30/05/2025
Two birds with one stone.
➡ The stone, boulder to be exact, is a temporary memorial to Polish victims of German Na**sm, put by the German Government near the Bundestag in Berlin. Bird one the stone is meant to kill is German liability for the crimes Germany committed against Poles and Poland. Bird two is German responsibility for the said crimes. The birds are not dead yet, but heading that way.
Let’s talk about liability.
➡ The German invasion and occupation killed over 5.2 million Polish citizens, 2.9 of them Jews. That’s close to 17% of the pre-war population. Around 150,000 servicemen were KIA. Just under a million perished in mass executions or countryside raids. 4.5 million became inmates of nearly 6,000 German camps of all sorts, or Polizei-Gefängnis, police prisons, and only 860,000 of them survived.
➡ Apart from Jews, Polish elites were marked for total annihilation, but unlike Jews, right from the start. In the first occupation year, German police agencies killed over 100,000 Polish society leaders and carried on until 1945, ultimately putting 55% lawyers, 40% doctors, 20% teachers and scholars and 20% clergy in mass graves. In all, that’s 37.5% university graduates and artists dead.
➡ 21% of all victims were children under ten, and in all, Germany murdered 1.5 million Polish minors, orphaned over 20%, and denationalized at least 196,000, 80 to 85% of them forever. Killer squads emptied all Polish mental institutions in Aktion T4, and in retaliation raids by German police, tens of thousands residents of over 800 villages were exterminated without mercy.
➡ 2.1 million Poles, most aged 15 to 24, got abducted for forced labor in Germany, to make Hugo Boss, Thyssen Krupp, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, Opel, Bayer, AGFA, Siemens, Dr. Oetker, Zeiss, Continental, Bosch, Maggi, BASF, IG Farben, Heinkel, Allianz and thousands of small-time farmers richer. 15% of the slaves never returned home because they’d been worked to death.
➡ The occupation left some 590,000 Polish citizens physically crippled. Another million suffered from acute TB, the result of shortage of food and excess of backbreaking labor. How many became emotionally scarred for life no one knows, but you’ve all seen the newsreels from liberated camps. Su***de rates in post-war Poland were insane, so PTSD must have been common.
➡ Add to it crippled economy in ruined country. Germany destroyed buildings, razed industrial plants, confiscated Poland’s treasury and private deposits, looted banks and savings societies, grabbed crops and livestock, removed machinery, stole minerals and raw materials and even melted church bells for their war industry. The estimated material losses amount to $196 billion in today’s money.
➡ And that’s still not all. Hi**er and his cronies aimed to erase the Polish ethnicity with ethnocide. They stole 516,000 works of art from 25 museums they razed, and from thousands of private collections. They removed or destroyed 15 million books. They torched or blew up 43% of historic buildings and temples. Whatever couldn’t be taken, got destroyed, like 80% of Warsaw.
Let’s talk about responsibility.
➡ By 1949, the Allies tried a few thousand German killers and extradited yet more to Poland, but after Nuremberg, only some 87,000 people in Germany got charged with war crimes. The charges were usually dropped, the proceedings discontinued, or the defendants walked. The result was only under 7,000 convictions. Mind you, none of them was for genocide or crimes against humanity.
➡ And yet in 2020, 68% of Germans claimed their country worked out its N**i past and could be an example for others. 70% thought it atoned for its pre-WW2 and WW2 crimes. 58% didn’t believe the German nation had been more responsible for national socialism, war and atrocities than other nations. Only 3% admitted their own family had participated in or supported the N**i regime.
➡ We’re talking about a nation that voted the NSDAP into power, gave that party over 8 million members, 14 million soldiers, 800,000 SS-men and millions of civilian supporters. And yet, three percent. Three. No wonder on the 2023 anniversary of the end of WW2, Chancellor Scholz tweeted that "Germany and the world were liberated from the tyranny of National Socialism."
➡ In a 2024 poll by the Pilecki Institute, 57% German people decided collaborators from other countries were just as guilty of the Holocaust as the Germans, 34% said the blame was mostly German, 9% it was German only. 53% think German crimes against Poles were partly, and according to 25%, fully acknowledged and punished. 40% say that the Polish victims were adequately compensated.
➡ Here’s what they call adequate compensation: a little over a million out of 2.1 million forced laborers from Poland, exploited, on average, for 2 years and 9 months, by 200,000 German companies and farmers, between 1992 and 2004 got a one-time charity that averaged €150. The total money paid to various groups of Polish victims of German terror and exploitation amounted to €1.5 billion.
➡ But at the same time, German victims, far less numerous, received €48.5 billion in damages. And the most puzzling thing of all: former officers of the N**i state were paid the total of €300 billion. Let’s put two numbers together: three percent of German society admit their family involvement in the regime, and the German government pays €300 billion to former N**is. Doesn’t add up.
➡ Again: Germany, which killed almost 17% of Poland’s population, exploited millions of its citizens, ruined the economy and robbed cultural heritage, paid the victims 0.75% of what it paid the killers and plunderers. They abduct you in your prime and exploit you 12 hours a day for 2.9 years, taking your health, and fifty to sixty years later, if you’re still alive, they’ll give you €150. And a stone.
Let’s talk about the stone.
➡ On second thought, there’s nothing to talk about. It’s not even a permanent memorial.
(Photo copyright: Deutsches Polen-Institut e.V.)
