In the middle of this, as the leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza now reports, the EU Commission is likely to open up visa-free travel from Russia. Well, not really all of Russia – but rather that strange Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, stuck there between Poland and Lithuania, outside of Russia proper. Oh, and they won’t actually be able to go to Lithuania – just to Poland. And, to make it clear, there still will be border controls in place, these Kaliningradians (?) will just be able to go through them (presumably flashing their Russian passports) without having to go through the trouble of getting a visa beforehand.

Then again, Poland itself has been within the Schengen zone for a while now; who knows where some of them will want to go on to from there? But the Commission is seemingly willing to take that chance and announce such visa-free entry tomorrow; according to the article (no by-line), it’s motivation is essentially that it feels sorry for the Kaliningradians, they must be so lonely: “to avoid the isolation of Kaliningrad from its immediate neighbors, it is necessary to ease the travel of its citizens.” Because that sort of isolation can’t be very healthy for any body politic.

Don’t laugh: since Kaliningrad was first isolated this way by the independence of Lithuania in 1990, it’s been mainly known (when noticed at all) for the shady activities of all sorts going on there: weapon-smuggling, alcohol/cigarette-smuggling, the dispatch of freighters with suspicious cargoes, and the like. This is quite simply a gesture to persuade people there to start behaving themselves.

                          

You would think that, for its part, the Russian government would welcome the improvement in relations with Poland that was the initial result of the tragedy and the common investigation both nations’ authorities then undertook, and so would try to prolong that any way possible. Or maybe not. For an article in one of the leading national newspapers Rzeczpospolita now informs us of a piece of trickery – petty trickery, at that – which would have elicited an approving nod from the likes of Lavrenty Beria, long-time head of the NKVD under Stalin.

What’s worse, it took an on-site inspection by no less than Poland’s First Lady, Anna Komorowska, to reveal the transgression. Last Saturday she led a ceremonial delegation to the Smolensk memorial site, now meant to commemorate not only last year’s crash but the Katyn atrocity that indirectly led to it. There, the delegation discovered to their horror that a change had been made to the memorial plaque that had been placed there shortly after last year’s tragedy. Those of you out there who would like to try out your Polish can click here to see the before-and-after for yourselves, otherwise let me just inform you that the original Polish-language tablet was gone and replaced by a bilingual Russian-Polish one. OK, there’s nothing wrong with that per se, except that space had been created to fit the Russian in by deleting the text in the first plaque which had mentioned the Katyn atrocity, cited as “genocide” (ludobójstwo)*, together with the Russian government’s admitted responsibility for that.

Naturally, the Polish government had never been consulted – because it would never have approved. The Russian authorities apparently just went ahead and made the change. Actually, it would have been more appropriate to consult the “Association of Katyn Families” since that was the name on the original plaque, responsible for putting it there. Instead, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski will have a chance to “consult” with his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev today on a number of things, including – one would expect – this plaque affair.

UPDATE: Poland’s other mainstream national daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, is now reporting that the two presidents have found a solution to try to tamp down the public outrage in Poland over the Smolensk memorial plaque shenanigans. A competition! There will be a competition, run by the Polish Ministry of Culture, to come up with yet another memorial plaque, to be placed at there in time for the two-year anniversary of the tragedy next year – which, we can only hope, will proceed a bit more tranquilly, in both countries.

*Of course the Katyn massacre per se was by no means “genocide.” That word unfortunately has been so overused by those out to make cheap political points that its original meaning and impact are truly under threat – and it is only roughly 67 years old!

                          

Citizens of what was then known as the “Free World” have by-and-large been spared such abuses. Indeed, here in the Eurozone we have the common European currency, a medium of exchange not subject to the whims of any one national government. What’s more, it was adopted on 1 January by yet another EU member-state, Estonia. Yet that was recognized by most observers as somewhat of a bittersweet occasion; taking up the euro does say important things about the extent of that country’s European integration, yet the sovereign debt financial crisis with which the EU has struggled for a little over a year has revealed several cogent reasons for a country to regret ever giving up its own national currency.

But I’m not out to talk about any of those here. Rather, let’s get back to the “currency reform” scam: it’s the damndest thing how prices seem to rise whenever a country adopts the euro! You see, all prices, wages, etc. have to be converted then by a fixed conversion-ratio – for example, it was 2.20371 for the Dutch guilder – and usually the new price that results is not a very round number. No, much better to make it so – and do you think that merchants then round it upwards or downwards?

