It is a wet, gray day when Willy Brandt visits the memorial for the victims of the Warsaw ghetto uprising on December 7 in the capital of Poland. With a serious, almost mask-like expression on his face, he walks to the expressionist bronze monument and lays down a large wreath of white carnations. Brandt tugs the loop, steps back a few steps, then suddenly drops to his knees. Federal Foreign Minister Walter Scheel, who stands behind him on the right, is as surprised as the Polish Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz; Even Brandt's closest confidant, State Secretary Egon Bahr, is irritated.

Brandt's gaze goes into the distance. He looks like petrified. He kneels in front of the memorial for about half a minute. The photographers and cameramen know that they are taking pictures that will go around the world. "Brandt takes seconds," said Hans Ulrich Kempski, then chief reporter of the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", "who seem endless to the witnesses of the scene until he stands again, it looks like he needs all the strength to fight back tears."

The images of the Federal Chancellor kneeling in the square of the heroes of the ghetto, the German, bowing to the victims of the Germans, carry a drama that is rare in politics. It is no coincidence that it was Willy Brandt who chose this stirring gesture of empathy. No politician has so polarized the West German republic, but also excited as many people as Willy Brandt.

Brandt's hardest journey

Nevertheless, it is an absurd scene: a German anti-fascist who had fled the Nazis into exile and was therefore attacked by the rightists as a "traitor to the fatherland" recognizes the German guilt and expresses sadness.

Brandt's trip to Poland was the most difficult since he was elected Federal Chancellor in October 1969. Nowhere had Germans raged worse during the Second World War than in the eastern neighboring country; no other country had occupied them longer. Six million Poles were killed between 1939 and 1945. Converted to the population, Nazi tyranny did not demand more sacrifices from any people in Europe. The extermination camps of the Holocaust were operated by the SS, especially in Poland. German occupiers and their helpers murdered the three million Polish Jews.

The flight and expulsion of the Germans, the decision of the victorious powers to hand over a quarter of the territory of the German Reich to Poland, did not make the situation any easier. Relations with Poland were the most heavily-strained for the Germans after the Second World War. This was true even for the GDR allied with the People's Republic of Poland. Until well into the sixties, the "friendship and peace border" was hermetically sealed off and heavily guarded.

A spontaneous emotional outburst

The federal governments led by the CDU had not recognized the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish western border, but insisted on illusory territorial claims. Only the SPD, with Willy Brandt in the grand coalition as foreign minister, dared to ask this question. Egon Bahr developed the New Ostpolitik with the guiding principle "Change through rapprochement". The Brandt government then recognized the territorial reorganization of Europe decided on in Potsdam in 1945 by the allied victorious powers. At the same time, it tried to mitigate and overcome the division of Europe and, above all, Germany through the Iron Curtain.

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German-Polish Relationship: Willy Brandt's Greatest Gesture

Brandt later wrote: "The key to normalization was in Moscow." In order to reach an understanding with Poland and to improve relations with the GDR, Egon Bahr started negotiations in Moscow. On 12 August 1970, Brandt and Soviet Prime Minister Alexey Kossygin signed the "Moscow Treaty", which established the inviolability of European borders. Similarly short - and limited to renouncing violence and accepting the European borders - was also the Warsaw Treaty, signed by Brandt on 7 December 1970 in Warsaw after the knee blow.

Soon after the symbolic kneeling down, the question arose: Was the kneeling a long considered and calculated action? Hansjakob Stehle, at that time a correspondent for the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", stood a few meters from Brandt and clearly rejects this: "No," he said, "it was a spontaneous emotional outburst."

Did Brandt kneel?

Brandt himself has kept it all his life, how and when he got the idea to kneel in front of the memorial. In his "Memoirs" he wrote simply: "I had planned nothing, but Wilanow Castle, where I was housed, leaving in the feeling of having to express the peculiarities of the commemoration of the ghetto monument on the abyss of history and under the Last of the millions murdered, I did what people do when language fails. "

Brandt also quotes SPIEGEL reporter Hermann Schreiber in his memoirs. He wrote about the scene at the monument: "Then he kneels, who does not need it, because for all who need it, but do not kneel there - because they do not dare or can not or can not dare."

"In the Federal Republic," recalled Brandt, "there was no lack of sardonic or stupid questions as to whether the gesture had not been overdrawn." Der SPIEGEL, on whose cover a photograph of the kneeling chancellor, gave the Allensbacher Institut a survey commissioned: "Did Brandt kneel?"

The better German

Of the interviewees, 41 percent said that the gesture was appropriate and 48 percent thought it was excessive. Only in the group of 16 to 29 years old Brandt found by a narrow majority approval. 42 percent considered the knee blow to be exaggerated and 46 percent to be appropriate.

For many of the younger ones, the election of the anti-fascist Brandt was almost the same as the establishment of a new Federal Republic. Konrad Adenauer had called Hans Globke a former anti-Semite and Nazi State Secretary in his Chancellery; Brandt's direct predecessor, the CDU man Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, had been a member of the NSDAP. The Social Democrat Brandt, who had survived National Socialism in Norwegian exile, was the better German for the youth.

Similar to the West German youth, Brandt also found great approval in the Western world. The US magazine "Time" named it shortly after the knee drop to the "Man of the Year". One year later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize - until today the only German since the Second World War. While photos of Warsaw's knees were printed in all West German newspapers, only a small sheet written in Yiddish published a picture in Poland.

Since December 2000, there is a Willy Brandt Square in Warsaw with a monument reminiscent of the grand gesture.