Germans and Poles have been neighbours for more than 1000 years. But in the mind of both societies, this long history of relations, as empirical investigations from the past year show, is virtually confined to the Second World War. The attack by Nazi Germany on Poland, its criminal policies in occupation, the Holocaust inflicted on the Jewish population, the intended genocide of Polish elites, the terror directed at the Polish people in its entirety – all these things have left deep traces in the collective consciousness of the Poles. One of the outcomes of the Second World War was the westward displacement of Poland, with millions of people – above all Germans and Poles – having to leave their traditional homelands and be resettled several hundred kilometres further west.

Coming to grips with the events of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath was made more difficult not just by the attitudes prevailing in the two societies, such as hatred and bitterness among the Poles, where almost every family had lost one or more members, and among the Germans, who had had to leave their homelands even though many of them had had nothing to do with the crimes of the National Socialists. The post-war relations between Germans and Poles were also determined by the emerging new international order, above all by the intensifying East-West conflict and the division of Germany. This overall constellation led to a distinct approach to the Second World War in each of the three societies – Polish society and the two German societies.

In West Germany three interrelated planes were observable in this process: the settling of practical political issues, the official interpretation of the past and the gradual change in the understanding of history in society at large. The first plane concerned the denazification policy of the Allies, which was extremely unpopular in society, and several amnesties for war criminals until the mid-1950s. Large parts of society took these amnesties as proof that the new German State had achieved de facto sovereignty. One highly problematic aspect was that politicians like Konrad Adenauer, who were free of any reproach of collaboration with the Nazi regime – and, still more, a party such as the Social Democrats (SPD), which had consistently been in opposition to the Nazi regime since the days of the Weimar Republic – faced the dilemma of using these and other measures designed to reintegrate groups closely associated with the Nazi regime, in order to win a majority in the Bundestag for a democratic transformation of the public order – and this in a society that was still largely dominated by authoritarian attitudes.

From our present perspective, many of the positions taken on the Second World War by West German politicians and the main stream Federal German press up to the end of the 1950s or beginning of the 1960s can only evoke astonishment. In the early 1950s, the predominant conviction in the public consciousness was that responsibility for the misdeeds of National Socialism weighed solely on Hitler and a very small circle of “war criminals”, while the majority of the Germans were regarded as having been led astray, or were even seen as victims. Any more profound attempt to come to grips with the questions that should have arisen after the Nuremberg trials, if not before, was repressed. The memory of broad swathes of society was dominated by the privation endured during the war, among soldiers their experiences at the front and more generally the awareness of having come through years of hardship. Even the resistance to Hitler, which has been seen since the 1960s as a morally indispensable element of German history, met with broad incomprehension from society in the early years of the old Federal Republic, where the resistance was to some extent reduced to a breach of the oath of allegiance to Hitler.

A systematic criminal prosecution of war criminals did not begin until 1958, when the Prosecution Centre for National Socialist War Crimes was established in Ludwigsburg as a result of the 1958 Ulm “task force” trial. This was the beginning of a series of criminal proceedings that peaked with the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt that lasted until the mid-1960s. In 1964/65, the Bundestag held its first – at times heated – debate on the lapsing of Nazi crimes under the statute of limitations. Despite repeated calls to finally “close the books” on the past, the statute of limitations on crimes against humanity was ultimately abolished, even though, decades after the event, trials have to take place in conditions that are sometimes utterly unsatisfactory, for example, with witnesses who are absent or whose memory is failing.

The discussion of National Socialist crimes, their significance and their place in history, has never ceased to dog German historical research or the German public since that time. On a scale that is probably unique in the 20th century, German society has attempted to investigate crimes committed by its own people on the orders of their own government and to draw the necessary conclusions on widely differing planes – political, legal, in terms of their own historical consciousness and on other planes. Attempts to historicise and hence relativise German crimes – for example, in the so-called “Historikerstreit” (“historians’ dispute”) in the 1990s – encountered the question posed more sharply with each passing year in historiographical and media publications: how Hitler’s seizure of power and Nazi rule had been possible at all.