Any of you out there over the age of twelve knows the answer quite well – strange, isn’t it, how wages and bank-account totals don’t benefit from a similar rounding? – and so the result inevitably is an otherwise uncalled-for bit of inflation. That’s what made the Germans nickname their new currency the Teuro (teuer is “expensive” in German); on a local note, I can remember how Amsterdam bars, in particular, raised their prices under the quite shameful assumption that their customers were not capable of doing elementary division with a calculator.*

Naturally, then, the same thing has come to Estonia, as we see in a pieces from the Polish national daily Gazeta Wyborcza: Inflation in Estonia highest for two years. Specifically, December’s inflation rate was 5.7% higher than it was in December, 2009. (And how much was that? Annoyingly, the article prefers to use differential rather than absolute inflation rates.) We do know that inflation was high there throughout the last part of the year, as last month’s rate was also only 0.5% higher than last November’s. The main commodities driving this are listed as mainly foodstuffs and non-alcoholic beverages. (Can we hope, then, that the owners of Estonian drinking establishments actually restrained themselves?)

Anyway: Welcome to the club!

*Interestingly, grocery-store prices were mainly converted in a straightforward manner – mainly because Dutch consumer-rights organizations promised to watch them like a hawk!

                          

Poland had already shown up as a bit player in another Wikileaks dispatch from earlier this week, revealing new NATO contingency plans to make extensive use of that country’s transportation infrastructure to shift troops to the Baltic States should they be invaded by Russian forces. (Polish soldiers would also be heavily involved, in the form of at least one of the nine divisions slated to be included in any such maneuver.) But the only really new element disclosed in that connection by the Wikileaks dump was a certain dissatisfaction among Polish political and military authorities over the plan, since in such a situation Russia would by definition be at war not only with the Baltic States but also with Poland and with NATO in general, and such a commitment of resources would necessarily thin out Poland’s own defences somewhat.

No, the new and notable revelations that have emerged over the past few days have to do with the physical commitment to Poland’s defence made by US authorities in the form of US Army Patriot anti-rocket and -aircraft missiles sent to be stationed there. (Those who want to read an English account can turn to the UK’s official Wikileaks publisher, namely the Guardian, which spreads the story out over two articles here and here.) Recall first of all that those Patriots were stationed in Poland in the first place as an accompaniment to the anti-missile rockets that were also to have been there as part of a “missile shield” system to protect the US from Iran-launched ICBMs that the Bush Administration had worked so hard to establish, but which was then canceled by Barack Obama in September of last year. The Poles were glad to have at least that one sort of partial American military presence in their country even as the other was canceled – for the old, crude reason that having American soldiers in your country heightens the chance that they will also be killed if anyone attacks you, thus making American intervention to do something about that attack much more likely – but they had always been more concerned about threats from Russia rather than from Iran. “Don’t worry,” was the American reaction, “the Patriot can defend your territory against airborne threats from any direction, not just from the Middle East.”

There was one catch, however, as we are only know finding out thanks to the Wikileaks dispatches: those Patriots can defend Poland against airborne threats coming from Iran, Russia, or anyone else only if they are equipped with bona fide live missiles, which for the majority of their presence on Polish soil they have not been. Indeed, these communications make clear that the concept for the Americans the whole time was for the Patriot contingent in Poland (stationed in some patch of wilderness up in the Northeast, near the border with the Russian Kaliningrad enclave) to be only a training post – fly Patriot crewmen in there on occasion just to get some practice in wartime deployment to a more-exotic location to the East, work a little with what amounted to only mock-up equipment, and then get out of there again back to their home unit. Naturally, the level of permanent personnel stationed there reflected this role, usually numbering only around 20 or 30 whereas Polish authorities had expected something more like 110, reflecting staffing for a ready-to-go combat unit.

It’s something, then, but it’s not much – and it certainly is nothing that would stop Russian aircraft or missiles should the need arise. But it was all that Polish authorities found themselves able to get out of the American government, and they did their complaining quietly (e.g. about getting nothing better than “potted plants”) while never letting up on efforts to try to get even more of an American deployment of forces to Poland, and maybe with some actual combat-teeth for a change. Ideas that have arisen along this line are stationing some F-16s on a Polish airbase and/or maybe some C-130 transport aircraft and/or maybe even moving a detachment of Naval Special Warfare troops from Stuttgart to Gdansk. As it happens, Polish President Komorowski will have the opportunity today to discuss such things as he visits President Obama at the White House. But the shine is already considerably off the encounter after these latest revelations of the fast-and-loose behavior American military and diplomatic authorities display towards even the country’s closest allies (e.g. still with its own troops fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with American forces in Afghanistan).

