Europe

Speaking at Beitz’s commemoration on September 26—his 100th birthday—Gauck declared that Beitz “made our country better.”  

Read more in the Financial Times.  

Read the story in Bloomberg News.  

On Hitlerland, McKagan states: “His thought-provoking angle on Hitler encourages the reader to study his footnotes; his reference material is my de facto reading list.”  

Click here to view the full comments in World War II magazine. 

In 1981, when I was Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief, my wife Krysia and our children spent most of August visiting her family in Czestochowa. I joined them for a week, and was immediately infected by the sense of excitement that was evident everywhere. Poles reveled in their rediscovered freedoms, with Solidarity openly challenging Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski’s regime at every turn. While many people worried about the possibility of a government clampdown and in the West there was increasing talk about a possible Soviet invasion, the general mood was one of defiance and hope—banishing the sense of pervasive fear that was characteristic of countries in the Soviet bloc.

Which is exactly why back in Moscow the leadership was increasingly alarmed by Solidarity’s rise. On a daily basis, I monitored the Soviet media’s ominous pronouncements about the dangers that this labor movement represented. At the end of August, Krysia arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport at almost midnight on a flight that had been delayed several hours. Coming to meet her, I watched as she maneuvered our children and the luggage through a long customs line. To my relief, the customs officer, a young woman, saw how exhausted our children were and started waving through her luggage without inspecting them.

But at the last minute, she told Krysia to open her purse and plucked out a key chain. It bore no inscription, only a picture of Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II. Suddenly furious, she demanded all the luggage back and spent the next three hours combing through everything. It didn’t matter that Solidarity was an officially recognized trade union in Poland at the time. To her, Walesa and the pope represented a mortal threat to the Soviet system.

As it turns out, she was absolutely right. In fact, I’d argue that in the history books that will be written outside of Poland about the broad sweep of the twentieth century, only two Poles will be inevitably mentioned: the men pictured on Krysia’s key chain. They will be hailed as the prime movers of the events that led not only to the round table accords and the first semi-free elections of 1989 but also to the chain reaction of tumbling communist regimes throughout the old Soviet bloc—and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself.

For those of us from the Western press who were fortunate enough to chronicle these seismic events, Walesa’s central role was never in doubt. That is not to say that we knew what the outcome would be any earlier than anyone else did. We were not prophets and, like many Solidarity activists, we assumed that there was a long struggle ahead. Most of us would never have predicted in those early days that the Soviet system would crumble as quickly as it did. And those of us who reported from Poland understood that Walesa, his advisors and followers were often at odds with each other. But Solidarity garnered its strength from a remarkable coalition of workers and intellectuals who dedicated themselves to a common cause even as personal rivalries, tensions and jealousies were all too evident.

Nonetheless, in the emerging narrative of Solidarity Walesa was always front and center. One reason is that every narrative needs its central character, and Walesa fitted the part perfectly. His very imperfections—his quirky, often amusing, sometimes prickly personality, along with his sometimes peculiar utterances that were hard to deconstruct in Polish and even more so to translate into English or any other language (“I am for and even against…”)—made him a complex hero. But as the electrician who scrambled over the wall of the Gdansk shipyard, he embodied the story of the workers challenging and exposing the myth of the workers’ state.

The fact that Walesa was as capable of directing his jokes at himself as at his opponents endeared him to the journalists all the more. Writers like self-awareness, they like irony. But what they really like most is someone who has a sense of mission, who is willing to risk everything to win everything. And a character who can truly inspire at those critical moments which later are seen as history’s turning points. The narrative arc of Walesa’s story in the 1980s basically wrote itself.

While now most people recall Walesa and Solidarity’s highs and lows—the triumphant agreement on August 31, 1980 legalizing the union, the imposition of martial law on December 13, 1981 and the elections on June 4, 1989—certain moments in between are most vividly etched in my memory.

