"Twenty years after the end of World War Two, at the height of the Cold War, relations between Poland and then-West Germany were characterized by mistrust, hostility and lack of communication. The division of Germany had been finalized just four years earlier with the building of the Berlin Wall. Two irreconcilable ideological blocs the capitalist West and the communist East were now squaring up to each other on either side of the Iron Curtain."
"It would be another four years before West Germany introduced a policy of detente, after the arrival of the Social Democrat Willy Brandt as chancellor. The traumatic memory of the war and the German occupation, with 6 million dead on the Polish side and millions of Germans expelled from the east after 1945, weighed heavily on the German-Polish relationship. Furthermore, disagreement over the redrawn border between the two was a constant source of friction between Warsaw and the West German capital, Bonn."
"The West German government refused to recognize the post-war border, which had been drawn along the Oder and Neisse rivers. As far as Bonn was concerned, regions east of this line, including Silesia and eastern Pomerania, were "German Eastern Territories currently under Polish administration." Meanwhile, communist state propaganda pilloried the Germans of the young federal republic, which at the time was still led by the first West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (CDU), painting them as arch-enemies and revanchists bent on revenge and the recovery of these former territories."
Sixty years ago Polish bishops approached German counterparts with an unexpected message of reconciliation. Twenty years after World War Two, Cold War tensions, the recent division of Germany and the Berlin Wall produced deep mistrust, hostility and lack of communication between Poland and then-West Germany. Wartime trauma — six million Polish dead and mass expulsions of Germans — and dispute over the Oder–Neisse border aggravated relations. Bonn refused to recognize post-war borders, labeling eastern regions as German territories under Polish administration, while communist propaganda portrayed West Germans as revanchists. In this deadlocked situation, Catholic churches in both countries initiated intensive episcopal contacts in autumn 1965.
Read at www.dw.com
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