UPDATE: As a great philosopher once observed, “two out of three ain’t bad”! The Gazeta (Wyborcza) Twitter-feed carries the news coming out of the Polish-American presidential summit:

Amerykańskie F-16 i Herkulesy w Polsce. Od połowy 2013 roku http://bit.ly/hZyovB

December 9, 2010 6:30 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@gazetapl_news

Gazeta.pl

So that will be 16 F-16′s (how symmetric!) and 4 C-130′s (all American-manned and -operated; this isn’t an equipment sale) stationed on a Polish airbase starting in mid-2013. And if you click through Gazeta’s link to the article you even can see, amid all that Polish, a nice photo of Komorowski chatting with Obama in the Oval Office.

                          

Jacobs has been Potsdam’s mayor for a while now, since March of 1999, and he did come out on top of that initial vote with 41%. But Scharfenberg was not all that far behind at 33%, and the guy does have many useful qualities, such as being a shrewd judge of people’s character, and able both to keep a secret and submit thorough, informative reports. How do I know this? Because Hans-Jürgen Scharfenberg is also unique as the first significant German political candidate known to have been an informer back in the day for the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi.

Some good coverage of the Scharfenberg phenomenon is to be found in the German press, of course (like in Die Welt: Stasi informant wants to become Potsdam’s mayor) but also in the press from not so far away to the East in Poland, namely Gazeta Wyborcza (Will a Stasi agent govern Potsdam?). All accounts agree that the guy was very good in those side-activities he engaged in next to his formal post at the Academy for State and Law in Potsdam (from 1978 to 1986). The file he accumulated on people he spied on totals some 300 pages, and he was apparently quick to root out and denounce to his Stasi masters not only colleagues who let it be known that they were trying to find some way to escape to the West, but also those who were womanizers or homosexuals (and so “mennenizers” maybe?) or had other aspects of their personalities or behavior that could constitute weaknesses for the Stasi to use to blackmail and manipulate them.

But then times changed – rather drastically – and Eastern Germany saw the DDR regime’s collapse and reunification with the West. Scharfenberg eventually found his feet in this new world rather well, actually running for Potsdam Oberbürgermeister in 2002 and losing by a total of only 122 votes in the run-off – yes, to the SPD’s Jacobs. The thing is, back then no one other than himself knew about his Stasi background; indeed, he denied anything of the sort and in the 1990s had refused to allow any sort of screening or investigation into his DDR past.

Since 2002, however, researchers rummaging through the extensive archives saved from Stasi destruction at the end of the regime finally came upon information about Scharfenberg and “outed” him, so to speak. Still, he ran again this year for the same Oberbürgermeister post, and he came in second again in the first round. And depending on turnout, how the voters for the candidates who didn’t make the first cut switch their votes (if at all), etc. he could even win on 3 October and become Mayor. (I’ll try to remember to look to see if that happened and let you know via an update to this post, since I realize that, by this point in the post, you’re all dying to know how the story turns out!)

Stasi Don’t Matter?

In other words, his prior work for the Stasi doesn’t seem to matter politically. That’s surprising in one respect because one would ordinarily think that Die Linke would not do well in Potsdam – indeed, that the Left side of the German political spectrum in general would not do well – because Potsdam is fairly prosperous these days as a film industry, computers, ERP software, etc. give it an unemployment rate of under 10% (very good for the East).

The larger issue, though, is of course how someone with such a shady past working directly as a spy for a repressive regime could at all be attractive as an elected public figure. But he is, and this is called Ostalgie or “Eastern nostalgia,” a nostalgia by many Germans living in the East for the DDR where, back then, even if the authorities spied on you all the time, they at least also ensured that you and everyone had a job, an apartment, a pension, etc. – none of them very fancy, but guaranteed (if you didn’t defy the State). For this writer, and for many others I’m sure, such an attitude is hard to understand – but there it is, undeniable, staring us right in the face in the Potsdam mayoral polling figures.

For those needing a subject for their sociology/history dissertation, the obvious comparison here is with attitudes to the Nazis (especially the hard-core: the SS, high regime functionaries) following Germany’s defeat in WWII. Why were Germans willing to definitively reject these after the War yet at the same time harbor this Ostalgie now? Then again: it’s only the former East Germans by and large who feel Ostalgie – back immediately after the war, in the former Soviet sector of Germany, was this particular cohort ever really allowed to confront and resolve the question of how to regard the Nazis among them? Quite possibly not; recollection from my own reading tells me that any and all issues of Nazi guilt were swept under the carpet as the Soviets and their German Communist lackeys rushed to form a Worker’s State to stand in opposition to the fascist-capitalist regime (in their eyes, of course) taking form to the West. So does this affect their attitudes today, more than sixty years later?

