Willy Brandt in Warsaw

It was a damp, gray day when Willy Brandt visited the memorial for the victims of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in the capital of Poland on December 7th.

With a serious, almost mask-like expression on his face, he walks to the expressionist bronze monument and lays a large wreath with white carnations.

Brandt adjusts the bow, takes a few steps back, then suddenly drops to his knees.

Federal Foreign Minister Walter Scheel, who stands behind him on the right, is just as surprised as the Polish Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz;

even Brandt's closest confidante, State Secretary Egon Bahr, is irritated.

Brandt's gaze goes into the distance.

He looks petrified.

He kneels in front of the memorial for about half a minute.

The photographers and cameramen know that they are taking pictures that will go around the world.

"Brandt takes seconds," said Hans Ulrich Kempski, then chief reporter for the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", "which seem endless to the witnesses of the scene until he stands again. It looks as if he needs all his strength to fight back tears."

The images of the Chancellor kneeling in the square of the heroes of the ghetto, the German who bows to the victims of the Germans, conceal a drama that is rare in politics.

It is no coincidence that it was Willy Brandt who chose this stirring gesture of empathy.

No politician has polarized the West German Republic as much, but also inspired so many people as Willy Brandt.

Brandt's most difficult journey

Nevertheless, it is an absurd scene: a German anti-fascist, who fled into exile from the Nazis and was therefore attacked by the right as a "traitor to the fatherland", acknowledges the German guilt and expresses grief.

Brandt's trip to Poland was the most difficult since he was elected Chancellor in October 1969.

Nowhere had the Germans raged worse in World War II than in their eastern neighbor;

they had occupied no other country longer.

Six million Poles perished between 1939 and 1945; in relation to the population, Nazi tyranny did not claim more victims from any of the people in Europe.

The SS operated the Holocaust extermination camps mainly in Poland.

German occupiers and their helpers murdered around three million Polish Jews.

The flight and expulsion of the Germans, the decision of the victorious powers to hand over a quarter of the territory of the German Reich to Poland, did not make the situation any easier.

Relations with Poland were the worst for the Germans after the Second World War.

This was even true of the GDR, which was allied with the People's Republic of Poland.

Until well into the sixties, the "friendship and peace border" was hermetically sealed and heavily guarded.

A spontaneous outburst of emotion

The federal governments led by the CDU had not recognized the Oder-Neisse Line as the Polish western border, but had insisted on illusory territorial claims.

It was not until the SPD, with Willy Brandt in the grand coalition as foreign minister, dared to address this question.

Egon Bahr developed the New Ostpolitik with the guiding principle "Change through rapprochement".

The Brandt government then recognized the territorial reorganization of Europe decided by the allied victorious powers in Potsdam in 1945.

At the same time, she tried to soften and overcome the division of Europe, and especially Germany, through the Iron Curtain.

Brandt later wrote: "The key to normalization lay in Moscow."

In order to come to an understanding with Poland and to improve relations with the GDR, Egon Bahr started negotiations in Moscow.

On August 12, 1970, Brandt and the Soviet Prime Minister Alexej Kosygin signed the "Moscow Treaty", in which the inviolability of European borders was established.

The Warsaw Treaty, which Brandt signed on December 7, 1970 in Warsaw after he fell on his knees, was just as short - and limited to renouncing violence and accepting European borders.

Soon after the symbolic kneeling down, the question arose: Was the kneeling down a long considered and calculated action?

Hansjakob Stehle, then a correspondent for the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", stood a few meters away from Brandt and firmly rejects this: "No," he said, "it was a spontaneous outburst of emotion."

Was Brandt allowed to kneel?

Brandt himself kept it to himself during his life how and when he got the idea to kneel down in front of the memorial.

In his "Memories" he simply wrote: "I hadn't planned anything, but left Wilanow Castle, where I was staying, feeling that I had to express the special features of commemoration at the ghetto monument. At the abyss of history and beneath the Load of the millions murdered, I did what people do when the language fails. "

In his memories, Brandt also quotes the SPIEGEL reporter Hermann Schreiber.

He wrote about the scene at the memorial: "Then he kneels who doesn't need it, there for everyone who needs it, but doesn't kneel there - because they don't dare or can't or can't dare."

"In the Federal Republic", Brandt recalled, "there was no lack of malicious or stupid questions as to whether the gesture was not exaggerated."

SPIEGEL, on the cover of which was emblazoned with a photo of the kneeling Chancellor, commissioned the Allensbach Institute to conduct a survey: "Was Brandt allowed to kneel?"

The better German

Of those surveyed, 41 percent said the gesture was appropriate, 48 percent thought it was excessive.

Brandt only found approval with a narrow majority in the group of 16 to 29 year olds.

42 percent thought the knee-fall was excessive and 46 percent thought it was appropriate.

For many of the younger generation, the election of the anti-fascist Brandt as Chancellor was almost the same as establishing a new Federal Republic.

With Hans Globke, Konrad Adenauer had appointed a former anti-Semite and Nazi as State Secretary in his Chancellery;

Brandt's direct predecessor, the CDU man Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, was a member of the NSDAP.

The Social Democrat Brandt, who had survived National Socialism in exile in Norway, was the better German for the youth.

Similar to the West German youth, Brandt also found great approval in the western world.

The US magazine "Time" named him "Man of the Year" shortly after he fell on his knees.

A year later he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize - as the only German since the Second World War to this day.

While photos of the kneeling in Warsaw were printed in all West German newspapers, in Poland only one small sheet of paper, written in Yiddish, published a picture.

Since December 2000 there has been a Willy-Brandt-Platz in Warsaw with a monument commemorating the grand gesture.

Icon: The mirror