Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). When the British Foreign Secretary was asked what the core of his duties was, he replied: “It is in all cases to represent the interests of Her Majesty’s United Kingdom.”
Before his visit to Warsaw, Chancellor Scholz had just read the prescribed form of oath clearly and distinctly during his swearing-in ceremony in the Bundestag, thereby accepting his mandate, albeit without invoking God: “…devote my strength to the welfare of the German people, increase their benefit, turn harm away from them…” This now also applies to Poland!
To the demands for reparations from the Polish head of government, Morawiecki, he replied that this question had been legally clarified, i.e. in plain language: Germany will not pay reparations!
It must be noted in this context, however, that up to now no official German body, or person in a position as is Olaf Scholz, has mentioned the annexation of Eastern Pomerania, half of East Prussia and all of Silesia and the expulsion of the German population there.
These measures contrary to international law must not simply be forgotten.
Nor were they an act imposed on Poland by the Allies, but rather demands that were circulating in Warsaw long before the Second World War and thus a fulfilment of Polish dreams.
Reparations? If so, then these have been more than fulfilled with the aforementioned Polish measures.
As someone who experienced the brutal expulsion as a child, I will not allow it to be erased from history.
Both peoples, Germans and Poles, were perpetrators and victims at the same time. As the Polish historian Jan Jozef Lipski once put it: “We have to tell each other everything on the condition that both of us talk about their own guilt. If we don’t do this, the burden of the past will not allow us to set off towards a future together.”
Annotation:
We must tell each other everything, Deutsch-Polnischer Verlag, page 153, Warsaw 1998