UPDATE: Nope, sorry: Hans-Jürgen Scharfenberg lost once again in the run-off election, and this time by tens of thousands of votes, not the 122-vote margin of last time. Gerd Nowakowski has an interesting commentary in Der Tagesspiegel, which is after all a Berlin daily and so very close-by. He says there is no way the ex-Stasi informant Scharfenberg could have won, and that because of a simple fact that I should have picked up on, but didn’t: 3 October, the very same day of the run-off election, was not only also German Reunification Day holiday, but no less that event’s twentieth anniversary!

Just imagine if the Potsdam electors had chosen the Stasi-man, on that of all days! Frankly, whichever official was in charge of setting the run-off election date, once the results of the initial poll showed that it would be necessary, was the one who in effect chose who Potsdam’s next Oberbürgermeister was going to be, by picking a date that in effect ensured Jann Jakobs’ second re-election to the post. I wonder if that person explicitly knew what he was doing – he must have! Shades, perhaps, of DDR-style “democracy”?

                          

Good work, that, although the PressEurop editors did somehow miss within that Rzeczpospolita piece the credit that journal was willing to give to its arch-rival Gazeta Wyborcza for actually getting the scoop, in the form of this article which appeared the day before the Rzecz report. Also, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski was not “head of intelligence” but rather Minister of the Interior; and there is another ex-Minister of the Interior who is under investigation in this connection as well, one Krzysztof Janik.

In any event, the combined reporting from Poland’s two most-respected national dailies provides a fascinating glimpse into a story with explosive potential that still is being treated as a Top Secret matter by the prosecutorial authorities involved. As the Gazeta piece reminds us, the first indication the world had that something funny was going on in Europe was the reporting in the Washington Post of early 2005 that alleged the existence of CIA-run “black site” prison facilities in European countries. The Council of Europe then took that as a cue to investigate on its own, and soon concluded that such installations were in place in Romania, Lithuania, and Poland. When questioned at the time, Polish authorities were noticeably unhelpful, eventually admitting only that yes, there was an airport in the northeastern Polish wilderness that the government had made available for CIA flights.

Unfortunately, the Poland-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (actually known as Helsińska Fundacja Praw Człowieka) recently released a document it had (somehow) procured from the Polish office of Border Security showing that the CIA flights to and from that airfield in 2002 and 2003 had departed with a total of at least 20 fewer passengers than they came with, i.e. there had to be some sort of holding facility there. Perhaps a luxury hotel? Not a chance; it was a prison facility which Polish officials at the very highest levels (thus President Kwaśniewski and Premier Miller) had approved for CIA use from December 2002 to September 2003. And then, strangely enough, after the Americans left the Ministry of Interior carried out a thorough cleaning and refurbishment of the installation.

The trouble these gentlemen are in, in the first instance, involves the questionable approval they provided for this CIA facility and the associated air access, which in several respects seems to have violated ordinary norms of Polish sovereignty, i.e. the control any nation is routinely supposed to have over the use of its airspace, as well as which people are deprived of their freedom at installations upon its territory and why – oh, and how those people are treated within those installations as well, for in other contexts there have been clear revelations of actual CIA torture of terrorism suspects carried out during this period at other such “black sites.” So the charges against these top officials could conceivably extend to enabling the practice of torture on Polish sovereign territory as well.

But Did They Know?

Well, that’s if it can be shown that they knew what was going on there. Remarkably, ex-President Kwaśniewski was actually willing to speak to the Gazeta reporters about this affair, after first admitting that he has not even (yet) been called in for questioning by the investigators. Then: “There was cooperation with American intelligence [authorities]. That’s how you had those CIA flights to Szyman [airport's location]. There wasn’t any prison.”

Gazeta: “Within the framework of that cooperation could Poland have given the Americans permission for a prison and torture?”

Kwaśniewski: “The Americans never asked us for any such permission.”

Gazeta: “Maybe they did it without our permission?”

Kwaśniewski: “I don’t have any information about the Americans torturing prisoners in Poland.”

Ex-Interior Minister Janik also spoke a bit to the Gazeta reporters, expressing his view that, whatever may or may not have happened at any prison that may or may not have existed, he actually doubted that Kwaśniewski or Miller would have known about it.

Again, for all the caginess of their comments (after all, Kwaśniewski denies the existence of a prison which does seem to have been there), these gentlemen were actually being quite cordial with their comments, inasmuch as the Polish prosecutors are refusing all comment since this is still supposed to be a Top Secret matter – understandable, since such serious charges, lodged against such prominent men in Polish politics, must be brought before the parliament itself (the Sejm) and approved there for prosecution before the State Tribunal.

