Michael Mills said:
The problem with reports on the events in Bydgozcz/Bromberg made by Polish army officers, and with claims by Polish witnesses, is that they are suspect of having been falsified
what they thought they saw is highly likely to have been influenced by the general hysteria which reigned in the city on that day, engendered by fears of an imminent German attack.
It would appear that some Polish historians, for reasons of national pride, have relied uncritically on the reports by Polish officers and civilian witnesses, without subjecting them to the proper analysis.
Analyses by modern German historians are more likely to be accurate, since those historians are well aware of the need to avoid providing any justification for German misdeeds during the invasion of Poland. Today there is no official German chauvinism, whereas Polish chauvinism exists right to the very top of the Polish Government.
As for claims of German plans to send teams of saboteurs into places like Bydgoszcz to create diversions, it would need to be proved that those plans were actually implemented, and did not just remain suggestions on paper.
Why should the testimony of German residents (probably mostly pro-Nazi) be given more credence than that of the Polish residents. German carried out a mis-information campaign before and after the war to justify the war. Which German testimony is mis-information and which honest?
From the the last paragraph of my message:
Chinciński discussed ion activities in Bydgdnewly discovered documents of the German military intelligence (Abwehr) that show that there were indeed plans for a fifth column and diversoscz; he also discussed the bias of communist era Polish historiography which minimized the cases of Polish mob lynching of ethnic Germans, which did occur in Bydgoszcz.[20]
So German documents confirm the fifth column.
German historian, Hans-Erich Volkmann, noted the problems with German historiography, outlining some of the unreliability inherent in early post war studies, which were still significantly affected by the Nazi-era, and that the Bydgoszcz events were and still are a politically charged issue.[20]
So a German historian disputes German historiography.
Today there is no official German chauvinism,
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/407/272krzyst.html (Emphasis in red is mine)
Recent German Claims Against Poland
Krzysztof Rak and Mariusz Muszyński (Sarmatian Review)
In 2006, the Prussian Trust, an organization representing German postwar expellees from Central and Eastern Europe, submitted a claim against Poland to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, alleging that Poland committed crimes during the forced evacuation of Germans to Germany in 1945. [1]
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Several arguments have been used by such political circles to justify their stance. The first is that such demands have been raised by marginal German groups and therefore should not be taken seriously. However, the so-called Vertriebene and their descendants constitute a well-disciplined electorate consisting of several million people. Before each election the political forces in Germany compete for this electorate. It was the fear of losing it that in 1990 made Chancellor Helmut Kohl resist the signing of the treaty with Poland that confirmed the present borders. It is because of this electorate that the chancellors and presidents of Germany grace with their presence the congresses of the “expellees,” not to speak of the fact that in the coalition agreement between CDU and SPD the government promised not to forget them. [3] J. K. Fromme, head of the expellees’ caucus in the CDU/CSU fraction of the Bundestag, has stated that the burden of guilt for the outcome of the Second World War is shared by Adolf Hitler and Poland, and that the Potsdam agreements [confirming the present borders of Poland] were merely “the minutes of certain negotiations” rather than an international agreement on which the present order of Europe rests.[4] Ms. Erika Steinbach, head of the Prussian Trust and a Bundestag member, has compared the deportations of Germans to the Holocaust, and ridiculed the Warsaw Uprising.[5] Do these people represent the margins of German society? We doubt it. Has any Parliament member in Poland compared the massacre of Poles in Volhynia during the Second World War to the genocide of Jews engineered by the Germans? Has any member of the Polish Parliament ever made claims against the Ukrainians because Poles lost their properties in Ukraine? Has anyone in Poland ever compared the Ukrainian misdeeds against Poles to the crimes of Hitler or Stalin? Of course not. Why don’t we ask our western neighbor to react to the trashing of standards of political decency by some of their compatriots?
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Few people in Poland or elsewhere know that in Germany there exists a vast literature justifying German property claims in territories that had been granted to Poland through international agreements after the Second World War (the same agreements deprived Poland of eastern territories from which hundreds of thousands of Poles were expelled without any restitution of property whatsoever). In present-day Germany there is hardly a single international law specialist that does not have in his curriculum vitae at least one article dedicated to the postwar fate of the expellees. The conclusions of such articles are generally anti-Polish. The vocabulary used in German public life-the key concepts of “expulsion” (Vertreibung) and “dispossession” (Enteignung)-contain legally detrimental connotations. Poles and others have also forgotten that one of the most respected authorities in international law, Professor Alfred Verdross, introduced (in collaboration with Professor Bruno Simma, now a judge in the International Tribunal in the Hague) into international law the institution of territorial supervision. This annulled the finality of Polish rights regarding post-German territories given to Poland after the Second World War[7] while at the same time cutting off eastern territories from the Polish state, thus initiating the painful and costly (to Poles) relocation of the Polish population from present-day Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine to western territories, from which Germans were relocated to Germany.
The third argument minimizing the claims of the Prussian Trust has to do with the allegedly radically changed nature of German patriotism. The argument claims that the German national consciousness has been radically changed, and therefore a danger of Germans engaging in any form of aggression against their eastern neighbor is thus simply moot. It is true that Germany went though a period of soul-searching after the Second World War, especially regarding the Jews and the Holocaust. However, such a soul-searching has never taken place regarding the Catholic Poles. It also appears that not only ordinary Germans but also German historians harbor an idealized picture of their actions in Poland in 1939-45, and the catastrophic destruction of Polish lives and property in the second world war. What is more, for a quarter-century now the historical debate in Germany (Historikerstret) has involved a number of serious historians who have posited that the crimes Germans committed in the Second World War were not exceptional, given that the twentieth century was a century of genocides such as that of the Armenians, the Ukrainians, and so on. If so, then the German nation is no more responsible for the history of that century than any other nation.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,214 ... te]Despite strong criticism from Poland, German Chancellor Angela Merkel supports the creation of a permanent institution in Berlin to commemorate the world’s deportees, including millions of German expellees after 1945.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed support Monday for a permanent center documenting the plight of Germans forced from their homes after World War II and other victims of expulsions, adding she hoped for help from European neighbors. [/quote]
Germans are also chauvinists!
