Ladies and Gentlemen

A brief preliminary remark:
German–Polish relations are burdened not only, but certainly to a large degree by the experience of National Socialism and can only truly be understood when the entire complexity of related issues are also considered. Nonetheless, because of the limited time of my talk, I must reduce my comments to a few central points thereby simplifying a complicated subject. I hope that you understand this and forgive me for not addressing certain areas.And finally, I must point out that my thoughts on this topic are the perspective of a German who grew up in the West, in the Federal Republic, and for lack of time, I will not address here the politics of the other German state, the GDR.

Sixty years after the German attack on Poland and the genocide that followed, the crimes still remain vividly present in both personal and collective consciousness. After crimes against humanity have occurred, like those committed by the Germans against the Poles, rapprochement requires above all the willingness of the victims to engage in a dialogue: personal contact is the basis upon which a process of understanding can be built.

Ever since my first visit to Poland in 1974, I have often made the acquaintance of survivors of the Nazi persecution who were willing to talk to young Germans about their personal experience of suffering. I admired them highly for their openness.

Especially the Polish survivors of National Socialism, through their openness and sensibility towards us, made it easier for me to enter into a discussion with them and to fully appreciate their entire life stories; In particular, how they are able to master their lives despite the painful memories and injuries, cannot be acknowledged enough.

During personal conversations with them it has become increasingly clear to me how impossible it is for us to turn back the clock and overlook the immense impact that their experience of suffering has had on their lives. Our acknowledgment of the crimes, as Germans born after 1945, can be a meaningful source of comfort to these people who experienced them personally and physically.

During the first years following the war, there was little desire on the part of the Germans – both the state and society – to acknowledge their suffering. For one, it would have required that Germany critically examine its role as a perpetrator nation and that German individuals scrutinize their personal involvement in National Socialism, as perpetrator, bystander, exploiter, or distanced, passive observer –and least of all as victim.

And secondly, in the Federal Republic in the immediate postwar years, commemoration was reserved for the German victims who had fled, been expelled and forced to evacuate their homes at the end of the war. Numerous associations representing these expelled populations attached to this commemoration the vengeful demand for the return of their lost property. It didn’t fit into this political view to recognize the historical fact that Germany – in starting the Second World War – had caused people to flee and evacuate their homes on a scale hitherto unknown, and hence was itself responsible for the expulsion of Germans at the end of the war.

The Protestant Church’s Ostdenkschrift (Eastern memorandum) of 1965, which renounced the German claim to Polish territory, was the first step in a slow process of rapprochement.

A few years later, the Brandt administration’s Ostpolitik led to a new policy of reconciliation toward the East that enabled Poland to make ges- tures towards Germany.
In particular, non-state organizations like the Christian Action Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste e.V. (Action Reconciliation Service for Peace) made an important contribution to this process of reconciliation. Sühnezeichen’s founding appeal of 1958 states: “We are still not at peace because there has not been true reconciliation...But we are still able to...counter selfrighteousness, bitterness and hatred by offering sincere forgiveness, by asking for forgiveness and by practicing this sensibility. Let us begin with Poland, Russia and Israel, whose people we have hurt the most.” These men and women placed atonement, acknowledgement of Germany’s guilt and responsibility before reconciliation.

The work of Aktion Sühnezeichen was immensely important to me personally as well. It enabled me to travel to Poland in the seventies. During a three-week visit, our group spent a number of days studying the history at the Auschwitz memorial site and through physical work – excavating the barbed wire fence that had enclosed the extermination camp at Birkenau – we made a contribution to the preservation of the site. Afterwards we traveled to Cracow and Warsaw where we came to know the people and the country. The experiences I made there led me, after completing my teaching degree, to do alternative military service, and on behalf of Sühnezeichen to assist groups during their visits to the Auschwitz memorial site.

Financial compensation can also play an important role in alleviating the losses and remaining damage suffered from injustices done. Restitution is therefore also a central precondition for a process of reconciliation.

Germany has always had difficulty with the notion of restitution for Nazi crimes against Poles. It was the view of the Federal Republic that the restitution agreement of 1952 made with the state of Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference took care of the Jewish victims. But the Jews who remained in Poland after the war never received any part of this indemnity.

And the non-Jewish Polish Nazi victims received almost no restitution from the Germans. Although historically and legally untenable in my view, the Germans justified this with the explanation that all demands for reparations were covered by the London Debts Agreement, which also went into effect in 1952.

In the seventies the Federal Republic made a flat payment to the Gierek government as general compensation to cover the retirement entitlement of Poles who had worked as forced laborers or who had been incarcerated by the Nazis. In the 1990s it was possible to distribute funds to Polish survivors through the Foundation for German–Polish Reconciliation.

But given the extremity of the crimes, these payments were a mere drop in the ocean.
And even the restitution funds for forced labor that are currently being paid through the Foundation “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft” (memory, responsibility and future) have, as a result of the very belatedness of the effort and the long drawn out disputes over the method of payment, led to widespread displeasure among the still living victims of National Socialism.

How Nazi victims are commemorated varies both from country to country as well as interculturally. Since the late 1970s in West Germany, the sites where the atrocities occurred have been the focus of historical research and presentations on the Nazi crimes. These are the sites where people from many different nations and with different political views and religious faiths were incarcerated, mistreated and murdered. Memorial sites in Germany regard it as their task to commemorate all victim groups and to present their fates with necessary differentiation.

In Poland, the repression of the memory of the genocide of the Jews and also the lack of recognition of the other groups has continually led to discussions and tensions.
This repression is a consequence of the state directed, communist commemoration polices that placed emphasis on victims in the People’s Army while ignoring others. Not only Jews but all other groups persecuted for racial, social or religious reasons were not acknowledged. In particular, those who engaged in resistance for other political reasons, like members of the Home Army for example, were not honored by Polish society.
Moreover, the strong influence of Catholicism and the Church in Poland influenced the development of a special form of martyrdom commemoration of Nazi victims that excluded Jews. This, coupled with the perpetuation of antisemitism, meant that Jews were excluded from official commemoration.