In all, though, this raises the prospect of rather hopeful (if unexpected) further news to come out of Poland soon – namely of high political officials responsible for torture actually facing prosecution for their actions! What a concept! Admittedly, there has also been further progress along this line in Britain, what with the renewed inquiries into that country’s cooperation with the American “War on Terror” occurring with the advent of the new coalition government. Just no hint of anything similar coming along from the wellspring of the “enhanced interrogation” concept, the USA. How long can that situation last once the Obama administration sees foreign officials going to jail for acts that American officials ultimately ordered but that his Justice Department refuses to prosecute?

Postscript: I thought I would offer my readers the following embedded video for their consideration as an addendum to this post. I ran across it during my research, and it’s just over four minutes of a Gazeta Wyborcza reporter, Ewa Siedlecka, explaining to the TV camera what is known so far in this CIA prison matter. Yes, it’s all in Polish, with no sort of translation of any kind. Still, I found it irresistible (yes it’s true, I can understand it) and even historical in a way, to watch such a sober report about a Polish prison and especially the torture that was feared to have gone on there: noise, deprivation of sleep, with licensed physicians standing by to ensure that the abuse would take the prisoner up to the edge of death, but not over – it’s all there, and one can assume that it has a shocking effect on any Polish citizen that might have run across it. (Please pardon the juvenile 15-second cookie commercial you’ll have to put up with at the beginning to be able to see the rest of the clip. Cookies, torture: then again, Central Europe has always been drenched in irony . . . and the additional page-view you provide presumably ultimately redounds to the benefit of the Gazeta Wyborcza company, headed by that truly heroic and historical dissident Adam Michnik.)

                          

All true, in a way. But the crucial fact that the website is in no hurry to mention is that this pipeline will deliver Russian natural gas to Germany while by-passing the countries through which a cheaper, overland pipeline would normally go, in particular Poland. To be sure, pipelines to Europe through Poland (and the Ukraine) already exist. But Russian relations with those countries are usually rather prickly; with the completion of Nord Stream, the Russian authorities will have the option within a few years to cut them out of natural gas transmission completely – literally to leave them out in the cold, with no gas, as has already happened this past decade during a number of winter-time confrontations with Ukraine.

Those past confrontations have at the same time cut off the gas supply to a number of other EU states (generally in Eastern Europe) dependent on Russia for their winter-warming, and thereby have underlined the EU’s vulnerable over-reliance on those gas supplies. The dawning realization that something needs to be done about this has had the effect, among other things, of a “promotion” of the importance of the EU Commission’s Energy Directorate to being headed by the German commissioner, whereas it was previously headed by the Lithuanian Latvian commissioner. It has also resulted in new attempts to build a southern natural-gas pipeline terminating in the Balkans and originating from some of Russia’s neighbors (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan) who also have natural gas to sell and will probably be more friendly about doing so.

Germans Selling-Out the Poles

The point about the Nord Stream pipeline, however, is that it always was a bad idea from a strategic viewpoint, enabling Russia to split EU unity in any future energy confrontation by delivering gas to some presumably-friendlier countries (Germany and places west) while cutting out rather more uncooperative direct neighbors. Then again, such a massive infrastructure project – with majority (51%) Gazprom ownership but other ownership slices in the hands of Western European energy companies (include the Netherlands’ Gasunie) – was sure to deliver very highly-compensated jobs to those who could get a place within its executive ranks. Then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2005, having to leave office after losing the national election (and presumably dismissing his Federal pension as inadequate to the lifestyle he was used to leading), jumped straight into the chair of Nord Stream Chairman of the Board. While in office he had been careful to maintain very good relations with Russia generally and Vladimir Putin in particular – suspiciously good relations, as things turned out. In the end, it’s clear that he prostituted himself together with the strategic energy interests of both Germany and the EU to gain more millions of euros towards his retirement account.

Fine; so what’s the point? The point is simply the scoop recently scored by Gazeta Wyborcza about Nord Stream, namely that Erika Steinbach is to be appointed to join Schröder on the Board. We’ve had occasion before here at EuroSavant to discuss Frau Steinbach; she’s the member of the Bundestag for Chancellor Merkel’s CDU party who is better known – or infamous, in Polish circles – as head of the lobbying organization for Germans driven out of eastern lands (mostly Poland and Czechoslovakia) at the end of World War II, and who has pressed for the German government to build a museum devoted to their sufferings. Here’s the quote the Gazeta reporter managed to get from a highly-placed CDU source:

It’s about offering a consolation-prize. Chancellor Merkel did not want to involve Steinbach with the work on the Token of Witness [that museum about the German refugees], so we had to offer something in exchange. I hope the Poles will understand.

