During the 80th anniversary observance of the Warsaw Uprising on Wednesday, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier sought forgiveness from the Polish people. He emphasized that Germans must always remember the immense suffering inflicted on Poland by their nation.
“We Germans must not forget,” the German head of state said in Warsaw, the Polish capital, where people rose up against the occupying German forces during World War II. He met with very elderly veterans of the battle.
Steinmeier's remarks continue a tradition of German leaders visiting Warsaw to honor the victims of Adolf Hitler's regime. This tradition was notably marked in 1970 when Chancellor Willy Brandt famously knelt at the site former Warsaw Ghetto, symbolizing remorse for the extermination of millions of European Jews.
Steinmeier himself also begged for forgiveness in 2023 on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a revolt by doomed Jews a year before the larger city-wide uprising.
The country’s main observances of the Warsaw Uprising take place today, Thursday, the anniversary of the start of the revolt.
Warsaw uprising
On 1 August, 1944, the Polish underground army launched an uprising against German forces after nearly five years of brutal occupation.
The thousands of poorly armed insurgents held on for 63 days in the cut-off city, inflicting heavy losses on the well-armed and trained German troops before being forced to surrender.
The Wehrmacht and SS brutally suppressed the insurgents, massacring 200,000 Poles and bombing the city into a wasteland of rubble.
Moscow watches
Meanwhile, Soviet troops, which were in the vicinity, did not come to the help of the insurgents. By giving the Germans time to quell the Warsaw Uprising, "Soviet authorities also allowed them to eliminate the main body of the military organisation that supported the Polish government-in-exile in London," according to historians.
As a result, there was hardly any resistance when the Soviet army occupied all of Poland, which gave Moscow a free hand in creating the communist-led Provisional Government of Poland on 1 January, 1945. After the war, Poland entered the Moscow-dominated Warsaw Pact, and Poland could only choose to join NATO and the EU after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
(With newswires)
