Well, in 1945 he may not have known better.michael mills wrote:Another snippet of information in relation to the Katyn issue. In 1945, just after the end of the war, Willi Brandt, then a member of the Norwegian resistance, wrote a pocket history of the war, published in Sweden by supporters of the resistance, in which he affirmed the Soviet claim that the Polish officers had been killed by the Germans.
The comment, at any rate, reminds me of a joke that circulated in Germany around 1970, at the time when the then Federal Chancellor Brandt had entered into the highly unpopular Ostverträge, the agreements with the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:
Willy Brandt is on a tour across rural Germany.
The car he drives in runs over and kills a swine.
Willy Brandt asks the chauffeur to go to the peasant owner of the swine, to identify himself as Willi Brandt’s chauffeur, tell the man that he killed the swine and assure him that the government will fully indemnify him.
The chauffeur goes to the farm where the swine had come from and takes very long to come back.
When he does, he is loaded with peasant bread, cheese, ham, sausages and other rural delicacies, so much thereof that he can barely carry all.
Willy Brandt expresses his surprise at his chauffeur’s having been given such a friendly reception, considering the circumstances.
Says the chauffeur: "I also don’t know what happened. All I did was go there and say, 'I am Willy Brandt’s chauffeur, and I ran over the swine with my car'."