Perhaps the Poles will understand in the end, because it all makes a sort of twisted sense: Nord Stream, a Russo-German project damaging to Poland’s strategic interests, becoming a high-salary dumping-ground for German politicians with scant regard for those interests. For now, though, the prospect of having Erika Steinbach appointed to that plum job just feels like a bad April Fool’s joke.

CORRECTION: The EU Commission energy portfolio was previously held by the Latvian commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, not the Lithuanian.

                          

Fine, so they finally have him on trial in Germany. (After he had already stood trial in Israel in 1986, it must be admitted – he was found guilty, sentenced to death by hanging, but then his conviction was overturned on appeal by the Israeli Supreme Court because of new evidence that had surfaced that cast doubt on Demjanjuk’s wartime identity.) Let’s just let things proceed from there, and expeditiously: by now, the most urgent consideration is probably to actually complete the trial before the 90-year-old Demjanjuk finally dies.

Right, but among the witnesses at his new trial will presumably be one Samuel Kunz, also said to be a death-camp guard in the service of the SS during the war, but who spent most of his time at Bełżec. Wait: what is this Kunz fellow doing otherwise enjoying his retirement in perfect freedom (residing near Bonn, as it turns out, and subsisting on a civil servant’s pension)? That’s what a number of still-living death-camp escapees want to know, and it’s also the question that Gazeta Wyborcza Berlin correspondent Bartosz T. Wieliński poses in his article Why are the Germans putting on trial only Demjanjuk (topped by a charming wartime picture of Kunz and his death-camp colleagues posing at Bełżec under a double-lightning SS symbol; you should click just to check that out, Kunz is holding the mandolin).

Yes, Wieliński definitely wants to know, and he’s been trained in the aggressive school of post-Communist Polish journalism. There’s only one “Kunz” in the phonebook for the town where Wieliński knows that he lives, so he gives him a call. Kunz answers, and is willing to acknowledge that he served as a guard at Bełżec. So Wieliński follows up (the language indicates he used the polite “Sie” German form of address): “Were you killing Jews there?” “I have nothing to answer for,” Kunz replies, and hangs up.

OK, so little enlightenment could be expected from that direct channel, although it clearly was worth a try. But the uncanny parallelism in what we know of the lives of Demjanjuk and Kunz really has to make you wonder. Both initially fought against the Wehrmacht in the Russian Army, but were captured. Both then agreed to/were forced to (depending on whom you ask) work for the SS, attending first the “How to be an SS worker” training-camp at Trawniki. But Demjanjuk went to Sobibor (although he also served elsewhere, including at the Treblinka death-camp), while Kunz worked mainly at Bełżec. And then, as the war careened to a close in a disastrous German defeat, both men headed West – a good idea, since the advancing Red Army was simply executing any SS-workers that fell into its hands. But while Demjanjuk eventually made his way to the US in 1952, Kunz settled in what was to become West Germany, and even eventually managed to get himself a civil service job in the Ministry of Architecture. (That’s the translation of what Wieliński gives in the article: ministerstwo budownictwa. A little Wikipedia research suggests that he means the Ministry of Construction, now based again in Berlin with a slightly-expanded name.)

In addition to his comfy job, though, Kunz had a sideline, one he was uniquely qualified to fulfill – as an available witness for war crimes trials, naturally, as they cropped up in Germany through the 1950s and 1960s. The highlight of these probably was the one in 1963, when eight former SS officers were put on trial. (Only one was convicted, the rest cleared for lack of evidence.) Strangely, it seems no one considered whether that witness – because of the expertise he had on SS war crimes based on how he had spent the war – might need to be called up to the stand as an accused himself. (Granted, it’s likely the legal authorities were dependent on the testimony he could give to nail guilty parties higher up in the Nazi hierarchy.) Until last year, that is, when the German press started to smell something funny about his case and write about it, and (probably not coincidentally) when the prosecutor’s office in Dortmund opened an investigation.

So Why Isn’t He in the Dock, Already?

So what’s happening with that? One death-camp escapee, Aron Krochmalnik, called to inquire why Kunz hadn’t been arrested yet, and was reminded that the man is getting rather old. So he wrote to the federal Ministry of Justice to voice his concerns. The word from there is that Kunz will be put on trial some time later this year.