On a warm day in August 1985, when the Jaruzelski regime was boasting that the country was “normalized” and that Solidarity was “broken,” I returned to Gdansk to observe how Walesa and others were marking the approaching fifth anniversary of the accords that had led to the initial flurry of hope for the now banned movement. At 2 p.m., the end of the first shift at the shipyard, Walesa walked out of the gate wearing a “Man of Iron” t-shirt and holding a bouquet of flowers. He placed the flowers at the foot of the memorial to the workers who died in the protests of 1970, as a small group of supporters, no more than 150 in all, clustered around him. Raising their hands in the V-for-victory sign, they joined Walesa in singing “Poland is not yet lost.”                                     

The mood was hardly triumphant. Later that day, about 3,000 people gathered for an emotional mass at St. Brigid’s Church nearby, with Walesa and Home Army veterans in front of the altar. As the faithful spilled out of the church, some began to chant Solidarity slogans. But spotting a cordon of police, the crowd quietly dispersed.

Back in his apartment, Walesa was philosophical about the palpable lack of energy or optimism of the movement’s followers that day. “You have to wait for the right moment,” he told me. When I had parked my car in front of his apartment building, secret policemen pulled out their cameras with long lenses and openly shot photos of me. The message was clear: we’re watching everyone who has anything to do with Walesa and Solidarity, especially you foreign correspondents.

But, of course, even then Walesa’s international reputation accounted for the fact that he was able to live above ground and operate in the open, while someone like Zbigniew Bujak, the leader of Underground Solidarity, was the country’s most wanted fugitive. During that same period, I was able to interview Bujak—but only after activists organized an elaborate chain of people to convey me to our rendezvous point in a way to throw off anyone trying to tail us. I was escorted through crumbling courtyards and switched cars three or four times.

It was readily apparent that there were tensions between the underground and Walesa, with Bujak issuing strike calls at times that were immediately countermanded by Walesa. In some ways, the tensions within Solidarity could rebound to the movement’s benefit: Walesa could argue that the government needed to ease up because otherwise the militants would be hard to control. But as with everything Walesa did there was a strong element of personal ambition.

After 1989, I asked Bujak about that period and how much he was aware of Walesa’s motives. The former underground leader shook his head. “I underestimated to what extent Lech was worried about my standing and how far he was willing to go to lower it,” he said.

As Andrzej Celinski, who was part of the Solidarity leader’s circle of intellectual advisors in the early days, told me later: “He was fighting not only for victory, he was fighting for his position after the victory over the communists. And that was during the worst period, when no one dreamed of victory.”

Most of us who were covering the events in Poland were hardly surprised by Walesa’s personal behavior that so often mixed personal ambition with his ambitions for Solidarity. He could think large—for his country and for himself. After the 1989 elections when he decided that Solidarity had to take charge of the government and the country’s catastrophic economy, many of his own followers thought he was committing a huge mistake. He was willing to gamble otherwise.

It’s only when history airbrushes national heroes that people forget that most of them had very complex, often difficult personalities—and, with rare exceptions, were never completely selfless—even as they performed seemingly miraculously feats, defying incredible odds. In fact, their personal ambitions were a key ingredient in their victories.

Walesa wore both his personal strengths and weaknesses on his sleeve, not bothering to disguise his mercurial emotions as more polished leaders do. In his case, normal rules didn’t necessarily apply. Many Western journalists made the mistake of starting an interview with Walesa the same way they would with any contentious leader: by asking him a vague, broad question, thinking that would put him at ease, before asking anything more pointed. Nothing irritated Walesa more. He considered such questions a waste of his time—and often would cut the interview short.

I remember one colleague returning from Gdansk completely frustrated and angry, having been cut off after about three minutes, despite the fact that he had traveled a long way to get there. My advice to any colleagues who asked: start Walesa off right away with a challenging question. He would almost always then become emotionally engaged.

But Walesa also could easily charm Western journalists. When he stayed in Buckingham Palace and joked that he couldn’t find Danuta in their huge bed, many Poles back home cringed. The journalists in London loved it.

More significantly, he knew how to rise to a historic occasion. Stepping up to the podium to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Nov. 15, 1989, he intoned “We the People,” echoing the opening words of the U.S. Constitution. From that moment on he had every member of the Congress standing and applauding wildly. From that moment, he represented not just Poland; he represented the drive for freedom everywhere.

