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7 FROM ENEMIES TO PARTNERS The Polish-German Transition to Peace The transformation of German-Polish relations since the end of World War II has been dramatic. Relations between these two countries have a history of bitterness dating back to the late eighteenth century, when Germans ruled over Poles. German rule may have brought technological progress, but it also crushed Polish insurrections and tried to “Germanize” Polish children.1 The period of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945 was a brutal one. Mass expulsions of Poles from territories annexed to Germany were conducted, more than 6 million Poles perished during the war, and Polish culture was destroyed. To complicate things further, in the aftermath of the war following Germany’s defeat and the creation of the new border with Poland along the Oder-Neisse Line, close to a million of the Germans who lived in Poland were expelled. Many perished during the expulsion, and others found themselves as refugees either in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) of East Germany or in the FRG. Despite being ethnic Germans, many of those who were expelled still dreamed of returning to their homes in areas that had become part of Poland.2 Despite this difficult history in German-Polish relations, most observers acknowledge that economic factors played a central role in the two nations’ transition to peace, though somewhat differently for each party. For Poland, even under Communist rule and more clearly after the democratization process, there was a clear and strong economic incentive to develop peaceful relations with Germany. For Germany, while normalizing relations did hold economic benefits, the driving force behind the process was political, and economic tools 160 Press-Barnathan CH7:Press-Barnathan CH7 3/31/09 2:54 PM Page 160 were utilized to promote Ostpolitik in Eastern Europe in general and in Poland in particular. After the end of World War II, the two states found themselves in two diametrically opposed ideological camps. Their relations were marred by a host of thorny problems. While Poland insisted that, according to the Potsdam resolutions , the Oder-Neisse border was the final and permanent border with Germany, the Germans insisted that it was not and that German “lost territories” should be returned. This call was picked up and repeated by the masses of German expellees who found their way to West Germany. Germany also demanded that the Polish government acknowledge the existence of the German minority in Poland and ensure its rights, something the Poles refused to do. Finally, the Germans were intent on recovering various cultural artifacts that the Poles had confiscated after the German withdrawal. The Poles, for their part, demanded sizable financial compensation from Germany for Polish victims of forced labor, as well as an apology for Germany’s behavior. During the 1950s, Chancellor Adenauer adhered to the Hallstein Doctrine, which meant an official boycott of all of Eastern Europe in light of their recognition of the GDR. However, by the early 1960s, economic relations between the two states had begun to develop once again. Thus, for example, while official diplomatic relations were not possible at the time, in 1963, the FRG did open a trade mission in Warsaw, which in practice served as a sort of embassy. The first major official breakthrough in renewing relations between the two states was the Warsaw Treaty, signed in 1970, which followed the German policy shift known as Ostpolitik, introduced in the mid-1960s by Chancellor Willy Brandt. The treaty affirmed that the Oder-Neisse Line formed the western frontier of the People’s Republic of Poland and that neither side had any territorial claims against the other. This in itself was a major accomplishment, given that this westward shift of the Polish frontier came at the expense of nearly forty thousand square miles of formerly German territory that had been home to about 8 million Germans. Still, this crucial border issue was not fully resolved because West Germany argued that actual recognition (a word that did not appear in the treaty) could be granted only by a unified Germany. The Germans thus stressed in the aftermath of the treaty that they would respect the border as long as the FRG existed. Final resolution of this issue would not take place for twenty years.3 The part of the treaty emphasized by the Germans was that calling for the normalization of economic and cultural relations. The treaty (ratified in West Germany only two years later, in 1972...

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