To provide a differentiated criticism I should like to note here that I have often had the opportunity to go behind official channels to learn about the fate of Polish Jews in the country. Our curiosity was evidently greater than the interest of Poland in this chapter of its history.

There is a barracks block at the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial site dedicated to presenting the fate of Jewish victims. Besides the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial, there are also monuments erected in the death camps of Treblinka, Sorbibor, Chelmo, and Belzec. But the presentation of these memorials and the information they provide is often incomplete, misleading, and at times even distorted.

The increased interest in the Holocaust worldwide has also contributed to a change in Poland’s perception of German occupation policies and their impact. As an outside observer, I am very pleased to see that the inclination to repress the history of the Holocaust in Poland is subsiding.To name just one example: Statistical studies show that in the last few years knowledge about Auschwitz as a site of Jewish extermination has increased considerably. Auschwitz is no longer understood by Poles solely as a place of Christian Polish martyrdom.

In a number of other memorial sites and also in the educational work in Poland, presentations both of the history of the Holocaust and of Jewish life are receiving increased attention.

The distinction made in Poland between the different groups persecuted by the Nazis is historically false. Both the Nazi ideology as well as the German murder policies connected the persecution of Jews with anti-Slavic policies against Poles, even though the actual measures remained different in degree and historical sequence.

Even before the outbreak of war, Jewish citizens of Poland who lived in Germany were caught in the machinery of persecution. When the war broke out, both the Polish intelligentsia, high-level government officials as well as resistance fighters stood along side Jews on the list of shooting targets.

The presentation of the history of the persecution of Poles can only become historically accurate when the interdependence of these two persecution complexes, usually kept separate, is recognized. Only then can lessons be learned from history.

With the fall of the communist regime in Poland and the establishment of unification in Germany, a number of efforts were made to broaden commemoration to include all victims of National Socialism. This in turn led to an intensification of the cooperation between Poland and Germany. Germans were invited to assist in the redesign of the memorial sites, participating, for example, in the international council of the Auschwitz memorial site. An exchange of cooperation was also established in the other direction: the Polish Office of Memorials works together with the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum – regarding the site where the largest groups of Poles within German territory were incarcerated.

In the second half of the nineties regular meetings took place between memorial museum staff members from both countries. This enabled me during my last visit to the Sobibor memorial site to actually witness how the results of these cooperative discussions influenced the exhibition presentation there.

That fact that at these sites, which mark the most sensitive area of German–Polish, Christian- Jewish history, it was possible to engage in objective and mutually–trusting cooperation is to me a very encouraging indication of the seriousness and stability of the national relations between Poland and Germany.

Though it must be noted with slight bitterness that only a small section of the German population is even aware of this development.

From a German viewpoint, it is also promising that an active involvement in Poland with this history in no longer motivated by accusatory gestures towards the land of perpetrators, but stems from a sincere interest in learning from history in dialogue.
The central question still remains as to how the crimes were possible in the first place. In every occupied country this question leads to the very difficult issue of collaboration with the German occupiers. Although the crimes were planned, organized and executed by Germans, their extensive implementation was only possible with the help of state authorities and the societies of the countries occupied. But even this point varies in degree from country to country.

Poland has begun to address this topic. A few internationally known examples have demonstrated how difficult this issue is to confront. The efforts being made are for that reason all the more impressive.

The responsibility for designing and preserving the internationally known sites of National Socialist genocide falls today to the Polish government – although Poland was not responsible for turning them into death camps: During its existence, the Auschwitz concentration camp and extermination camp were within the territory of the greater German Reich.

Poland is today overburdened by the financial costs necessary to preserve and provide a proper use of these sites. Particularly the sites under the administration of the Polish counties – Belzec, Chelmo, Treblinka and Sobibor – have immense financial difficulties. It is painful to see objects that were discovered during excavations in Chelmo a few years ago now being kept in fruit crates in trailers or to witness the exposed building foundation from where the gas trucks departed decaying because there are not enough funds for an appropriate conservation.

Everything that we allow to decay and be destroyed will no longer be available to coming generations to help them confront and understand the history of the Nazi crimes, the fates of victims and the importance of this history for today.

The Federal Republic of Germany has provided five million euro over the last decade for the conservation of the Auschwitz memorial site. But sadly, the German government is not willing to offer further support alone and I see no plans for more funding.
For this reason I regard it as an urgent measure that the international community of states find models to facilitate the support of the memorial sites in Poland. This could be realized both through a financial commitment from the states within the Task Force as well as through a lasting commitment on the part of the European Community.
But for this to happen it is also necessary that Poland create structures for the memorial sites that do justice to the international character of these sites.

In conclusion I would like to address a current development that in my view will continue the process of understanding and reconciliation in the future and it is my hope that the official representatives and citizens of my neighboring country present here today will agree with my suggestions.

It is still necessary that Germany – state and society – recognize its historical responsibility for the crimes committed in Poland during occupation. As long as Germany does this, it will remain possible through an open and objective dialogue to engage in historical research and to conduct joint discussions about the history and how it is presented today. Future educational work must focus on the history and its concrete events. If we manage to do this in a varied form and manner that stimulates the interest of visitors and can be applied to educational work, I am certain that each coming generation will find its own ways to access the history and ask new questions.
These will probably become increasingly universal in form, and the significance of this history of persecution for the present will change over time. But I am convinced that the serious confrontation with the history today will serve the interests of a rapprochement between Poland and Germans in particular and of a democratic education in general.