The change in the view of the Second World War that set in during the second half of the 1960s helped pave the way for the Ostpolitik (East policy) pursued by the Social Democrat – Liberal coalition, though to be sure, this policy also had other roots, not least the fact that Federal German foreign policy had been completely forced onto the defensive by the growing diplomatic recognition of the GDR. The recognition of post-war reality became the point of departure for Federal German foreign policy towards Poland from the 1970s onwards. On the subject of the relation of German society to Poland, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt declared in a much discussed speech given on the site of the former concentration camp Auschwitz in 1977 that the younger generation of Germans could come before the Poles without feelings of guilt but must be aware of what had happened during the Second World War and be prepared to assume political responsibility for the deeds committed in that period, which, in the political context of the time, above all meant recognising the post-war border between Germany and Poland. The position adopted by the GDR on the Second World War and National Socialism is another story altogether. The GDR conceived itself from the beginning as an anti-fascist state. One of the implications of this was that it attributed the crimes of which Germany as a whole was accused to the Federal Republic and declared itself free of involvement in this matter. While in the Federal Republic there was a continuous process of coming to grips with National Socialism from the 1960s onwards, any discussion of the extent to which its own society was implicated in this problem was taboo in the GDR. Rainer-Maria Lepsius summed up these dual phenomena in the formulation that the Federal Republic had internalised the problem of National Socialism while the GDR, in contrast, had externalised it. In the GDR there was no wide-ranging discussion of the possible guilt and responsibility, conformism and opportunism before 1945 of Germans living in the GDR, a deficiency that undermined the credibility of the vociferously proclaimed anti-fascism of the GDR, not least in Poland.

In Poland the traumatic experience of German occupation had put down deep roots in society. In the light of the Second World War, the entire history of German-Polish relations was regarded as a “thousand-year-long struggle”. As Poland’s new western border was rejected by the government and people of the Federal Republic until well into the 1960s, the Polish Communists launched the slogan of the “German danger” in order to legitimise their rule, a strategy that in the first few years was thoroughly successful. A breakthrough in this political functionalisation of the Second World War came with the letter of the Polish bishops to their German colleagues during the Second Vatican Council in 1965, which was notable not just for the celebrated sentence, “We forgive and ask for forgiveness”. It also sketched out a view of a thousand years of Polish-German history that departed radically from the interpretation of the Party.

Even if the answer of the German bishops was unable to live up to the standard of the document written by their Polish colleagues, this letter exercised a substantial long-term influence, as it stimulated a process of rethinking vis-à-vis Germany on the part of Polish intellectuals in particular. In Germany a stormy debate had broken out shortly before this in response to a memorandum published by the Protestant Church in Germany, in which the authors had endeavoured in an exercise of empathy to do justice to the situation both of expelled Germans and the generation of Poles born after the war in the former German territories, who also had a “right to a homeland”.

At the level of the two societies, meetings began to occur in the mid-1960s between small but strategically important groups, who conveyed to their counterparts their perspective on the most difficult chapter in the history of German-Polish relations. On the Polish side, it was predominantly Catholic intellectuals belonging to the Catholic Intelligentsia Club who were involved, while their German counterparts were mainly representatives of “Action Reconciliation” and Pax Christi. Much credit for changing people’s perspective on the country next door is also due to the joint Textbooks Commission appointed in 1972, which brought together German and Polish historians. Admittedly, the Commission’s activities were unable to extend into areas such as the role of the Soviet Union in German-Polish relations and the basis of Communist rule in Poland.

One of the developments made possible by the peaceful revolutions in Europe in 1989/90 was a German-Polish dialogue on the past that was free of political considerations. However, what in fact happened in the 1990s was that various aspects of the occupation policy pursued by Germany in the Second World War were investigated predominantly by Germans, while Polish historians above all tackled the previously taboo subject of Soviet policy towards Poland during the Second World War.With regard to Germany and the Germans, a heated debate was carried on in Poland beginning in the mid-1990s, if not before, on the circumstances in which the Germans who had previously lived in the areas allocated to Poland in 1945 had left their former homes immediately before and after the end of the war, and how these events should be assessed. Jan Józef Lipski had raised this question as early as 1981 in the broader context of relations between the Poles and their neighbours, and had been treated almost as an enemy of the state by the Communist authorities as a result.