Yes, Walesa’s reputation faded a bit as he offered a far less impressive performance as president. And as a former president, he continues to let slip more than the occasional off-the-cuff remark that comes back to haunt him. But much of the world hasn’t followed that saga. Poland and its struggles is no longer the center of international attention that it once was, precisely because it is now seen largely as a post-communist success story. And the man who is still most associated with the struggle to give Poland the opportunity for that success is Lech Walesa.

Click here to read the published report in Focus Historia, in Polish.

The Parliamentarians Network has developed into a unique actor of change in the international conflict prevention architecture. It has been policy relevant, as it engages decision makers, it has networked across institutions and continents, it has shared knowledge and experience, and it has led an action oriented dialogue on issues that have a bearing on stability and peace, locally, regionally, nationally and globally.

Conflict situations are usually characterized by stalemate at the strategic level, lack of political will for genuine dialogue at national and local levels, lack of societal desire for reconciliation, and all sides at all levels seek to attach political conditions to urgent humanitarian and development needs and activities. The onus is on the international community to take the initiative to make progress both on the ground and at the strategic level.

This shows: preventive diplomacy is a frustrating business to be in. But the Parliamentarians engaged in it are not wasting their time. Preventive diplomacy remains a moral imperative, an economic necessity, a humanitarian must, and a political obligation. The Parliamentarians Network drives this home to governments through its very existence on a daily basis.

In China, there is a story about a doctor, who always cured his patients shortly before they died. For this reason he was famous in the whole valley. There was another doctor, whose patients never fell ill in the first instance. This doctor was unknown. Which doctor do you think was the better one?

Conflicts are essential in order to foster societal change.The yardstick is whether societies manage their conflicts peacefully. Therefore, conflict prevention is not exclusively about preventing violence, it is also about channelling conflicts into peaceful procedures. So conflict prevention is a process rather than a policy.

There is no opposition to preventive diplomacy. In fact, there is a broad consensus about its importance. But experience has shown that rhetorical support for it does not always lead to appropriate action. And where the international community gets engaged, it focuses too much on crisis management and too little on preventive diplomacy; one of the reasons being that crisis management is visible, preventive diplomacy is not: it is quiet diplomacy, it cannot be conducted through the media.

There are two flaws in conflict prevention that the Parliamentarians Network has been trying to overcome: the lack of a prevention lobby in our societies and a lack of a top-down approach in governmental agencies. Remedying these deficits is part of the difficult domestic and international political will-building strategy the Network has been engaged in.

During the next years, tensions and conflicts over access to water and energy continue to endanger stability and security in many parts of the world. Also, the last undivided spaces of the earth: i.e. the cosmos, the oceans, and the cyber space, are likely to cause problems in the future. States with a global vision tend to spread out into these areas, as binding international agreements are lacking in order to regulate the competition here. Furthermore, religious rights of minorities are violated in many regions, especially in Northern Africa and the Middle East. This problem needs special attention, locally and internationally.

The Network should tackle all these challenges through institutionalised dialogue between all stakeholders and with a view to create win-win-situations for all.

Today, we find ourselves in a unique situation in that all decisive forces in world politics, including Russia, China, India and the Muslim world, share, objectively, common basic interests. This is a chance to work for the creation of a cooperative international order by reaching out to decision makers to sensitize them that conflict prevention needs to become part of their decision making. State borders and state power are no longer decisive reference points. Transnational problems require transnational solutions.

In the years to come, the Parliamentarians Network should lead the way in this direction, conscious of what Albert Einstein once said: “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”

Click here to read the editorial on the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention website. 

Responding to increased levels of cyber risks, governments are now taking more interest in cybersecurity policy, Mroz points out. But he argues that more cooperation and sharing of information between government and the private sector will allow for a faster response to threats than government policies can provide on their own.

"Cybersecurity is a critical issue that affects everyone," Mroz notes. "Both the United States and the European Union recognize that people are not really free if they are not safe."

The article summarizes some of the topics discussed at the Global Investment Risk Symposium held in Washington, D.C. on March 7-8, 2013.

Click here to read full article. 

Tributes poured in from all over the world for Beitz, who not only headed Thyseen Krupp, the steel conglomerate, during Germany’s postwar economic miracle but also saved hundreds of Jews and Poles from deportation to death camps during the World War II.

