German president asks for forgiveness on Warsaw Ghetto Uprising anniversary

Germany’s president has asked for forgiveness for the crimes his country committed in the second world war, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the first German president to speak at the commemorations in Poland’s capital, joined his Polish and Israeli counterparts to mark 80 years since Jewish insurgents’ doomed uprising against Nazi occupiers.

“I stand before you today and ask for your forgiveness for the crimes committed by Germans here,” Steinmeier said.

The German president also berated the Russian president, Vladimir Putin for waging war against Ukraine.

“With his illegal attack on a peaceful, democratic neighbouring country … the Russian president has broken international law,” he said. “This war brings immeasurable suffering, violence, destruction and death to the people of Ukraine.”

The official ceremony took place at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, which stands at the site of several of the uprising’s armed clashes.

The Warsaw Jews launched their armed revolt against the Nazis on 19 April 1943, preferring to die fighting than to be sent to a death camp. It was the largest single act of Jewish resistance against the Germans during the war.

“We must remember,” the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, said. “Absolute evil existed in the form of the Nazis and their accomplices. And absolute good existed in the form of the victims and the rebels, from every nation.”

About 7,000 Jews are thought to have died in the battles and a further 6,000 in fires Nazi troops started in the ghetto.

“The revolt was suicide. We couldn’t win, but we had to do them harm,” survivor Halina Birenbaum, 93, said before the anniversary.

Earlier on Wednesday, church bells and sirens sounded across Warsaw as volunteers handed out paper daffodils for residents to pin to their jackets.

The tradition is in honour of Marek Edelman, a leader of the uprising who marked the anniversary by depositing a bouquet of daffodils, which resemble the yellow stars the Nazis forced Jews to wear, at the memorial until his death in 2009.

Paper daffodils are also being distributed in other Polish cities this year.

The Nazis set up the ghetto in a space of a little over three square kilometres (1.2 square miles) a year after their 1939 invasion of Poland. It was the largest of the second world war ghettos.

Many Jews died inside of starvation and disease, and most who survived were sent to the Treblinka death camp east of Warsaw.

At the outbreak of the uprising, about 50,000 civilians were hiding in cellars and bunkers in the ghetto. The Nazis put down the revolt with extreme brutality and set fire to the entire district, turning it to rubble and ash.