German-Polish Pact Fixes Border, Guarantees Rights

Germany and Poland signed a friendship treaty Monday, formally cementing what remains one of Europe’s most fragile relationships nearly 52 years after Hitler’s tanks rolled across their common border and unleashed World War II.

The historic pact, negotiated over the past year, recognizes the frontier formed by the Oder and Neisse rivers and pledges to “prevent every type of war.” After decades of persecution, the treaty for the first time also guarantees the rights of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans living in Poland.

“This is the most important treaty Germany has signed since the end of World War II,” said Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

Cultural exchanges, a joint environmental task force and German support of Polish endeavors to join the European Community were also outlined in the treaty, which was signed here by Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Polish Prime Minister Jan K. Bielecki. The treaty still must be ratified by the parliaments of each country.

” . . . It is vital for the fate of our continent as a whole that the Germans and Poles at its center respect the existing borders, promote personal contacts and intensify peaceful exchange,” Kohl said.

Bielecki said the wounds left by the war belong to the past, stressing that “probably never before in their long common history were Poles and Germans so close and so confident about the future.”

But even as the promise of German-Polish friendship seeks to herald the new European unity, the two countries face each other across the continent’s economic fault line. And despite official vows of harmony and cooperation, social tensions between Germans and Poles still fester and boil.

Since the two countries waived visa requirements in April, Poles streaming over to shop, sell wares at flea markets or just visit have been attacked frequently by gangs of highway robbers and neo-Nazis.

Ethnic Germans in Poland have long complained that they are still being punished for Nazi atrocities committed half a century ago. Under Communist rule, Polish citizens of German ancestry were denied the right to educate their children, attend Mass in German or even read newspapers in their own language.

The “Treaty of Good-Neighborly Relations and Friendly Cooperation” was opposed by the ethnic Germans on grounds that it did not go far enough to protect their interests.

One-third of Poland was German territory before the war. The German ethnic minorities still living there wanted the treaty to secure dual citizenship for them and force the Poles to erect bilingual street signs in German-speaking areas. They also sought return of their property confiscated after the war, or compensation for it.

On the Polish side, the treaty failed to address demands to pay war reparations to the Third Reich’s slave laborers.