Foreign minister Zbigniew Rau has signed a diplomatic note outlining Poland’s demand for war reparations from Germany, which the government has previously said could amount to $1.3 trillion. The note is to be transmitted to Berlin today ahead of a meeting between Rau and his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock.
“The settlement of the consequences of German aggression and occupation should include, inter alia, payment by Germany of compensation for material and non-material damage caused to the Polish state,” said Rau today, quoted by the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
“Such a settlement will allow Polish-German relations to be based on justice and truth and will lead to the closing of painful chapters in the past and will ensure the further development of bilateral relations in the spirit of good neighbourliness and friendly cooperation,” he added.
Min. @RauZbigniew parafował dziś notę dyplomatyczną skierowaną do MSZ Republiki Federalnej Niemiec 🇩🇪.
Przedmiotem noty są kwestie związane z reparacjami za szkody poniesione przez Polskę w wyniku agresji i okupacji niemieckiej w latach 1939-1945. pic.twitter.com/BiW3wVCTK5
— Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych RP 🇵🇱 (@MSZ_RP) October 3, 2022
Broadcaster RMF reports that the note is to be sent to Berlin today, with Baerbock due in Warsaw tomorrow for talks with Rau focused on security issues. The text of the document has not been revealed, so it is not known if it includes a demand for a specific amount of compensation.
RMF also reports that Poland’s demands include the return of looted cultural items and Polish bank holdings, as well as the granting of nationality minority status to Poles in Germany and the launching of an educational campaign in Germany about World War Two.
On 1 September – the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 – the Polish ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party published a report compiled by a parliamentary team that calculated the losses caused by the six-year German occupation at $1.3 trillion in today’s terms.
At the time, PiS declared that it would be formally seeking reparations to compensate those losses, and the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said that the government would soon be issuing a diplomatic note to Germany.
In response, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reiterated Berlin’s longstanding position that the issue of reparations has already been “conclusively settled under international law”. Poland’s government, however, disputes that interpretation.
The Polish opposition has supported the reparations claim. However, it has also accused PiS of using the issue for political purposes, as part of a rise in anti-German rhetoric from the government ahead of next year’s elections.
In a speech last week, PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński pledged that, although “the fight for reparations will last a long time, we will carry it out with all consistency on a global scale…They [the Germans] try to present themselves to the world as a moral power, [but] they did more harm to us than to any other nation, apart from the Jews”.
Main image credit: Julien Bryan/Wikimedia Commons (under public domain)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
