With the presentation of an expert report on the extent of the damage suffered in World War II, Poland wants to give emphasis to demands for compensation from Germany. The report of a parliamentary commission should cover three volumes and also name a specific amount of money for the estimated damage. It could be a high three-digit billion amount. According to previous Polish estimates, based on a 1946 inventory plus interest, the war damage caused by Germany amounted to 800 billion euros.
The German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 was the beginning of the Second World War with at least 55 million dead – other estimates even come up to 80 million. There are no exact numbers. Measured against the total population, Poland had to mourn more deaths than any other country. Four to six million Poles lost their lives – up to a fifth of the population. The degree of destruction caused by the Nazi war of extermination was also comparatively high. For example, the capital Warsaw was almost completely destroyed.
In the Potsdam Agreement of 1945, the four victorious powers agreed that the Soviet Union would be compensated from the Soviet occupation zone in eastern Germany and that Poland would receive a share. According to estimates, around 3,000 companies were dismantled by 1953 and additional goods from current production were removed. However, the government in Warsaw argues that Poland had to compensate for its share by supplying coal to the Soviet Union. In addition, western countries such as France and the Netherlands were treated much better.
For the federal government, the issue of reparations was legally and politically closed with the 1990 Two Plus Four Agreement on the Foreign Policy Consequences of German Unity. However, reparations are not expressly mentioned in the treaty between the Federal Republic, the GDR and the four former occupying powers USA, Soviet Union, France and Great Britain. In addition, numerous states attacked and occupied by Nazi Germany, such as Greece and Poland, were not involved in the negotiations.
Most recently, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) rejected Poland’s demands for World War II reparations during his inaugural visit to Warsaw in December. And he pointed out that Germany makes “very, very high contributions” to financing the EU budget. Poland is the largest net recipient of EU funds.
Representatives of the national-conservative PiS party, which has governed Poland since 2015, have repeatedly raised the issue of reparation demands. In 2017, on the initiative of the PiS, a parliamentary commission was set up to draw up a report on the estimated amount of war damage. The publication of this report was announced several times, but repeatedly delayed. In November, Poland also established a research institute for war damage. At the time, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the issue of reparations was not off the table “because Poland was treated very badly by not receiving reparations.”
It is not yet clear whether the Polish government will use the report to make a specific request for a sum of money to the federal government. But even the publication of the report will put a strain on German-Polish relations, says Agnieszka Lada-Konefal from the German Poland Institute in Darmstadt. “The anti-German rhetoric of the PiS government will intensify afterwards.”
There are mainly domestic political reasons for this: The PiS already has the parliamentary elections in autumn 2023 in mind and hopes to retain its core electorate by campaigning against Germany. Not only in German politics, but also in the German public, there will be a lack of understanding. “That doesn’t create trust in Germany, but this trust in German-Polish relations is urgently needed at the moment in order to help Ukraine together.”
Yes. At the beginning of June, Greece officially called on Germany to negotiate reparations with a so-called verbal note. The government in Athens – at that time still under the left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras – had been asked to do so by Parliament. A Greek parliamentary commission had previously estimated the amount of damage caused by Germany in World War II at 289 billion euros – including a forced loan that Greece had to grant to the Deutsche Reichsbank during the war. The current conservative Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has endorsed the call for negotiations.
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