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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.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki has renewed his call for Germany to pay Poland war reparations during a speech at Auschwitz on the anniversary of the camp’s liberation, which is also marked as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“To this day, the German state has not paid reparations to Poland for the evils of World War Two,” declared Nawrocki, a conservative who took office last year.
“This is not how you build a world of peace. For every crime and every war, you simply have to pay and apologise. Only then will we be able to feel that we have fulfilled our duty.”
Prezydent RP @NawrockiKn: Państwo niemieckie do dziś nie zapłaciło reparacji Polsce za zło II wojny światowej. Tak nie buduje się świata pokoju. Za każdą zbrodnię i za każdą wojnę trzeba po prostu zapłacić i przeprosić. Wtedy dopiero będziemy mogli mieć poczucie, że wykonaliśmy…
— Kancelaria Prezydenta RP (@prezydentpl) January 27, 2026
This year marks the first time that Nawrocki, an academic historian who was previously director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, has commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day as president.
Nazi Germany killed over a million people, the majority of them Jews, at the camp, which it had established in 1940 on occupied Polish territory that after the war again became part of Poland.
“Poland is the custodian of the truth about German crimes and the custodian of the truth about the victims who died here, over 1 million of them,” declared Nawrocki. “Auschwitz remains a symbol of utter dehumanisation, complete barbarity; it was a death factory organised by the Germans.”
Yet after the war, the president argued, “we remembered the victims but we forgot the perpetrators”. He claimed that only 15% of the perpetrators in Nazi-German camps were brought to justice. Meanwhile, the German state has not paid Poland reparations.
In 2021, Poland, which was at the time ruled by the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, demanded that Germany pay $1.3 trillion in reparations for the damage it caused during the war. Germany has rejected that claim, arguing that the question of reparations was legally resolved in the past.
PiS lost power in 2023, and the current Polish government has not pursued the reparations claim. However, Nawrocki, who is aligned with PiS, has done so, including on a visit to Berlin last year.
In his speech at Auschwitz today, Nawrocki emphasised repeatedly that it was Germany as a nation that was responsible for Nazi atrocities.
“It was the German nation that supported the ideology of National Socialism and allowed Adolf Hitler to come to power,” he declared. “It was the German people and the German state that brought about the crime we know as the Holocaust.”
Polish President @NawrockiKn has called on Germany to pay Poland war reparations during talks in Berlin with Chancellor @_FriedrichMerz.
In response, Germany has reiterated that it considers the issue to be legally closed and that no reparations are owed https://t.co/sX07qtCFRL
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 16, 2025
Nawrocki also noted that, before the systematic mass murder of Jews began in 1941, there was, to use the words of historian Richard C. Lukas, a “forgotten Holocaust” against ethnic Poles carried out by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union after they both invaded and occupied Poland in 1939.
He recalled that the first transport of prisoners to Auschwitz in 1940 was made up of 728 Poles. The second largest group of victims of the camp, after Jews, were ethnic Poles.
The Polish president argued that, if the Western world had not shown “indifference” to crimes being committed against Poles early in the war, perhaps later atrocities might not have taken place. “Auschwitz might not have happened if the reaction had been appropriate much earlier.”
“It is our duty to remember the tragedy of the Holocaust, but also to remember what happened before 1939 and before 1942…[and] what happened after 1945,” when Poland fell under brutal Soviet-backed communist rule, said the Polish president.
Poland covers almost all the costs of maintaining former Nazi-German camps on its territory. It has spent more on this than Germany has paid in compensation to Polish war victims
It's time for Germany to fund preservation of the sites, argues @W_Kononczuk https://t.co/08nf4c2jMz
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) January 25, 2026
After his speech, Nawrocki took part in a memorial ceremony for victims of the camp, which was attended by Holocaust survivors as well as Poland’s culture minister, Marta Cienkowska.
The president, who was the honorary patron of today’s ceremonial events at Auschwitz, which is now a Polish state museum, then placed a candle on behalf of survivors at the International Monument to the Victims of Fascism, which is located in the former camp.
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.
Image credits: Mikołaj Bujak/KPRP
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.
