The Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland was brought to life in March 1945 as a central institution entitled to conduct investigations and collect evidences of war crimes committed during the German occupation of Poland (1939-45). In 1949, the Commission was renamed as the Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland, in order to mark the propagandist division between the ‘progressive’ and ‘antifascist’ East Germany and the ‘revisionist’ West Germany; yet, its activities were at the same time put on halt. In 1958, West German authorities created the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, based in Ludwigsburg. The first, semi-official, contacts between these two institutions were inaugurated in 1960, despite the lack of official diplomatic relations between Warsaw and Bonn at that time. The venue of the contact was the Polish Military Mission in West Berlin, where the prosecutors from Ludwigsburg could get acquainted with documents from the Commission’s archive.

In my article I try to examine the genesis of the Round Table negotiations in Poland and East Germany in 1989-1990 on the basis of the existing literature and archival sources. Despite the shared name “Round Table”, there were many significant differences concerning the genesis of the negotiations between the ruling communist parties and the opposition in the two countries. These differences can be observed on many levels, starting with the internal situation in both countries in the wake of 1989 – through their varied economic conditions, disproportionate political power of the opposition and dissident movements – up to different, though so close in time, political-historical context of both negotiations. Describing these historical asymmetries helps better understand spectacular changes of 1989 and their long lasting consequences.