German anti-Polish revanchism

This 2008 video is called Poland under German occupation 1939-1945.

In Germany, there was a neonazi band called Landser. They sang songs like ‘Adolf Hitler, unser Führer, Adolf Hitler, unser Held’ (Adolf Hitler, our Führer, our hero); songs claiming that African immigrants should be expelled from Germany and drowned; and at least one anti-Polish song: ‘Polackentango’ (Polacks‘ tango).

Some of its lines (translated):

When at Danzig [Polish: Gdansk] the Polish fleet will sink into the sea
And the German national anthem will sound on the Marienburg [the medieval castle of the Teutonic Order crusaders in Malbork, in Poland]
Then the Wehrmacht [Hitler’s army] will invade Breslau [Polish: Wroclaw] with their tanks
Und then the eastern territories of Germany [with nazi Germany‘s borders] will come home at last

At first sight, one might think this is a rant by mentally ill nazis without any political influence. Landser was convicted (not especially for the Polackentango; for their nazism and racism in general). And in 1970, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), led by Willy Brandt, agreed to recognize the post-1945 western border of Poland (what earlier West German governments had refused).

Today, 14 September 2017, however, Dutch NOS TV reports about Alexander Gauland. He is one of the two leaders of the extreme right AfD party, expected to get MPs in this month’s German general election (the other leader is Alice Weidel). Mr Gauland has said in a 2 September 2017 speech that Germans should be proud of the violence of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in World War II (and of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s armed forces in World War I as well). ‘Just like French people are proud of Napoleon, and British people of Winston Churchill‘.

Just days before the federal election, the consequences of Germany’s return to a policy of war and militarism are becoming ever more apparent. At a meeting of the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the state of Thuringia at the beginning of September, the party’s leading election candidate, Alexander Gauland, called for Germany’s Nazi past to be seen in a positive light: here.

Even further to the political ‘center’: an article by Peter Schwarz from Germany of today points out German revanchism against the western border of Poland. Not by some neonazi band, not by the AfD, but by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a ‘center’-right-wing establishment daily newspaper.

Germany and Poland are both European Union and NATO military alliance members. If the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has its way, then relations between these two allies will look like those of the two NATO, and still European Union, allies Spain and Britain, with their conflict on Gibraltar. Or like the NATO allies Turkey (also associate European Union member) and Greece (full European Union member).

A new exhibition brings the remarkable work of anti-fascist Polish painter Andrzej Wroblewski to Britain for the first time, says MICHAL BONCZA.