In Warsaw, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called for people to look to the future, despite the war in Ukraine, Poland's demands for reparations from Germany and other controversial German-Polish issues.

"The good news is that we have a common future," said the Foreign Minister on Tuesday after meeting her Polish colleague Zbigniew Rau.

"There can't be as much separating us as connecting us!"

Gerhard Gnauck

Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.

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At the German Embassy's annual reception on German Unity Day the night before, Baerbock said a remarkable sentence in front of hundreds of guests.

It actually contains things that are taken for granted, but during Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine it sounds new.

Perhaps it will go down in history as the Baerbock Doctrine: “The security of Eastern Europe is Germany's security.

You can rely on it."

With a view to the 1980s and the Polish citizens' movement Solidarność at the time ("without Solidarność there would not have been a fall of the wall in our country"), she promised: "We will be there for you, just as you were there for us when we needed you most At the same time, she spoke of the danger of an "erosion" of what had been achieved in the 1991 neighborhood agreement between the two countries.

Note not handed over with demands for reparations

However, on Germany's holiday of all days, Minister Rau had signed the note addressed to Berlin on demands for reparations amounting to trillions for damage and casualties during the Second World War.

According to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is supposed to reach Berlin “by courier”, so it was not handed over to the minister personally.

From the federal government's point of view, the question of reparations has been closed, said Baerbock.

At the same time, the Foreign Minister assured: "Germany stands by its historical responsibility without ifs or buts." It remains "our eternal task to remember the millionfold suffering that Germany has done to Poland".

The brutality "with an inhuman campaign of oppression, Germanization, pure annihilation" has "produced a completely different pain in Poland than in other places," said the Foreign Minister.

The memory of this must also be kept alive among young people in Germany.

It is "always noticeable how present this pain is to this day," said Baerbock zu Rau.

"And not only in ninety-year-olds, but also in nine-year-olds, because this pain is passed down through the generations." Perhaps not everyone in Germany is aware of this.

Baerbock admitted that Germany had to take a closer look at possible shortcomings of its own, for example in education policy.

She was alluding to the native language teaching for Poles in Germany and Germans in Poland, which was anchored in the 1991 Neighborhood Agreement.

Her Polish counterpart said on the issue of reparations that he was "convinced that the position of the German government on this issue will evolve as a result of the dialogue." the perpetrator of a crime was empowered to independently and solely determine the extent of his guilt, but also the extent and duration of his responsibility.