==Reply== 
 :I think you're reading too much into it from your POV, and taking some things too cynically. For instance, the bit about the pipe just means that it was this type of pipe they had to crawl through. Everyone knows the Poles, particularly Varsovians, suffered horribly under the Nazi-German occupation, and Germans know it too. That includes the resistance fighters who used Warsaw's sewers during the courageous but tragic uprising in '44. (Tragic, because Stalin let them die before moving the Red Army across the river.) 

 :From my perspective, the fact remains that it is Polish politicians (some of them) who keep raising anti-German themes and fears, not the other way around. Yes, I know there are right-wingers and nationalistic dolts in Germany, too (as there are in the U.S.). But they’re on the fringe, even more than they are in the U.S. (unfortunately). 

 :I haven't followed the pipeline story closely, but I suspect the Germans agreed to the Baltic route because they were worried about Polish attitudes toward Germany given the character of Polish populist politics these days. 

 :I have to wonder how many Poles remember not only Germany's support for Polish entry into the EU, but also West German aid to Poland two decades ago during the martial law period. I remember seeing on the news lines of West German semi-trucks heading across East Germany to Poland with food and other kinds of aid at Christmas time — this, to a country that, though not of its own volition, had annexed nearly a fourth of Germany's prewar territory only 40 years before. If the tables had been turned economically and geopoltically, would the Polish people have come to Germany's aid? 

 :We could debate these themes for pages. My POV, when all is said & done, is that the Germans by and large recognize their huge burden of collective shame over the Nazi atrocities, and have in the last half-century have done much toward reconciliation with Poland — first and foremost, by renouncing all claims to the Oder-Neisse territories. Certainly, some prejudices remain; every society has its bigots and fanatics. But Germans in general would like to achieve reconciliation with the Polish people — just as they have with the French, long seen as their "ancestral enemy." 

 :I would like to see some official gesture from Poland, backed by grass-roots support among the Polish people, to work not just toward "normal" relations with Germany, but toward friendship and mutual forgiveness. I'm not saying that nothing's been done along these lines, but one does get the overall impression that many Polish people, including some prominent politicians, cling to outmoded attitudes toward their western neighbors based on the horrors of a past vastly different from the present. 

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