Warsaw - In an interview published Monday, Polish opposition
leader and former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has rejected any
compromise with Germany over a planned memorial in Berlin for Germans
expelled from neighbouring countries after World War II.
Any participation by Poland in a project that commemorates the
expulsion of the Germans would mean an official recognition of the
Germans as victims of the war, Kaczynski told Wprost weekly.
Kaczynski said the Poles should not seek a compromise on the issue
and should instead say a decisive 'no' to the project.
Following his party's defeat at the polls in October, Kaczynski's
Law and Justice Party (PiS) is the largest opposition party in the
Polish parliament with 159 of the 460 seats.
Kaczynski said neither the Poles nor the victorious Allies were to
blame for the expulsion of the Germans.
'One hundred per cent of the blame lay on the side of the Germans,
who supported Hitler 'authentically and to the end,'' Kaczynski said.
The former Polish premier said that history was an important part
of foreign policy.
If Poles did not remember certain topics, in a few years they
would be presented with 'a bill for the munitions used to crush the
Warsaw Uprising,' he said.
The uprising to liberate Warsaw in 1944 was brutally crushed by
the Germans, resulting in the deaths of 18,000 Polish soldiers and
between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians.
Germany's grand coalition of left and right-wing parties wants to
set up a documentation centre to record the plight of Germans
expelled from countries like Poland and the then Czechoslovakia at
the end of the war.
According to German estimates, some 15 million German speakers
were expelled from their homes in the aftermath of the war. Up to 2
million are thought to have died as a result of the expulsions.
In response to concerns that the plan would portray the Germans as
victims of the war rather than aggressors, Berlin has offered to
expand the centre to include all nationalities expelled from their
homes in the post-war period.
German experts are expected to travel to Warsaw later this month
to explain the concept.
© 2008 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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