The early hours of September 1, 1939 the poles they woke up in terror as Hitler’s Luftwaffe planes bombed towns and villages. The Nazis they invaded Poland, starting World War II.
Exactly 85 years later, the Polish government insists: Germany has still not paid reparations for the crimes the Nazis committed in the country during the occupation. No more, no less. Warsaw demands €1.3 billion in reparations from Berlin.
The German government expected that after the ethnoconservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) left power in Warsaw, the new government of Donald Tusk would stop demanding reparations. But Poland’s new leadership doesn’t seem willing to back down either.
“Sorry is not enough”
The country’s president, Andrei Duda, speaking at a memorial service for Nazi victims, said that Germany’s representatives “asked for forgiveness and bowed before the victims of German totalitarianism and Nazi murders in Poland.” But Apologies and confessions of guilt are one thing, reparations are another. And that problem is still not solved. And it has never been solved.”
Poland’s new Prime Minister Donald Tusk has previously discussed the issue of “World War II reparations”. Indeed, last July, after German-Polish consultations in Warsaw, Tusk said that there had been no gestures “that would satisfy the Poles”. No amount of money can make up for everything that happened during the Second World War.”
85 years ago: Adolf raises the swastika over Europe – The provocation that started the destruction
“Surprise” in Berlin
Tusk’s words surprised even many in Berlin. When former EU Council President Donald Tusk took over the reins of Poland’s government in December 2023, many German diplomats and politicians assumed that Warsaw would no longer press the issue since it was friendly with Germany.
“But now cit is becoming increasingly evident that there were delusions in Berlin for Tusk”, as Die Welt writes.
Previous governments of the conservative Law and Justice Party asked the German government for the equivalent of about 1.3 billion euros in reparations. They relied on the report of a parliamentary commission set up by PiS politician and lawyer Arkadiusz Mularcik. A three-volume report listing Nazi crimes in Poland, the human and material destruction.
Although Tusk no longer refers to this report, he knows that most of his voters also support some form of reparations from Germany. Berlin and Warsaw are currently negotiating reparations for concentration camp survivors. This currently affects around 40,000 people in Poland.