The President of Germany apologizes in Warsaw for Nazi crimes and condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine

2023-04-19 21:57:23

a german president Frank Walter Steinmeierwith a David’s star on his lapel, like the ones the Nazis forced Jews to wear, and apologizing from Poland for the crimes of the Third Reich: the image, on the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, did not have the emotional charge that it displayed Willy Brandt, in December 1970, kneeling before the monument to the heroes of the Jewish revolt. The gesture of the then German chancellor was spontaneous, silent and probably the best expression of repentance and German shame at the horror of Nazism.

Steinmeier embodied in a speech the same sentiment as Brandt, a social democrat like him. He asserted that German responsibility for the crimes of Nazism will persist for yet several generations to come.

“The crimes committed here by the Germans plunge me into a deep shame”, he affirmed, in a ceremony marked by the sound of the sirens with which in Warsaw every year at 12:00 noon the revolt of the April 19, 1943. That morning, the inmates rose desperately against their deportation. Of the 450,000 Jews Only 50,000 of those who had lived crowded into the three square kilometers of the ghetto remained in the summer of 1942, with the beginning of the mass deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp. The uprising was brutally put down and those who remained in their homes were burned to death, with the ghetto on fire.

“I am before you to ask your forgiveness for the crimes committed by the Germans,” Steinmeier summed up. The president’s message does not differ much from other speeches delivered after Brandt’s historic genuflection by other German leaders, either in Poland or in Israel. He was accompanied at the 80th anniversary events by the Polish President, Andrzej Duda, and the Israeli Isaac Herzog. Steinmeier praised not only the “unimaginable courage” of the ghetto Jews who, poorly armed and destitute, stood up to Nazi soldiers. He also condemned the current “aggressive war” that shakes Europe, in neighboring Ukraine, and proclaimed the german determination to support, as Poland does, kyiv.

Apart from expressions of unity against Russia or reconciliation over the wounds of the past, the presence in Warsaw of the German, Israeli and Polish presidents occurred at a time of multi-band tensions, not just historical. Poland reproaches Berlin whenever the occasion arises for its slowness in military support for kyiv. And he continues to demand reparations from Germany for the ravages of the Nazi occupation – which the ultranationalist government party Law and Justice (PiS) places in €1.3 trillion–. Berlin considers that this debt was settled with the resignation of Poland itself, in 1953, to be compensated by the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Warsaw argues that it was a forced decision from Moscow over the then communist Poland.

Between Israel and Poland, on the other hand, the wound caused last year by the law passed by Warsaw that prevented the restitution of any assets seized by the Nazis to their heirs. A measure that the then prime minister, Yair Lapiddescribed as “anti-Semitic and immoral.”