German President marks former leader’s Warsaw ghetto tribute

German President Christian Wulff yesterday honoured Jews who fought and died in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazis, 40 years after a landmark tribute by his nation’s Chancellor Willy Brandt.

Mr Wulff and Polish opposite number Bronislaw Komorowski laid wreaths at the Warsaw monument inaugurated in 1948 where the doomed Jewish fighters had made their last stand.

During a visit to Poland on December 7, 1970, ChancellorBrandt fell to his knees at the same monument.

“I was 11 years old, but I was deeply marked by Willy Brandt’s great gesture, a sign of remorse, sadness and shame in the face of the huge suffering inflicted by Germans on eastern Europe,” Mr Wulff said earlier during a meeting with young Poles.

Besides being seen as a plea for forgiveness for World War II, Mr Brandt’s gesture also came to symbolise his drive to rebuild ties with eastern Europe, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.

Anti-Nazi activist Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat, spent the war in exile in Scandinavia. A fixture in post-war German politics, he was Chancellor from 1969 to 1974. He died aged 78 in 1992.

Pre-war Poland was Europe’s Jewish heartland. Its Jewish community numbered some 3.2 million, or around 10 per cent of the country’s total population.

Polish Jews represented around half of the six million victims of the Holocaust.

After invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis isolated Jews in ghettos, before beginning a systematic campaign of mass murder.

On April 19, 1943, they began liquidating the Warsaw ghetto, where just 60,000 people remained after the vast majority of the 450,000 held there had died of hunger or disease or had been sent to death camps.

Historical factbox

• The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, located in occupied Poland during World War II. It was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940.

• At this time, the population in the ghetto was estimated to be 400,000 people – about 30 per cent of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 2.4 per cent of the size of Warsaw.

• The ghetto was split into two areas, the “small ghetto”, generally inhabited by richer Jews and the “large ghetto”, where conditions were more difficult; the two ghettos were linked by a single footbridge.

• The Nazis decides to close the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16, 1940, by building a wall, topped with barbed wire, and deploying armed guards.

• Over 100,000 of the ghetto’s residents died due to rampant disease or starvation, as well as random killings, even before the Nazis began massive deportations of the inhabitants from the ghettos.