The Kaczynski Twins' Thin Skin A Long List of Cross-Border Salvos
Today's political relations between Germany and Poland remain overshadowed by the legacy of the Nazi invasion and occupation. But how rational is Warsaw's frequent invocation of this past? SPIEGEL has compiled an overview of the tenser moments between the two neighbors in recent years.
- When Germans and Russians agreed on the construction of a natural gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea, then Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski felt reminded of the grim days of Nazi Germany: "That's the Molotov-Ribbentrop tradition," he says, referring to the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany who divided Poland up between them prior to the 1939 German invasion of Poland. "That was the 20th century. We don't want any repitition of that."
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When Berlin-based daily Die Tageszeitung published a satirical piece on Polish President Lech Kaczynski ("Poland's New Potato"), Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga accused the paper of having produced a "collection of disgusting remarks reminiscent of the language of (Nazi propaganda newspaper) Stürmer." Comparing Die Tageszeitung to the Nazi paper is absurd: The left-wing paper has made the exhaustive critical analysis of Germany's Nazi past one of its main concerns.
- When Germany's Federation of Expellees (BdV), an organization representing ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe, organized an exhibition on the fate of European war refugees after 1945, entitled "Forced Paths," Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski called it a "very bad, very disturbing and very sad event" and "an attempt to relativize the history of World War II." "It's important to remember who were the murderers and who were the victims," he said.
- Warsaw was especially outraged over compensation claims by the privately owned "Prussian Trust." Twenty-two German war refugees went to the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg demanding the restitution of property lost to Poland in 1945. Jaroslaw Kaczynski insisted angrily that no country in the world could allow for there to be "property claims from citizens of another country on one third of its territory." Kaczynksi also argued, in the Polish tabloid Fakt, that if Germany's elites failed to react firmly, "the nation could again move in a direction that already ended once in a great European tragedy." And yet Berlin had repeatedly emphasized that it does not support the compensation claims and that there were no longer any open questions about property from World War II.
- The prime minister went even further during a parliamentary debate on the compensation claims. "There was and continues to be a genuine front for the defense of German interests in Poland. One has to say very clearly that this front consists, on one side, of active collaborators of the German intelligence agencies, including those inherited from (East Germany's secret police) Stasi. That's a very large group of people who live off German money and pretend to be independent scholars or independent journalists -- a large group of useful idiots with a beggarly attitude. It's simply not possible that almost all people in Poland who deal professionally with German-Polish relations live off German money."
- Polish anger was also provoked when the German weekly news magazine Stern wrote about an alleged CIA prison in Masuria, one of the infamous "black sites." The Polish tabloid Super Express published an angry article about "those arrogant Germans, who want to lecture us again."
- Jaroslaw Kaczynski put yet another spin on the tensions between his country and Germany three years ago: "Relations between Poland and Germany will be normal only when Poland is just as wealthy as Germany," he stated during the electoral campaign he was conducting at the time.
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