Temporary memorial to Polish victims of Nazi-German occupation unveiled in Berlin

A temporary memorial to Polish victims of the Nazi-German occupation of World War Two has been unveiled in Berlin, after it was announced in April by Germany’s culture minister, Claudia Roth.

The memorial – located in the place where Adolf Hitler announced the invasion of Poland – takes the form of a large boulder with a bronze information plaque. It will later be replaced by a permanent memorial known as the Polish-German House.

But the newly erected boulder has prompted criticism in Poland, mainly among politicians from the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), Poland’s main opposition party.

The temporary memorial was unveiled yesterday at a symbolic location – the site of the former Kroll Opera House, which functioned as the assembly hall of the Reichstag – Germany’s parliament – from 1933 to 1942. It was there, on 1 September 1939, that Hitler announced the invasion of Poland.

The boulder, placed under a wild apple tree, weighs close to 30 tonnes. Underneath it, the bronze plaque reads, “To the Polish victims of Nazism and the victims of the German occupation and terror in Poland 1939-1945” in both Polish and German.

“We are closing the gap in the culture of memory,” said Kai Wegner, mayor of Berlin, at the unveiling, quoted by Polish news website Interia.

“This stone is an admission of guilt. Without an admission of guilt, there can be no reconciliation,” said architect Florian Mausbach, one of the initiators of the memorial, quoted by German news programme Tagesschau.

Heiko Maas, former German foreign minister and president of the German Institute of Polish Affairs (DPI), emphasised that “this is a day we have been waiting for for a long time”, reported Polish broadcaster TVN24.

He praised the German citizens’ initiative from 2017 that paved the way for the memorial and said that “we Germans are not sufficiently aware of the misery, pain and destruction that our country brought to Poland during World War Two”.

Meanwhile Polish culture minister Hanna Wróblewska, also present at the unveiling, recalled that the citizens’ appeal for a memorial in 2017 began with a reminder that “there is almost no Polish family that was not affected by the German occupation in the period 1939-1945.”

Wróblewska, quoted by TVN24, added that the memorial is “a responsibility consisting of the courage to look at the past without avoiding difficult issues, without passing over in silence, without forgetting.”

However, the temporary memorial was also criticised in Poland by politicians from the main opposition party, PiS.

“Today in Berlin an embarrassing comedy: after several decades of babbling, Bundestag resolutions, grand announcements and constant ‘changes of concept’, they are to unveil a temporary…stone,” wrote Piotr Gliński, an MP and former culture minister. “No sovereign Polish government should participate in this blunder.”

Meanwhile, Mateusz Morawiecki, a former PiS prime minister and current chairman of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party, wrote that the boulder “is not a dignified commemoration of Polish victims, but a grotesque one”.

“No Polish politician should bow before a stone until the Germans kneel before the truth and account for their crimes,” he added. Morawiecki and PiS have repeatedly called for Germany to pay war reparations to Poland.

The idea to commemorate the Polish victims of the wartime Nazi-German occupation first emerged in Germany in 2017 when a group of around 140 citizens, politicians and social activists called for a monument to be erected in Berlin.

Prior to that, Polish politicians and Auschwitz survivor Władysław Bartoszewski had persistently called for such a monument, emphasising the need for Germany to visibly commemorate the suffering of Poles during World War Two.

Germany’s federal government, the Bundestag, first approved plans to create a memorial honouring Polish victims in November 2020. The measure received support from all political parties apart from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

However, not until August 2023 did the German culture ministry outline plans for the memorial, which is to take the form of a “Polish-German House commemorating the suffering that took place in Poland in the years 1939-1945, as well as the cruel death of over five million Polish citizens, including approximately three million Jews”.

While focusing on wartime atrocities, the planned Polish-German House is also intended to show historical ties before and after the war, including Germany’s role in the partitions of Poland from the late 18th to early 20th century, the migration of Poles to German lands, and Poland’s integration into the EU and NATO.

The idea finally received approval from the German government in June 2024. After that, the project passed back to the Bundestag for implementation.

Almost six million Polish civilians – around half of them Polish Jews – are estimated to have died as a result of the Second World War. That represents 17% of Poland’s pre-war population, which is the highest proportional death toll of any country during the war.

The German occupiers also laid waste to many Polish cities – including the capital, Warsaw, which saw around 85% of its buildings destroyed – and plundered or destroyed much of Poland’s cultural heritage.

That painful legacy continues to cause tensions today, in particular under the rule of the PiS government, which launched a bid to obtain war reparations from Germany. Berlin argues that there is no legal basis for those claims.

Main image credit: MKiDN (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)