ABSTRACT
In 1944 the Polish author of a well-known book on the German terror rule in occupied Poland made the gloomy forecast that hatred in Poland ‘will continue for many generations and last very long after the war until Polish-German relations become normal again’. Most Germans consider Poles to be negligent and incapable of governing themselves, uneducated and uncivilized, careless, wasteful and corruptible, false and servile to the point of hostile duplicity, and cruel to the point of sadism. Most Germans consider as absolute truth the assertion that all culture in Poland simply comes out of Germany. The application of a kind of class struggle theory to German-Polish relationships is an invention of modern chauvinism. In any case, the Germans on the frontier felt the special, nationally-modified character of Polish Catholicism to be a sharply divisive element; indeed, ‘Polish’ and ‘Catholic’ were considered equivalent.
