Introduction

The Krzyżowa Foundation was established as the Cold War was winding down, as part of the reconciliation between Germany and Poland, which itself was part of the general reconciliation in Europe. During World War II, an anti-Nazi opposition group made up of representatives from across German society, and later referred to as the Kreisau Circle, had met on the von Moltke estate in the lower Silesian village of Krzyżowa, By risking their lives, the members of the Kreisau Circle worked on plans to reconstruct Germany and Europe on the basis of democratic and Christian moral values. In the late 1980s, members of the democratic opposition movements in both Poland and East Germany would later pick up on these meetings of the Kreisau Circle in Krzyżowa. Their own resistance to their own communist dictatorships also involved joint activity across different social groups, even across different nation states. So one of the resistance activities the members of these democratic opposition groups engaged in was participating in personal, free versions of Polish-German dialogue. As the Cold War was dying in the spring on 1989, a group of Poles, Germans from East and West Germany, Americans and Dutch - picked up on the World War II local history in Krzyżowa, and wished to create a meeting center there. Their initiative was very lucky, One of its results was that on November 12, 1989-- just a few days after the fall of the Berlin Wall --Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Chancellor Helmut Kohl participated in a Polish-German Reconciliation Mass, with held in Krzyżowa. In a dual sense, Krzyżowa had come to represent reconciliation among different social groups as well as opposition to totalitarianism. Krzyżowa had became a symbol of the general European reconciliation after the Cold War.

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