New Polish president demands Germany pay war reparations on invasion anniversary

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland’s new right-wing president, Karol Nawrocki, has marked the anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two by renewing calls for Germany to pay reparations for its brutal invasion and occupation.

However, at the same ceremony, Prime Minister Donald Tusk – who leads a more liberal, pro-EU government that is opposed to Nawrocki – warned that “we must understand who is the enemy and who is our ally”, and that only a “united Europe” can keep Poland safe.

“To build a partnership with our western neighbour based on the foundations of truth and good relations, we must finally settle the issue of reparations from the German state, which I unequivocally demand,” declared Nawrocki this morning at Westerplatte in the city of Gdańsk.

That was where, on 1 September 1939, the first battle of the German invasion of Poland took place. Within weeks, Poland had been overrun by Nazi Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east, marking the beginning of almost six years of brutal occupation.

Around 6 million Polish citizens, 17% of the prewar population, were killed in the war, a higher proportion than in any other country. The German occupiers also laid waste to many Polish cities and plundered or destroyed much of Poland’s cultural heritage.

“Eternal shame to the German and Soviet murderers,” declared Nawrocki today, adding that, “if you have killed and stolen, you must confess your sin, you must apologise, and you must make amends”.

“For our common future, for the security of our alliances, we are waiting for reparations from the German state,” continued Nawrocki, who expressed hope that “the Polish government will strengthen the voice of the Polish president…[in] seeking truth and honesty towards our western neighbour”.

Nawrocki – who took office as president less than a month ago, before which he served as head of the state Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) – has in the past repeatedly expressed his belief that Germany still owes Poland war reparations.

Speaking after the president, Tusk, who like Nawrocki comes from Gdańsk, said that Westerplatte is a “sacred place…[that] compels us to remember the millions of victims of this most brutal of wars, and compels us to remember that Poland must never again become a victim of anyone’s aggression”.

But, added the prime minister, in order to prevent an “attack on our homeland, we must understand who is the enemy and who is our ally, we must understand clearly where this threat comes from today and with whom we should unite in the effort to defend Poland and the entire Western world”.

“A united Europe, NATO, our allies – this is the lesson we learned from that solitude in 1939. Poland can never again be alone. It can never be weak.”

In 2021, Poland’s former government, led by the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party with which Nawrocki is aligned, launched an effort to obtain up to $1.3 trillion in reparations that it claimed Poland is still owed by Germany.

Successive German governments, however, have argued that the issue of reparations has already been legally settled and nothing further is owed. But they have also repeatedly expressed regret and remorse for the suffering of Poles under German occupation during the war.

In June this year, shortly after Nawrocki’s election, Knut Abraham, the German government’s plenipotentiary for Polish-German cooperation, told Deutsche Welle that “our position has not changed; from a legal perspective, the matter is closed”.

After Tusk’s government replaced PiS in office in December 2023, it ended the official push for reparations but has suggested that Germany should still provide some form of “compensation” to Poland for the death and destruction it wrought during the war.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Mikołaj Bujak/KPRP

Daniel Tilles

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.