POLAND/GERMANY: The German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schröder, has praised the "heroic and courageous resistance" of the Polish people and apologised for German war crimes exactly 60 years after the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. Derek Scally reports from Warsaw.
The revolt was put down after 63 days with barbaric force, leaving hundreds of thousands of men, women and children dead or imprisoned and the city of Warsaw, as Mr Schröder put it yesterday, in "soot and ashes".
"We bow our heads in shame at the crimes of the Nazi troops," an emotional Mr Schröder said, addressing a huge crowd in a square named after the uprising. "In this place of Polish pride and German disgrace, we hope for forgiveness and peace." He paid tribute to the uprising's heroes who enabled him to come to the Polish capital as "chancellor of another free and democratic Germany".
Earlier, a visibly moved Chancellor laid a wreath and made two deep bows at the memorial to the heroes of the uprising at 5 p.m., the so-called W-Hour when the uprising began. Mr Schröder joined the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, and the British deputy prime minister, Mr John Prescott, to lay wreaths at the uprising graveyard.
The representatives of the war time Allies are conscious that many Poles remain embittered that the Allies left Poland to face the Nazis alone in its hour of need.
Mr Powell said: "Poland will never be alone again . . . I think the purpose of these events over the last couple of days . . . is to celebrate Poland's freedom now, to commemorate what was done in the past in achieving that freedom and to look forward."
The Polish Prime Minister, Mr Marek Belka, said: "This anniversary is for the first time the chance to make the Warsaw Uprising an integral part of the great European historical heritage . . . This 60th anniversary shows what an important road our peoples have behind them."
Mr Belka said he discussed with Mr Schröder "problems which have their roots in the past", a veiled reference to pending compensation claims against the Polish government from Germans who lost property after the war in what is now Poland.
Mr Schröder told Varsovians that Germans were well aware who started the second World War and who its first victims were. "Therefore there can be no more room for restitution claims from Germany which turn history on its head," he said, adding that those seeking compensation had no political backing and were morally unjustified.
The Polish Foreign Minister, Mr Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, criticised the Allied post-war conferences which divided Europe and put Poland inside the Soviet sphere of influence. "They decided about the fate, the future of independent sovereign nations, fighting with their blood for their freedom, above their heads," he said. "That cannot be accepted and it should never happen again."