If you have followed the press on the recent EU summit you probably heard that the Polish President and Prime Minister raised World War II issues in their negotiations.
The response to their raising these issues was less than positive. It’s kind of like the response a person receives when they raise a notion that no one else wants to acknowledge. “Can’t they just be quiet?”
The EUObserver notes in Polish twins accused of bad taste in Brussels:
The most controversial Polish tactic was its attempt to leverage German World War II guilt. When Jaroslaw [Kaczynski] talked ahead of the summit about using EU voting to repay Poland for the millions of Poles killed by Germany in the 1940s, it seemed like just another populist faux pas.
But Lech [Kaczynski] brought up the idea again at the EU leaders’ dinner in Brussels, in a move that may have contributed to chancellor Merkel’s threat to call an intergovernmental conference without Polish approval. In post-summit interviews, the twins kept the same line.
“There are no reasons to censor the past,” Lech said, regretting that he himself was too young to have fought the Germans. “I’m sorry, but today we still have to remind people who was the executioner and who was the victim,” Jaroslaw said in his interview.
Commenting on the rhetoric, Polish liberal MEP and historian Bronislaw Geremek told PAP that “the EU was based on the idea of putting an end to the war era…[the Polish government] tried to open wounds that have not yet fully healed.”
The German press was less kind. The biggest selling paper, Bild, called the twins “poisoned dwarves” and referred to their “sickening double game…”
Speaking of ‘poisoned dwarves,’ probably a bad choice of words for the German Press.
Among Mengele’s favorite experimental subjects were Jewish dwarves and identical twins.
From The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments by Baruch C. Cohen at Jewish Law Articles.
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Many people with disabilities became the subject of medical research both before and after their deaths and were used to enrich the profits and prestige of medical institutions, doctors, and German and Austrian universities and researchers. Corpses of patients that had been marked before gassing as being of potential “scientific interest” were separated out and delivered to a nearby autopsy room. Young German physicians performed autopsies on these corpses to earn academic credit. Many organs from murdered disabled victims, brains in particular, were recovered for scientific study at medical institutes. Researchers sent lists of desiderata to killing centers requesting the brains of dwarves and people suffering from “idiocy” and rare neurological abnormalities, presumably with the belief that such disabilities would be scientifically interesting. Although many organs were harvested, the brains of murdered victims were the ones most utilized. Some of Germany’s most prestigious institutions benefited from this hideous use of the body parts of murdered people with disabilities, including Breslau University, Heidelberg University and the medical schools and psychiatric departments at Bonn, Cologne, Berlin and Leipzig.
From Forgotten Crimes – A Report by Disability Rights Advocates.
But then again, Bild is not exactly about journalism…