“With the death of Berthold Beitz, Germany has lost one of its most eminent and successful corporate personalities, who helped to shape the country in important ways,” Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

“Berthold Beitz was a light and a role model in the darkness of the murderous Nazi period,” Dieter Graumann, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told the Juedische Allgemeine, Germany’s Jewish weekly.

Mroz offered this commentary about Beitz’s role at EWI and his contribution to lessening tensions between East and West in the Cold War days:

It is impossible to overstate the importance Berthold Beitz had in bridging the gap between the Soviet Union and the West during the most difficult days of the Cold War. Dr. Beitz, who served as EWI chairman during critical years in the 1980s, was a decisive and remarkable man. His visionary decision to create the Krupp Senior Fellows at EWI in the early 1980s enabled significant talent from Warsaw Pact and NATO nations to come and work together at the institute in New York for periods of one to two years.

The first ever publication on CBMs and CSBM—confidence and security building measures for the CSCE (now OSCE)—were written by these fellows. They often used pseudonyms because of the delicate nature of their pioneering work. Many of the EWI Krupp Senior Fellows later went on to become ministers and key leaders of their nations after the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe.

As chairman, Dr. Beitz was a mentor and was deeply engaged in the issues. He consistently encouraged us to take risks and push the ball further down the field. The respect with which he was held in Moscow and around the world translated into important openings for EWI in our first decade. Dr. Beitz was enormously proud when his grandson Robert Ziff became an active board member and served as chairman of the EWI executive committee. “It is the very kind of engagement to make a difference in this world that I expect every grandparent would like to see of future generations,” he noted.

EWI has lost a great pioneer, friend and leader with the passing of Dr. Bertold Beitz. We are a stronger and better institution because of him. Much of the remarkable success we had in helping facilitate Warsaw Pact-NATO relations in the 1980s was due to his interventions, engagement and vision.

We send to his wife Else, his three daughters and grandchildren our deep sympathy and our promise to continue to work hard in the best tradition that Dr. Beitz helped us establish at the EastWest Institute.

The obituary that ran in The New York Times can be found here.

“In no other area of security are the rules undefined,” McConnell said, making the point that without agreed-upon guidelines, critical infrastructure systems across the globe are at stake and financial and political stability are continually threatened. Discussions continued on ways that EWI, with its unique history of building trust between nations, can help make significant progress in fighting cyber crime and avoiding global misunderstandings and tensions. The European delegation emphasized the U.S.-EU alliance and hopes for improved cyber cooperation despite recent strains.

Participants stated that one of the main roadblocks to significant progress is the gap between the rapid pace of technology and the slow pace of policy approvals. One reason is that lack of familiarity with rapid technological advances often overwhelms and confuses uninformed policymakers. All agreed that there must be a bridge between these two arenas and that dialogue is a key component.

Click here to view more photos from the event. 

In 1914, shortly after Germany invaded neutral Belgium, the German authorities exacted revenge for the shooting of several of their soldiers on patrol in Louvain. They executed more than 200 civilians, then methodically set fire to homes and to the University of Louvain’s library. About 250,000 books went up in flames, including 800 that had been printed before the year 1500. Rebuilt and lavishly restocked between the wars, the library once again went up in flames in May 1940, the result of German shelling in World War II. This time, 900,000 books were reduced to ashes, 200,000 of which had been donated by Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Wars routinely destroy not just lives but cultural treasures. Yet Robert M. Edsel keeps demonstrating that, for all its horrors and destruction, World War II included unprecedented efforts to preserve Europe’s artistic masterpieces as the Allies retook the continent.

In his earlier book “The Monuments Men,” Edsel focused on the American and British museum directors and art historians who were assigned that task in northwest Europe. (George Clooney is now directing and starring in a film based on that volume.) In “Saving Italy,” he zeroes in on members of the same unit sent into the field during the Italian campaign that started in 1943, when the Allies mounted their drive to topple Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime and expel the country’s German partners-turned-occupiers.

