Germany asks Poland's forgiveness 80 years after WWII invasion

France24 ^ | 1 Sep 2019 | AFP

[CondoleezzaProtege]

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Sunday asked Poland’s forgiveness for history’s bloodiest conflict during a ceremony in the Polish city of Wielun, where the first World War II bombs fell 80 years ago. “I bow my head before the victims of the attack on Wielun. I bow my head before the Polish victims of Germany’s tyranny. And I ask forgiveness,” Steinmeier said in both German and Polish.

“It is the Germans who committed a crime against humanity in Poland. Anyone who claims it is over, that the national-socialists’ reign of terror over Europe is a marginal event in German history judges that for himself."

The line appeared to be a clear reference to the German far-right, whose co-leader Alexander Gauland once called the 12-year Third Reich a “speck of bird poop” in an otherwise glorious German past.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Poland suffered some of the worst horrors of World War II: nearly six million Poles died in the conflict that killed more than 50 million people overall.That figure includes the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, half of them Polish.Though it has been 80 years since the war started, there are still unresolved matters according to Poland, which says Germany owes it war reparations.

Polish President Andrzej Duda for his part denounced Nazi Germany’s attack on Poland, calling it “an act of barbarity” and “a war crime.”

“I am convinced that this ceremony will go down in the history of Polish-German friendship,” he added, thanking Steinmeier for his presence.

The heads of state will later tour the Wielun museum and meet with local survivors of the September 1, 1939 bombing.

Later Sunday, US Vice President Mike Pence, Steinmeier and Duda will deliver speeches at a ceremony in Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square, the site of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

[VanDeKoik]

Considering that the Poles own a chunk of what was once Germany, maybe the "I'm sorry" needs to come from the country that sliced off that massive gray chunk of Poland that they never gave back?

[Larry381]

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier reminds me a lot of Obama who I’m sure, would like to apologize for everything about the United States of America.

[IndispensableDestiny]

F**k them.

[rhombus10]

Next they can apologize for the Visigoths sacking Rome.

[CodeToad]

Why? If you go to war and lose territory, tough.

[aspasia]

So, sorry for being so German, please accept our contemporary “benign” EU sympathies.

[vetvetdoug]

Hasn't the perp that orchestrated the invasion been punished or is dead?

[gaijin]

It’s like they CRAVE guilt.

Germany guilt and Muzzie guilt-mongering:

MATCH MADE IN HELL.

Actually guilt-mongering not ONLY by muzzie$, eh, ifyaknowhwhatImean.

[VanDeKoik]

Uh, so its OK that the USSR annexed massive parts of Poland and never returned them?

[dfwgator]

Russians don’t apologize.

There’s an old joke, “A Polish soldier encounters a German and Russian Soldier, which does he shoot first? The German, of course.....Business before Pleasure.”

[dfwgator]

Ok Germany, then stop insisting that Poland surrenders her culture by taking in Muslims.

[GOPJ]

A day late and a dollar short... Germany fails once again...

[hanamizu]

Yeah, I always wonder about that. USSR gets to keep the parts of Poland it got from the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Same thing holds for the Baltic Republics and bits of Romania as well.

[AlaskaErik]

While Steinmeier may be contrite, Merkel runs Germany as the Fourth Reich, only with the force of personality and the weight of the German economy, instead of with military force.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

The colors in Europe have been changing for more than a thousand years. Borders are military and political divisions, often decided by victors alone.

I’d bet they continue to change in the next conflict.

[I want the USA back]

The name’s the same, but the reality isn’t. There is no way for “Germany” to apologize to “Poland.” The vicious aggressors are dead or hiding in Argentina. The victims are dead or aging.
Same goes for slavery. The participants are all dead. Just don’t let it ever happen again! Learn from the past!

[niteowl77]

The colors in Europe have been changing for more than a thousand years. Borders are military and political divisions, often decided by victors alone.

My dad's side has roots that go back to Alsace/Elsass, and as far as I can tell, the name remained phonetically the same, but was spelled in either the French or the German manner... depending on which bunch was keeping the records at a given time. Ironically, they came to America when it was a British colony and in a long, roundabout process merged into hard-drinking, quasi-hillbilly, Anglo-Scottish clans in Ohio.

This "asking of forgiveness" is a cynical EU non-apology meant only to further undermine national sovereignty and paint people like the AfD as genuine National Socialists. It goes to show you that Hitler's German-centric "United Europe" (one can easily find how seriously German troops in WWII took the idea) hasn't been abandoned by any means, but rather co-opted by INTERnational socialists who let the Germans sit in the big chairs.

[Ceebass]

If it’s any consolation to the Poles, the Germans suffered 10 million dead, and a country pulverized to rubble. This in a paroxysm of national madness not seen since the French Revolution.

I see something similar developing with the rats.

[Larry Lucido]

You can’t apologize for something you didn’t do.

You can’t forgive something that happened to someone else.