German parliament approves memorial in Berlin for Polish WW2 victims

The Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, has approved a plan to create a memorial in Berlin that will honour the Polish victims of German Nazi occupation during World War Two.

The decision was approved by a large majority of MPs, who voted in favour of a proposal submitted by representatives of four parties: the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD), as well as the Greens and Free Democratic Party (FDP). The Left (Die Linke) also voted in favour.

The only party not to give its approval was the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is the largest opposition group. It abstained from voting. The leader of AfD’s parliamentary group, Alexander Gauland, has previously called “Hitler and the Nazis just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history”.

The newly approved proposal undertakes to create a “place of remembrance, meetings and discussion dedicated to Polish victims”. It notes that, “from the outset, the aim of the German occupation in Poland was complete destruction of the statehood of our neighbour”, reports Rzeczpospolita.

Poland experienced among the greatest losses of any country during World War Two. Almost six million of its citizens were killed, the vast majority of them civilians. That represented around 17% of the country’s pre-war population, a higher proportional death toll than for any other state involved in the war.

Around half of those killed were Polish Jews, with the German occupiers centring their Holocaust machinery in occupied Poland, which before the war had been home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. The Germans, as well as the Soviets, also sought to eliminate the Polish intellectual and military elites.

In addition, many Polish cities – including the capital Warsaw – towns and villages were left almost completely destroyed, while much of the country’s cultural heritage was plundered. Tens of thousands of works of art remain listed as missing.

“There will be a place in the middle of Berlin where we can focus on Poland – both the terrible consequences of the German occupation and the very close relations between our countries now and in the future,” says Rita Süssmuth, a former president of the Bundestag and now president of the German Institute of Polish Affairs.

“Just as it is necessary to inform German society about the unimaginable crimes committed on Polish soil, it is equally important to reflect at this point on the coexistence of Poles and Germans in a common Europe – in the past, but also today and tomorrow,” added historian Peter Oliver Loew, the institute’s director.

The proposal for a memorial in Berlin was first made by Florian Mausbach, a retired urban planner, reports Gazeta Wyborcza. Although its exact form is yet to be decided, its likely location is adjacent to the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof, a railway terminus seriously damaged during the war.

The memorial is now to be designed in consultation with experts working with the German Institute of Polish Affairs, whose former head, Dieter Bingen, told Rzeczpospolita that it was important for the conception to be aimed at young people.

Germany’s ambassador to Poland, Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, has also expressed his support. Shortly after taking up his post in September, he outlined one of his main aims as “deepening knowledge in Germany – especially among our young people – of what the Germans did in Poland between 1939 and 1945”.

“This is the purpose served by a monument to Polish victims of the Third Reich in Berlin,” the ambassador told Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita at the time. On Friday, he hailed the Bundestag’s vote as a “historic decision” to commemorate “all victims of the German war of extermination and German occupation in Poland”.

Poland’s foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, who last month discussed the proposed memorial with his German counterpart Heiko Maas, welcomed Friday’s resolution as “long-awaited a step in the right direction” that emphasises the “murderous character” of German wartime occupation.

The Polish ambassador in Berlin, Andrzej Przyłębski, however, has been less enthusiastic. Ahead of Friday’s vote, he told Rzeczpospolita that he was “slightly disappointed” with the proposal.

Przyłębski said that he understood the project to be aimed at creating a building that would present centuries of Polish-German relations, with the six years of wartime occupation just “one element”. Przyłębski would prefer a more “classic monument”.

After the Bundestag’s decision on Friday, Przyłębski welcomed what he said was a “positive signal”. He also expressed hope that the wording of the resolution “does not exclude the possibility of a classic monument”.

The proposed “Poland memorial” has also faced some criticism from German politicians who fear the “nationalisation” of remembrance.

Social Democrat Markus Meckel said that beginning to commemorate victims by nation would lead to calls for memorials from other countries and ethnic groups that suffered in the war, reports MDR, a German radio station.

An anonymous source close to the German foreign ministry also told Rzeczpospolita that the development of the memorial has no relation to the Polish government’s demands for Berlin to pay war reparations.

Such claims have resurfaced in recent years, backed by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which in 2017 set up a parliamentary committee to calculate the amount of money that Germany owed Poland.

In May last year, the committee’s chairman, PiS MP Arkadiusz Mularczyk, said that the report was complete and suggested that the amount demanded from Germany could reach $850 billion.

However, since then the report has remained unpublished. At the end of last year, Mularczyk explained that it was still being translated, seven months after he had declared it complete. In September this year, a further ten months later, he said that translation was still underway, reports Money.pl.

Main image credit: German Federal Archive/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Ben Koschalka

Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.