And what a dramatic story it is, given the extent of Italy’s artistic heritage, the looting of the retreating German forces and the intrigues within the German high command as they recognized they were fighting a losing battle. At the heart of Edsel’s lively narrative are the two most important art specialists dispatched to Italy in 1943: Deane Keller, 42 that year, a Yale art professor with an in-depth knowledge of Italy, and Fred Hartt, 29, a rising star of the Yale University Art Gallery. Because Keller was self-effacing while Hartt was expansive and attracted publicity, the two were occasionally at odds. But they shared the same passionate commitment to their mission.

During a nighttime raid on Milan in August 1943, the Royal Air Force offered an object lesson about how much was in jeopardy. A bomb landed 80 feet from Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” destroying the wall of the refectory of a Dominican monastery. Thanks to strategically placed sandbags and scaffolding, the painting survived, but initially no one dared risk digging through the debris to see whether it really had.

Such episodes compelled Allied commanders, from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower on down, to pay more than lip service to the notion that their offensives should seek to minimize the destruction of cultural treasures. While the safety of their troops always came first, much could be done to that end, whether it was a matter of keeping troops from billeting in architectural jewels or of more selective targeting.

Most of the art specialists, as Keller put it, saw themselves as engaged in “a personal crusade” to save whatever they could. Their biggest frustration was that they often felt like bystanders, able to move in only after the destruction had taken place. After assessing the American bombing of Padua, which included a direct hit on the Chapel of Mantegna with its famed frescoes, Hartt despaired, “I should characterize the situation as desperate.”

The other source inducing high anxiety: the looting of the art treasures by retreating German forces. Ironically, the Germans had learned some lessons from World War I and enlisted their own art specialists to avoid the kind of wholesale destruction that had been evident at Louvain. But they wanted both to claim credit for preserving the treasures and to send them home.

Most infamously, Hermann Goering demanded a steady flow of priceless objects from Monte Cassino, Florence and elsewhere. Keller, Hartt and their Italian counterparts were continually trying to trace the Germans’ stunning hauls, and how they largely succeeded makes for a riveting read. So do some of the other spectacular successes in undoing the damage of warfare. In Pisa, a city hit hard by American bombers and German artillery, Keller orchestrated a massive effort to save the gorgeous frescoes of the Camposanto, with a team of engineers and workers erecting protective covering while they also gathered up countless specks of painted plaster for reassembling later. For his role in returning a vast trove of art to Florence, Hartt was named an honorary citizen of that city after the fighting ended.

Edsel’s larger point in this and his previous book — and through the work of his Monuments Men Foundation — is that the achievements of both men and their colleagues should be “a source of pride for all Americans.” While he was deployed, Keller did not think that such a moment of recognition would ever come. He suspected that the larger narrative of the global conflagration would overshadow everything else. At a time when millions were dying, the fate of Italy’s masterpieces could easily be seen as a mere footnote. “I wonder if this whole story will ever come out for people to know about and to realize — I doubt it,” Keller wrote in a letter to his wife.

On that particular point, Edsel’s book proves him dead wrong.

Click here to read the review in The Washington Post. 

Nagorski was one of several panelists to discuss the “Freedom of Media and Security of Journalists,” an event organized by the Overseas Press Club (OPC) in conjunction with the Press Club Polska, with 60 people in attendance. During the panel, Nagorski—who had served as bureau chief for Newsweek in Warsaw, Moscow, Rome, Bonn and Berlin— contrasted the historical differences faced by journalists, from the Cold War to present times.

“It’s worth noting that, despite all the dangers today to freedom of the media and the huge problems we have with security for journalists, there are some positive trends,” Nagorski said.

“There’s no better example than the country we’re now in. I covered Poland in the 1980s, when I had to play cat-and-mouse games with the security services to interview someone like Zbigniew Bujak, the underground leader of Solidarity who was the country’s most wanted political fugitive. I was led by Solidarity contacts through back alleys, jumped in and out of cars, and went through all sorts of other drills to avoid being followed. Today, that’s hard to imagine. Political life is free and the media is free. And the country has taken off economically, banishing the chronic shortages and deprivation of the bygone era. As elsewhere, the media is facing plenty of competitive pressures, but no more so than everywhere else.”

Click here to read the full event write-up.