Poland has filed a formal claim against Germany for €1.3tn in reparations for damages and losses inflicted by the Nazis during their occupation of the country in the second world war.
Foreign minister Zbigniew Rau said on Monday he had signed a diplomatic note addressed to Berlin to demand the payment, which was calculated by a Polish parliamentary committee that published its long-awaited report last month.
German authorities, however, have repeatedly rejected the Polish claims, saying the question of reparation is closed.
Rau said that he would raise the issue with his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock during her visit to Warsaw on Tuesday. “The parties should undertake immediate actions aimed at permanent, comprehensive and final legal and material regulation of the issue,” Rau said.
But some Polish historians and other experts have accused Poland’s rightwing government of using wartime atrocities to fuel nationalism ahead of a tough election next year.
They have also warned that Poland was trying to revive an issue that was settled in the 1950s when Poland’s then Communist government renounced its claim to German reparations. In recent decades, Germany has also paid direct compensation to some Polish war victims, notably survivors of the Holocaust.
But in an interview with the Financial Times last month, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said his government was not bound by statements made by previous administrations that were part of the Soviet bloc and he insisted there were no legal documents that prevented Poland from making a fresh claim for reparations. The premier stressed that Poland was ready for a long court battle with Germany.
“All the legal arguments will be used by us,” Morawiecki said. “The Herero and Nama people waited 120 years to get compensation, we also have time,” he added, in reference to a €1.1bn euro donation pledged last year by Germany for the colonial-era slaughter of tens of thousands of tribespeople in Namibia.
Poland’s push for reparations is adding to diplomatic tensions between Berlin and Warsaw, most recently over Polish complaints that the German government had backtracked on pledges to provide military equipment following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But the government has also come under criticism from some former Polish diplomats who have regrouped in an association that recently issued a note claiming the parliamentary report had used “quite arbitrary criteria” to calculate Poland’s claim.
The former ambassadors also accused the government of focusing on Nazi crimes as “part of a smart strategy that relies on provoking anti-German resentment as a way of distracting public attention from other problems and maintaining power.”
Separately, a Spanish association that successfully pushed for the 2019 exhumation of General Francisco Franco urged Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to use this week’s visit to Spain of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to also demand “a symbolic act of reparation” and some kind of German apology for the support granted by Hitler to Franco during the Spanish civil war, which included the bombing of the city of Guernica by German planes.
“There cannot be a relationship of friendship between the two countries . . . without recognising the terrible damage made by the soldiers and military equipment of Nazi Germany,” said Emilio Silva, the president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory.
