German president asks Poles for forgiveness on eve of 80th anniversary of Warsaw Uprising

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German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked the Polish people for forgiveness during observances Wednesday marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, saying Germans must never forget the immeasurable suffering inflicted on the neighboring nation.

“We Germans must not forget,” the German head of state said in Warsaw, the Polish capital, where people rose up against the occupying German forces during World War II. He met with very elderly surviving veterans of the battle.

Steinmeier’s words fall into a tradition of German leaders traveling to Warsaw to pay homage to the victims of Adolf Hitler’s regime. In a gesture of a past era that has become iconic, Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1970 fell to his knees at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto to express remorse for the annihilation of millions of European Jews.

Steinmeier himself also begged for forgiveness in 2023 on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a revolt by doomed Jews a year before the larger city uprising.

The country’s main observances of the Warsaw Uprising are to take place on Thursday, the anniversary of the start of the revolt.

On Aug, 1, 1944, the Polish underground army launched an uprising against German forces after nearly five years of their brutal occupation.

The thousands of poorly armed insurgents held on for 63 days in the cut-off city, inflicting heavy losses on the well-armed and trained German troops before being forced to surrender.

The Wehrmacht and SS crushed the insurgents, carrying out a massacre of 200,000 Poles and bombing the city until it was a wasteland of rubble.