Word: brandts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WHILE several hundred Poles looked on in silence, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt walked slowly toward a granite slab that towers over an empty area near Warsaw's Old City. The memorial rises on the site of the Jewish ghetto, whose 500.000 inhabitants died either in the 1943 uprising against the Nazis or in prison camps. Solemnly, Brandt placed a huge wreath at the base of the monument. Then, unexpectedly, he dropped to his knees. For an electrifying half-minute, his face sculpted in deep emotion, Brandt knelt on the pavement. It is particularly noteworthy that this symbolic...
...Brandt was in Warsaw to establish normal diplomatic relations between West Germany and Poland for the first time since the end of the war. In the city's Radziwill Palace, with Polish Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka beaming in the background, Brandt and Polish Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz, a former Auschwitz inmate, signed leather-bound copies of an agreement that cedes to Poland 40,000 sq. mi. of former German territory east of the Oder-Neisse rivers. In return, some 100,000 ethnic Germans who have lived in the Oder-Neisse region since the end of World War II will...
Tormented History. A glass-clinking round of cultural and economic socializing followed the signing, as members of the delegation that accompanied Brandt sought out their Polish counterparts. Student leaders met, Novelist Gunter Grass mingled with a group of Polish writers, and Berthold Beitz, representing the giant Krupp enterprises, conferred with leaders of the Polish Planning Commission. Nevertheless, neither Brandt nor Gomulka had any illusion that all the hatreds that have grown up between Germans and Poles over the course of 1,000 tormented years could be dispelled quickly...
Genuine normalization of affairs between West Germany and Eastern Europe is blocked by an issue completely separate from the treaty: an agreement on the Berlin problem. Brandt is not expected to submit the Polish treaty or West Germany's four-month-old renunciation-of-force agreement with the Soviet Union to the Bundestag for ratification until the Berlin problem is solved. But there was growing worry, especially in Washington, that Brandt might have committed a tactical error in agreeing to the two treaties before Berlin's status was resolved...
...Soviets, according to a top member of the Nixon Administration, believe that because Brandt's government is so strongly committed to relaxing tensions with the East, it cannot leave the Moscow and Warsaw treaties in limbo for long. According to this view, Brandt may eventually be forced to accept the Soviet plan for Berlin: a "third German state" with economic ties to Bonn but with none of the political links that guarantee the city against absorption by East Germany. Other officials argue, however, that Moscow is moving slowly on Berlin largely because it is having trouble forcing East Germany...