The Hindu : International : Schroeder on mission to mourn Polish holocaust

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 01, 2004

International

International

Schroeder on mission to mourn Polish holocaust

By Ian Traynor

LONDON, JULY 31. Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder goes to Warsaw tomorrow on a delicate mission to mourn the German military's levelling of the Polish capital and the slaughter of 200,000 people in the Second World War.

He is under pressure to assuage Polish fears of German claims for properties lost in western Poland when the Nazis were defeated.

After he attended the ceremonies last month in France to mark the 60th anniversary of the D-day invasion, Mr. Schroeder's participation in the events marking the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising completes a double act of German rehabilitation in western and eastern Europe.

But unlike the close Paris-Berlin axis, relations between Poland and Germany have chilled in recent months, not least because of Polish alarm over changing German attitudes to the war and the issues raised by the suffering of Germans during and after the conflict.

Marek Belka, the Polish Prime Minister, yesterday called on Mr. Schroeder to make a firm statement in Warsaw renouncing all German claims for compensation or restitution for German property and assets expropriated at the end of the war.

Compensation issue

``It would be enormously important if Germany made an initiative putting an end to the compensation issue,'' Mr. Belka told the German newspaper, Die Welt. The Chancellor ``should dispel the bad atmosphere''.

Increasing German pressure on the Poles for an admission of the wrongs done to Germans at the end of the war and for some form of material compensation are causing intense resentment and mistrust in Poland, where six million people died during the war and whose invasion by Hitler in 1939 triggered the outbreak of the conflict.

Some 12 million Germans were kicked out of central Europe, many of them killed, at the war's end.

Poland, in particular, was literally lifted from east to west and transplanted on to territory that for centuries had been peopled by Germans.

The rightwing Prussian Trust organisationhas been launching private lawsuits in Poland for the return of lost property, believing that Poland's accession to the E.U. in May will make it easier for Germans to reclaim their former homes. —

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

International