Twenty Years After

"I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people." said Britain's Edmund Burke 175 years ago. Last week, on the 20th anniversary of the day that Nazi tanks rolled into western Poland and lit the flames of World War II. many of the political and intellectual leaders of West Germany, ignoring Burke's admonition, soberly indicted themselves and all their countrymen.

"This was the beginning of the descent into the abyss," said the Frankfurter Nene Presse in a special issue commemorating September1, 1939. "We and not Hitler alone-that is the nagging part of our memories." declared the Deutsche Zeitung. "Before history we are responsible, too, because Hitler came to power by the parliamentary route and received overwhelming majorities in all the plebiscites, was met everywhere with frenetic cheers." Wrote the weekly Die Zeit: "We want to say it clearly: Germany has sinned against Poland."

In this chorus of self-accusation, no voice carried so much weight as that of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. In a nationwide radio address, Adenauer offered deep expressions of regret to "the likable Polish people," admitted that "Hitler Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and cruelly destroyed it." But today's Germany, he insisted, "is quite another Germany from that under Hitler ... It is therefore that I say from deep conviction that this Germany, the new Germany, will some day be a good neighbor of Poland."

In Poland, where anti-German feeling still runs high and subservience to Moscow remains a law of life, the only audible answer to all these German overtures was a snarl of Communist fury. Standing in a drizzling rain to address an anniversary gathering of 20.000 people, Poland's Premier Josef Cyrankiewicz cried that Adenauer hopes "to drive a wedge between Poland and the Soviet Union." As for Adenauer's claim that Germany's final repudiation of Hitler was demonstrated by German cheers last week for Dwight Eisenhower, "the victorious army leader against Hitler's Germany," that, said Cyrankiewicz, was so much eyewash. The Germans who cheered Ike, he snapped bitterly, no doubt included "many of our old acquaintances . . . experts on gassing and punitive expeditions."

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