Time will tell if that ever actually happens. In the meantime, Krochmalnik is going ahead with a private suite against Kunz. But any explanation for the rather different treatment he has received (so far) when compared to John Demjanjuk is still lacking. Some say – and the clever among you will already have notice this just from their last names – that that’s because Kunz was actually volksdeutsch, i.e. originally a Russian citizen but of German ethnic heritage, which also explains why he easily got West German citizenship (and even a job with the German federal government) after the war while Demjanjuk presumably would have had a bit more trouble with that. More insidiously, this might also indicate that the prosecuting authorities are now more inclined to move against foreigners who are alleged to have committed war-crimes on German soil, rather than Germans.

On the other hand – and Wieliński does present this possibility fully – the key difference might be that, for Kunz and unlike Demjanjuk, there are no eye-witness accounts of his crimes, nor writings accusing him from victims/escapees. To be sure, at another war-crimes trial in Austria there was testimony that certainly all SS workers at Bełżec were involved in the killing, without exception. (Unlike Auschwitz, camps like Treblinka/Sobibor/Bełżec were set up to do nothing else, and were completely dismantled as the Red Army approached.) But Kunz steadfastly denies doing any killing, even as he admits he was at Bełżec and present while it was done. The bottom line: He might be innocent of the accusations, in a twisted, legalistic way which nonetheless still leaves the shadow of a doubt. And that shadow, let us remember, was precisely what allowed John Demjanjuk to escape the hangman in Israel.

                          

One of the blocks of the Volga-Don Atomic Electric Plant in the vicinity of Rostov-on-Don was closed down after there occurred this morning a ruptured pipe in the steam generator.

The plant’s director, Aleksandr Palamarchuk, has assured the press that there has been no damage involving radioactivity, and that radiation readings are “within the norm.” It is planned to get the malfunctioning block started again in about four days’ time.

Interestingly, this plant does not seem to be of the type of old Soviet-style reactors that we’ve heard of before (e.g. Chernobyl), as it was put into operation only nine years ago, and already provides about one-seventh of the electric power consumed in southern European Russia. Nonetheless, it had a problem before, just last month in the very same sub-block, which meant that that part of the plant has been producing minimal levels of power since that time. Now it’s producing nothing, due to that “ruptured pipe” (pęnknięcie rury).

                          

“Could this be true?” I wondered. I have certainly covered this whole Czech-and-Polish missile defense system topic here before, most notably in a post from last March entitled Poles Down the River?, and my common theme has been the Obama Administration’s steadily-waning support for going through with this deployment. Yglesias – evidently a non-Polish-speaker – can only provide as reference a link to a report from the DefenseNews site that itself cites “[l]eading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza” as the source for its information. Here we can do somewhat better, of course, and even with five days’ delay it was relatively easy for me to use the Internet-tubes to find the on-line article in question (Poland without shield, by the newspaper’s Washington correspondent Marcin Bosacki – athough feel free to insert “the” or “a” there in the title before “shield,” as the Polish language ordinarily uses neither word explicitly).

Bosacki’s lede: “Cancellation of USA plans to build an anti-rocket shield in Poland and the Czech Republic is practically a foregone conclusion – so maintain our sources in Washington.” Then again, those “sources” are somewhat thin on the ground here. Most of the heavy lifting is provided by one Riki Ellison, once a linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers but now head of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, which lobbies for missile defense generally and so, one can assume, also for this deployment to Poland and the Czech Republic in particular. One has to assume he is passing on all this information in sorrow at how events are turning out.

Deployment to Poland and the Czech Republic is no longer in the administration’s plans, Ellison claims, in favor of deployment of the anti-rocket missiles to ships at sea and/or to Turkey, Israel, or even Balkan countries. How to account for the change in policy? In Ellison’s view, the Russians have gotten inside Obama’s head: his “new team takes Russia’s arguments more into account” and “Obama’s people judge that many of the world’s problems will be easier to solve together with Moscow.” (This happens to reflect, by the way, the discussion in my prior Poles Down the River? post where I passed on word of a “secret letter” Obama had supposedly sent to Russian president Dmitri Medvedev offering to cancel the deployment to Poland and the Czech Republic in exchange for Russian assistance in dealing with Iran.) Admittedly, Bosacki does bring up in this piece “other interlocutors of ours” (that is, other sources, although completely unnamed), which for their part assert that the Russians did have something to do with this significant policy-shift, but that it was more down to both the deployment’s estimated cost and to doubts (always very valid) about whether the missile-defense system proposed to be installed would ever actually really work.

