German president asks Poland’s forgiveness to mark 80th anniversary of World War Two
- The carpet-bombing began one week after Germany and the Soviet Union secretly agreed to carve up Eastern Europe between them
- Polish President Andrzej Duda for his part denounced Nazi Germany’s attack on Poland, calling it ‘an act of barbarity’ and ‘a war crime’
“I bow my head before the victims of the attack on Wielun. I bow my head before the Polish victims of Germany’s tyranny. And I ask forgiveness,” Steinmeier said in both German and Polish.
Poland suffered some of the worst horrors of World War Two: nearly 6 million Poles died in the conflict that killed more than 50 million people overall.
That figure includes the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, half of them Polish.
“It is the Germans who committed a crime against humanity in Poland. Anyone who claims it is over, that the national-socialists’ reign of terror over Europe is a marginal event in German history judges that for himself,” Steinmeier added in the presence of his Polish counterpart.
The line appeared to be a clear reference to the German far-right, whose co-leader Alexander Gauland once called the 12-year Third Reich a “speck of bird poop” in an otherwise glorious German past.