Niemieckie groby wojenne z okresu II wojny światowej w Polsce. Zagadnienia wstępne

Abstract

446 thousand German soldiers died in Poland in World War II. Until the end of the 1980s, the Poles were unwilling to remember most of the German graves situated in their country. The breakthrough of 1989, together with a series of bilateral agreements, on the basis of which the graves of the German war victims were to be legally protected, respected and appropriately maintained, changed this. As a result, the remains of over 100 thousand German soldiers have been disinterred, the graves of German soldiers at the cemeteries in Joachimów-Mogiły, Kraków, Warsaw (The Northern Cemetery) and Poznań have been commemorated, and new, mass cemeteries have been built in Przemyśl, Mławka, Modlin, Siemianowice Śląskie, Nadolice Wielkie, Gdańsk, Puławy, Bartosze, near Ełk, and Stary Czarnów (Glinna) near Szczecin. These cemeteries are to provide for reconciliation and a genuine normalisation in relations between Poles and Germans. Since the late 1990s, youth camps as well as the Bundeswehr and Polish army camps have been organised in localities where German war cemeteries are situated, during which the participants carry out building work and repair the architectural artefacts in German cemeteries from both World War I and the World War II. The camp organisers’ aim is for these events to help the youth of both countries to become acquainted with each other, to learn history and tolerance, to disperse prejudices, and so forth. While to most of the Poles such actions are a form of expressing a humanitarian attitude, some of them find it unacceptable to commemorate the aggressor’s dead, while others perceive these efforts as a business opportunity.