It was a historic commemoration ceremony today in Warsaw to mark the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19, 1943. Then hundreds of Jews who had remained in the Ghetto, surviving under inhumane conditions, rose up against the German occupiers, who they put down the rebellion with great violence, setting fire to the Ghetto. The fighting lasted until May 16 and ended with the destruction of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw.

On April 19, 2023, for the first time, a German president, in this case the Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier, addressed the assembled crowd – flanked by their counterparts from Poland, Andriy Duda and Israel, Isaac Herzog – a memorial speech for the victims of the Nazi atrocity in Warsaw. After all, this particular place has been a symbol of German-Polish reconciliation since 1970, when the then German Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt humbly to honor the dead of the Holocaust.

“I apologize”

“I stand before you today and ask for your forgiveness for the crimes the Germans have committed here,” an emotional Frank-Walter Steinmeier said from Warsaw on Tuesday morning. “The Germans meticulously planned and executed the Holocaust, this crime against humanity. With unimaginable brutality and inhumanity they persecuted, enslaved and murdered the Jews of Europe, the Jews of Warsaw” the German president underlined in his speech, repeating “never again” and characterizing, in front of the presidents of Poland and Israel, “doAP ro” post-war reconciliation.

AP

“In liberal democracies, our power grows when we act together, united,” he pointed out. But the German president also wanted to send a message to Moscow, at a time when, in the year 2023, a new war of aggression by Russia is raging in Ukraine, on the European continent. Once again, from Warsaw and in a highly charged historical and symbolic climate, he reiterated Germany’s undivided support for Ukraine by all means.

War reparations were absent, but…

According to information from the Polish program of DW and the correspondent Magda Gwodz-Pałokat, who is in the Polish capital, today in Warsaw and the contacts of the three presidents indeed moved in an atmosphere of unity, paying tribute with reflection and deep respect to the victims of Nazi destruction. In fact, Polish President Andrzej Duda did not make any public reference to the issue of Polish claims for reparations amounting to 1.3 trillion euros and chose to keep a low profile, at least in the context of today’s Remembrance Day.

However, according to a report by the Polish correspondent Jacek Lepiars, just a few hours before the arrival of the German president in Warsaw, the Polish government approved a resolution on the need to regulate the issue of the payment of war reparations and reparations resulting from the German occupation of the Third Reich in Poland. It should be noted that the country’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and President Andrey Duda come from the same party (PiS).

O if. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland and responsible for these matters, Arkandius Mularczyk, even announced that the resolution in question could be the basis for a second diplomatic note to the German government on the issue of war reparations and reparations. As the Polish journalist notes, Warsaw’s previous verbal communication to Berlin had been chosen to be sent to Berlin on October 3, 2022, the Day of German Unity. The response of the German Foreign Ministry followed the standard post-war Germany: “The matter is closed.”