Category Archives: Germany

European Union, France, Germany, Government, Immigration, Italy, Politics

The desperate migrants’ route across Europe

EU IMMIGRATION

IN the freezing passes of the Italian Alps, migrants march slowly up an icy incline as they head for France.

The mountains have become an unlikely route for Africans looking for a new life across the border.

Thousands are thought to have tried to traverse the range over the last few months alone, wearing clothing that is unlikely to protect them from the extreme conditions.

Faced with the policies of Italy’s Right-wing government, asylum seekers who arrive by boat on the country’s Mediterranean shores have headed north instead to reach France.

From there they can move on to Germany, Spain, Belgium, Holland and – ultimately, for many – Britain.

The latest route used by desperate migrants is increasingly coming to the attention of populist Right-wing political groups that have risen to prominence on the back of Europe’s migrant crisis.

Already, Italy has swung heavily to the right, with interior minister Matteo Salvini turning migrant boats away from harbours. Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban has made stopping immigration a cornerstone of his philosophy, and young conservative Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz has called for an “axis of the willing” to strengthen borders. Anti-immigrant MEP Christelle Lechevalier – of the renamed French right-wing National Front, now National Rally – last week tried to make political capital out of African migrants crossing from Italy into France at the ski resort of Montgenevre.

Some 26 European nations are in the supposedly border-free Schengen zone, which makes it possible to cross between member states without border controls. But faced with the prospect of mass immigration, police at several border posts are increasingly turning away new arrivals and sending them back to Italy.

As a result, migrants are turning to mountain passes, ski resorts and hiking trails to avoid official checks.

Snow-free in the summer, the Alps are a far less dangerous hike. And even if migrants are caught and sent back to Italy, they can always try again.

Earlier this year there were reports of migrants using the Col de l’Echelle mountain pass into France through thick snowdrifts. At the end of their eight-mile journey, African migrants would simply knock on the first door they saw.

Up to half a million migrants are thought to be in Italy, despite the fall in the number arriving – usually from lawless Libya – in boats across the Mediterranean.

Widespread public reaction to Europe’s migrant crisis has prompted EU nations to belatedly close off entry points and movement routes (as well as proposed detention centres in the Med to process asylum applications). German chancellor Angela Merkel hailed the migrant summit agreement as a success, with its vague talk of promises of cash for Third World countries to help them control population flows and loosen proposals to tighten border controls within the EU.

But no European country, let alone any African one, has yet agreed to host a migration centre. Mrs Merkel’s firm grip on Germany, which she has led since 2005, has weakened in recent months. Interior minister Horst Seehofer, leader of the Bavarian CSU party, was so incensed with last week’s deal that Mrs Merkel’s governing alliance was in serious jeopardy of collapsing. There were fears he was on the verge of ordering German police to start turning new arrivals away (in direct defiance of Mrs Merkel’s wishes).

Last Friday’s summit agreement failed to nail down any firm agreements on exactly how migrants arriving in EU countries on the Mediterranean coast could be dispersed elsewhere.

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Europe, European Union, Germany, Government, History, Poland, Society

The billions that Poland is demanding from Germany in wartime reparations 

ESSAY

Poland

The devastation and destruction of Warsaw in 1945 following the Nazi occupation of Poland.

FOR many in Britain, World War II is a story of unparalleled heroism, and there are many stirring films such as the new blockbuster Dunkirk. For the people of Poland, however, the war was a nightmare so black and so bloodstained, that no film could even remotely capture the depths of its horror.

Consider the incident in a German town called Gleiwitz close to the Polish border. On the night of August 31, 1939, a small group of Nazi intelligence agents, dressed in Polish uniforms, burst into a radio station. They then broadcast anti-German messages in Polish before dumping the bodies of prisoners they had just hauled out of the Dachau concentration camp, who had been made to resemble Polish saboteurs then shot and mutilated to make identification impossible.

A few hours later, Adolf Hitler rose in the Reichstag and proclaimed that the Gleiwitz incident was the final straw. He deceitfully blamed the incident on anti-German saboteurs.

By the summer of 1945, some six million Polish citizens, one in five of the pre-war population, had been killed. The great cities of Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin were in smoking ruins. Millions of books had been ruined; hundreds of libraries, schools, museums and laboratories had been destroyed.

In effect, the Germans had done their best to eradicate an entire nation, erasing its culture, murdering its middle-classes and reducing the rest to slavery. And though the Nazis were defeated, the Polish people’s ordeal was far from over. Following Hitler’s tyranny, Poland was then occupied by Stalin’s Red Army, who turned it into a brutalised Soviet satellite.

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Germany, Government, History, Poland, Second World War

Poland set to demand billions in reparations from Germany over World War Two

WARTIME REPARATIONS

Poland-reparations

POLAND is demanding millions of pounds in reparations from Germany for its treatment of Poles during the Second World War in an “historic counteroffensive”.

POLAND is preparing to demand billions of euros in wartime reparations from Germany.

Government officials in Poland are looking into a “historical counteroffensive” to claim compensation for atrocities and looting.

Arkadiusz Mularczyk, an MP with the ruling Law and Justice party, has revealed that parliamentary researchers will have an analysis of the issues ready by Friday, 11 August 2017.

Germany’s 1939-1945 occupation of Poland cost the lives of up to six million civilians, around a fifth of the pre-war population. Half the dead were Jewish Holocaust victims. Churches, cultural treasures and entire cities were plundered and destroyed.

The Soviets also carried out looting and committed atrocities such as the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in 1940. Under pressure from Moscow, Poland’s former communist government agreed in 1953 to make no further reparation claims.

But Antoni Macierewicz, Poland’s defence minister, has said that the decisions of a Soviet puppet state were not necessarily valid today.

He insisted the Germans needed to “pay back the terrible debt they owe to the Polish people”.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the country’s most powerful politician, said in a recent interview the “Polish government was preparing itself for a historical counteroffensive”.

“We are talking here about huge sums, and also about the fact that Germany for many years refused to take responsibility for World War II,” said Kaczynski, who leads Right-wing Law and Justice.

He called for reparations when he was prime minister more than a decade ago, creating tensions between two important trading partners and allies in NATO and the European Union. Ulrike Demmer, a spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel, responded to Mr Macierewicz by saying “the question of reparation for Poland was dealt with conclusively in the past, legally and politically”.

She added: “Of course Germany stands by its responsibility in World War II, politically, morally and financially. It has made significant reparations for general war damage, including to Poland, and is still paying significant compensation for Nazi wrongdoing.”

Poland’s wartime suffering has been highlighted this week by the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Uprising. The revolt in 1944 claimed 200,000 Polish lives and saw the near total destruction of the capital city.

A year earlier the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto also saw heroic resistance. Underground fighters held out for almost a month against heavily-armed German units; 13,000 Jews were killed.

Poland has spent decades trying to regain its looted treasures. Its ministry of culture still keeps a watch for any works that may turn up on the international art circuit.

It often finds itself having to buy the works at auction – sometimes from the descendants of those who stole them.

Berlin has paid billions of euros over the years in compensation for Nazi crimes, primarily to Jewish survivors, and acknowledges the country’s responsibility for keeping alive the memory of Nazi atrocities and atoning for them.

It took until 2010 for Germany to finally clear its First World War debt. The £22billion reparations were set by the Allied victors – chiefly Britain, France and the United States – as compensation and punishment for the conflict.

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