt that Kaczynski's comments are, with all due respect, idiotic. And I didn't want to stir an endless and pointless discussion again. So excuse my harsh words now that I'm forced to comment.
President Koehler literally said:
"Wir müssen geduldig vermitteln, dass es in Deutschland keine ernst zu nehmende politische Kraft gibt, die die Geschichte umschreiben will"
Translation: We have to patiently demonstrate that there is no political faction worth taking seriously trying to re-write history.
"... keinen Zweifel daran, dass das nationalsozialistische Unrechtsregime und der von Deutschland begonnene Zweite Weltkrieg auslösende Ursache für Flucht und Vertreibung"
Translation: [There should be] no doubt that the criminal regime of the national socialists and the second world war, that was started by Germany, were the inital cause for flight and expulsion.
If Jaroslaw Kaczynski finds such statements disconcerting, than he either hasn't read Koehler's speech (which I suspect) or is indeed hysterical, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung suggested.
I have no problem if Poles put blame were blame due, which is the case with many of Jutta Steinbach's statements. However in this case, it's just a politician desperate for re-election trying to cater to his voter base with anti-German resentments.
Koehler went before the Bund der Vertriebenen and basically told them they were wrong, more or less advocating the Polish position:
"Diese Besorgnisse sollten wir nicht ignorieren, wir sollten sie ernst nehmen, gerade wenn wir sie für unbegründet halten."
Translation: We shouldn't ignore these [Polish] concerns, instead we should take them seriously, especially when we think them unfounded.
If anything at all, Jaroslaw Kaczynski has proven Koehler wrong, namely in that one should BETTER NOT take all of the Polish government's statements seriously, but rather pretend they hadn't happened for the sake of diplomacy.
Ironically, Koehler's speech made the headlines in Germany ONLY AFTER Kaczynski's reaction.
This "gift" from Uncle Joe didn't help matters.
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