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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   969 thread views

Transnational Thursday for November 20, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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(see e.g. some German politician telling Trump that "Germans were the first victims of national socialism")

Who said this?

in WWII animated flashback scenes demonic Poles with glowing red eyes hunt down the hiding Jews

I don’t know what your media produces, but no one here thinks the poles committed the holocaust, and even you merely accuse the germans of minimizing the poles as victims in favour of the jews, not make them the perpetrators. This controversy and the related one about the ‘polish camps’ sounds like the poles are hallucinating an offense to get angry about.

Helmut Kohl's government was opposing Polish access to NATO, for reasons that largely echo current Ukraine's - that it would be "taunting" Russia. Plus ca change.

Are you implying that this unremarkable position is equivalent to the molotov-ribbentrop pact? Or that germany failed ukraine somehow? Since 1990 the germans have been nothing but friends, allies and financial supporters of the poles.

Who said this?

I did not exactly hear about it in context of Germany, but it was an official policy towards Austria since 1943 that started from Anschluss and beyond. As far as I understand, this is to large degree a myth as Austrians supported Nazis in equal numbers to that of pre-anschluss Germans. Heck, Austrians had fair share of high-profile Nazi leaders including Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann, who was raised in Linz since age of 8 and who Austrian Nazi since 1932 and many other war criminals leading concentration camps and so forth.

Austrians embraced it especially immediately after WW2 with and they used this myth to refuse any reparations toward holocaust survivors up until 1995.

He sounded like he was referring to a real, specific incident ("some German politician telling Trump that": "Germans were the first victims of national socialism"), not some vague disculpatory vibes ("it wasn't really us") in another country. This strongly reinforces my priors of polish hallucinations.

I do think these old legal cases about reparations, still hanging around, are poisoning the discourse. It's like listening to lawyers arguing about a plane crash. Neither side has a primary interest in the truth. The cases should be either chucked or settled for all time, now. Flip a coin if you have to, I don't care, but get it over with.

While putting full or even equal responsibility on Poles would be ridiculous, it is also an historic fact that Poles (e.g. Armia Krajowa) were not exactly friendly to Jews and committed various atrocities (not at the level the Nazis did). Example: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/1946-us-document-reveals-poles-treated-jews-as-badly-as-germans-did-543940 (I don't necessarily agree with the title, but it contains some evidence to that) So the claim underlying the offense is real, and that's something the Poles, understandably, are not very happy to discuss. Bit it's a part of history too. It doesn't remove any responsibility from the Germans, there is a lot of blame for everybody to get their part.

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