Political tensions overshadow Warsaw Ghetto anniversary ceremony

Poland presented German president Frank Walter Steinmeier with a copy of its €1.3 trillion second World War damages claim during his visit to mark the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Political tensions – over money, nationalism and remembrance culture – overshadowed the ceremony and featured in speeches delivered by Mr Steinmeier, Polish president Andrzej Duda and president Isaac Herzog of Israel.

At noon in Warsaw, sirens sounded and church bells rang to mark the moment on April 19th 1943 when Nazi soldiers launched a final push to empty Warsaw’s walled-in Jewish ghetto, set up in 1940.

Months after deporting more than 300,000 people from here to death camps, armed Jewish guerrillas launched a last stand. It was brutally put down after a month, and the ghetto levelled, with thousands of casualties and survivors deported to their deaths.

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“The uprising was suicide,” said 93-year-old survivor Halina Birenbaum. “We couldn’t win, but we had to do them harm.”

On an open square in the former ghetto, where ex-chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees in 1970, Mr Steinmeier asked for “forgiveness for the crimes committed by Germans here”.

He said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year had reinforced German feelings of “responsibility for the crimes of the past and our responsibility for our shared future”.

“I am convinced that our countries, our liberal democracies, have grown even closer in the past months,” he said.

Mr Duda hailed the Jewish insurgents as a “symbol of bravery, determination and courage, our heroes, who fought for a free Poland”.

His Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog described the ghetto fighters as “a symbol of heroism” during “humanity’s darkest hour” and “a symbol of the 1,000-year history of Polish Jews”.

“Absolute evil existed in the form of the Nazis and their accomplices,” said Mr Herzog. “And absolute good existed in the form of the victims and the rebels, from every nation.”

Warsaw and Jerusalem have been at loggerheads over compensation rights for Israelis and Holocaust education projects. On Tuesday, thousands of Israeli teenagers participated in the annual “March of the Living” from the former Nazi death camp in Auschwitz.

Warsaw officials want greater effort to frame Poland as a place of Jewish life – for more than a millennium – with the mass murder of Europe’s Jews linked more clearly to Germany.

Tensions between Germany and Poland, meanwhile, have increased since Warsaw’s national conservative government – in power since 2015 and seeking a third term in the autumn – filed its wartime compensation claim, drafted by a government commission, last autumn.

It rejects a 1953 waiver of further compensation claims against Germany, insisting that deal was signed by the communist regime under pressure from the Soviet Union.

Berlin insists the new claim has no basis in international law, pointing to postwar compensation payments, the transfer of former eastern German lands to postwar Poland in 1945 and the 1990 German unification treaty.

Meanwhile some in Germany have shared concerns raised by politicians and historians in Israel and Poland that their respective governments are exploiting the Holocaust for nationalist political agendas.