Today, German and Polish historians are engaged in a dialogue completely free of taboos on the most traumatic episode in bilateral relations, the Second World War, its causes, the inconceivable policies of National Socialist Germany towards Poland and its other eastern neighbours and the consequences in the immediate aftermath of the war. In this debate, it is unanimously agreed that the suffering that millions of Germans also experienced at the end of the war and in the immediately ensuing period cannot be weighed against the crimes earlier committed on Germany’s part but must rather be seen in the context of the Second World War. In 30 years of institutionalised dialogue, including more than a decade now of dialogue without political constraints, German and Polish historians have by a continuous series of personal meetings achieved something for which politics may make ready the relevant framework of enabling conditions but which politics itself cannot create: the building of mutual trust. The generational change – i.e., the gradual assumption of positions of responsibility by persons who did not personally experience the Second World War – has reinforced this process still further. Among young historians on both sides in particular, there now hardly exists any attempt to look at history mainly through the prism of a narrowly conceived “raison d’état”.

As a result, in the last couple of years alone, several publications have appeared that aim to promote a mutual understanding – not merely among specialists – of this the most difficult episode in German-Polish relations. At the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, a volume on German-Polish relations in 1939 – 1945 – 1949 came out in 2000, produced by a joint German-Polish team and intended for a broad public, particularly teachers.1 A team of six young historians from Poland and Germany has combed Polish archives for evidence of the fate of Germans in Poland after 1945. The first three volumes of a planned four-volume edition of source material under the general editorship of Professors Borodziej (Warsaw) and Lemberg (Marburg) have appeared in Polish,2 and the first volume in German has now also been issued3. The role of private German foundations such as the Robert Bosch Foundation, which provide financial support to undertakings aimed at promoting understanding, such as the edition of source material just cited, should be mentioned in this connection. Accounts of the experiences of Polish and German expellees have been initiated by private parties; the parallels between the fates of Germans and Poles promote understanding of the other side.4 In a broader context, finally, there is the volume on German-Polish relations in the 20th century in general, edited by the joint Textbooks Conference5.

Historians do not live in an ivory tower – least of all historians of contemporary history. Almost 60 years after the end of the war, following the solution finally reached in the issue of material compensation to slave labourers, only a very few problems dating from the Second World War and its immediate aftermath remain open in the political domain, where Germany and Poland are concerned, among them being the return of cultural goods displaced in connection with the war. Both societies are looking forward, towards a common future within the structures of western cooperation, above all NATO and the European Union. This will entail relations of a qualitatively new type, such as have not hitherto existed between Germans and Poles. In bilateral relations, future-oriented questions will predominate. The shaping of this future, however, can only succeed if it is based on both sides on an honest reckoning with the past and the endeavour to secure common criteria for its assessment.

The way in which Germans and Poles are coming to terms with the most difficult episode in their past can, firstly, open people’s eyes to the fact that the history of common relations has already lasted for a thousand years and has also contained periods of fruitful exchange. But secondly – and this is surely much to the surprise of all those involved – Polish-German relations in the historiographical field are by now regarded as exemplary by third parties, including Poland’s neighbours to the east, and as a model they should strive to emulate in their relations with Poland.

Notes
1 Wlodzimierz Borodziej, Klaus Ziemer (eds.), Deutsch-polnische Beziehungen 1939 – 1945 – 1949. Eine Einführung. Osnabrück 2000 (Einzelveröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Warschau, vol. 5)
2 Niemcy w Polsce 1945 - 1950 : wybór dokumentów / Pod red. Wlodzimierza Borodzieja i Hansa Lemberga. Warszawa 2000.
3 Die Deutschen östlich von Oder und Neiße: 1945 – 1950. “Unsere Heimat ist uns ein fremdes Land geworden ...”. Dokumente aus polnischen Archiven. Ed. by Wlodzimierz Borodziej and Hans Lemberg. Marburg/Lahn 2000
4 Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Renate Stößinger, Robert Traba (eds.), Vertreibung aus dem Osten: Deutsche und Polen erinnern sich. Olsztyn 2000
5 Ursula A. J. Becher; Wlodzimierz Borodziej; Krzysztof Ruchniewicz (eds.), Deutschland und Polen im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert. Analysen - Quellen - didaktische Hinweise. Hannover 2001. Ditto (eds.), Polska i Niemcy w XX wieku : wskazówki i materiaÚy do nauczania historii. Poznaõ 2001