Take My Word For It, People: It’s Dead

Not to worry, though, because Marcin Bosacki followed up two days later (i.e. last Saturday, August 29) with another piece firmly stating (as its very title) The shield is dead. To further emphasize how he is standing by his reporting, this on-line article features his very own head-shot at the top-left, grinning out at the reader in an honest, credible way. His lede here: “Reality is that this government of the USA will not build the [anti-missile defense] shield in Poland or the Czech Republic.” In the two intervening days he has improved somewhat the authorities he can cite as sources for this report – the name Riki Ellison is no longer anywhere to be found. Instead he cites a recent conference of high-level generals and defense contractors on the subject of anti-missile defense, held in Huntsville, Alabama, at which the subject of Poland and the Czech Republic simply never came up, whereas at the same conference last year it had dominated the proceedings. Hmm, okay, that does seem to indicate something, and to add to that Bosacki also brings up another of his “informers, close to the Obama administration,” who tells him “now it’s clear: the plan for Poland and the Czech Republic is dead.”

As to why things have taken this turn, he is still not sure. It could be the Russians; it could be the doubts about the whole project, in some part already openly expressed, on the part of Obama’s highest advisors. Will the two countries gain some kind of “sweetener,” he wonders, to compensate them for this disappointment – for this deployment that they agreed to and, in both cases, gained internal political approval for in the face of determined opposition? In any event, in his view the whole affair rather has znaczenie drugorzędne, that is, the whiff of second-rate treatment.

The Patriots Are Late

Finally, in this context a look is warranted at an earlier article published by Gazeta Wyborcza’s great competitor as a national daily newspaper for Poland, Rzeczpospolita. It’s clear that Rzecz got seriously scooped by Gazeta reporter Bosacki on this whole story; nonetheless back on 17 August it did have a story about the Patriot anti-aircraft defense missiles, operated by US Army personnel, that are supposed to accompany that deployment of anti-rocket missiles to Poland (Will the patriots [i.e. anti-aircraft missiles] for Poland not make it in time?). Now, it was really the Patriot deployment that the Polish authorities were looking forward to, much more than the anti-missile system itself, precisely because those bring with them US military personnel and thus a much firmer US commitment to Poland’s defense in case of attack – because any such attack now has a much greater chance of killing not just Poles, but Americans. Unfortunately, as Rzeczpospolita reporter Jacek Przybylski notifies us here, negotiations for that deployment are not making much progress. For example, there’s little likelihood that any Patriots will be deployed in Poland by the end of this year, as was once the intention; the US Army needs 90 days in any case after signature and ratification of the appropriate agreement just to bring about the deployment of those units from out of Germany, meaning that ratification would have to be completed in late September just to get some Patriots to their planned base in the Warsaw area by Christmas, and the negotiations are hardly that far along.

Why are things taking so long?, is the question Przybylski poses right in the middle of his piece. Of course, we think we already know the answer to this – two weeks after this article came out – from Marcin Bosacki’s subsequent reporting over at Gazeta Wyborcza. But at least Przybylski himself also comes close, citing his own source in the form of Aleksander Szczygło, head of the Polish National Defense Office: “For sure one cause is that the new American administration still has no opinion on the necessity of building a shield.” Of particular concern seems to be the project’s cost, which a recent article in the Washington Post revealed will be easily over $1 billion. And indeed, even now that remains Washington’s official position: We haven’t made any decision yet. Gazeta’s Bosacki encountered this stance first-hand: as he relates in his original article, he put in a request to the US Department of State for a discussion of Polish-American relations in general, but was told that no representative would be availalbe for that “until the review of the strategic concept of the shield had been completed.”

Thanks to his reporting – if we can trust it – we now know better: there will be no anti-missile-system deployment to Central Europe. This is clearly a good thing, as anyone who has closely followed my extended treatment of the subject here will realize: it was never by any means certain that this technology would actually work in achieving its ostensible aim – i.e. intercepting rogue nuclear-tipped missiles emanating from Iran, and maybe from North Korea (!) as well – but what it would do, and already did, was annoy the Russian government mightily, to no real useful geopolitical purpose. Still, the Obama adminstration’s task going forward is now to find a way to ease the very considerable embarrassment that is sure to ensue among the Polish and Czech governments as the reality of this 180-degree turn to non-deployment eventually emerges into the public sphere.

UPDATE: Here is the New York Times coverage, which I had missed. Naturally, the State Department spokesman’s position is that no decision has yet been made. The fact that jumps out at me is the $4 billion cost for the anti-missile deployment to Poland and the Czech Republic through 2015, as calculated by the Government Accountability Office.