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Poland will officially ask Germany for World War II reparations worth more than 6,000 billion zlotys (about 1.35 billion euros), an amount calculated in a report by the government’s Law and Justice party estimating the damage caused by the Nazi invasion.
“Today is the day to address the issue in the international dialogue and put it on the agenda of German-Polish relations,” Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said during the report’s presentation.
“The goal, probably in the long term, is to receive compensation for everything that Germany and the German nation did to us between 1939 and 1945,” he added.
Kaczynski stressed that many countries in the world received compensation, even small amounts, while Poland has received nothing.
Germany, according to Kaczynski, has not paid for its war crimes against Poland, nor did it actively seek to punish Nazi war criminals.
“Different legal acts created a de facto abolition system. Even people who were guilty of the death of tens of thousands of people, were able to live normally in Germany and sometimes held official positions in Germany,” he argued.
Arkadiusz Mularczyk, responsible for preparing the report, said that the result of Nazi Germany’s activities during World War II halved Polish capabilities to create wealth.
“All partial values of Poland’s demographic and material losses together give the sum of 6,220,609 billion zloty (approximately 1.35 trillion euros). Computed in dollars, with the exchange rate at the end of 2021, it is equivalent to 1,532.17 billion,” Mularczyk said.
According to Kaczynski, the sum indicated in the report is conservative and could be much higher.
“It is a large sum, but considering that war reparations are paid over decades, the German economy will be able to handle it. It will not be a big burden, and we can say that it is realistic,” said the nationalist Law and Justice leader.
The current report consists of 3 volumes. The first contains an estimate of Poland’s material and non-material losses during the war, the second contains photographic documentation of atrocities committed by the Nazis, and the third volume lists all crimes committed by the Nazis in Poland during World War II.
“During World War II, Poland suffered the greatest losses compared to the total population and national wealth of all European countries,” Mularczyk said.
“The damage was caused not only by the war itself, but also by the German occupation policy,” he added.
According to the report, Poland lost 77,900 square kilometers of territory due to the war. Poland’s population fell from 35.1 million people in 1939 to 23.9 million people in 1946, while 590,000 people were left with various types of disabilities.
It is estimated that Poland lost 5.2 million people due to Nazi actions alone. Poland’s population did not reach its pre-war size until 1978.
Before the report was published, some experts expressed doubts that Poland could legally demand compensation from Germany.
Last month, history professor Stanislaw Zerko told Efe that, in his opinion, legal channels are closed.
In 1953, Poland’s communist government signed a declaration renouncing independent reparation claims from Germany, and the declaration was later confirmed by the first democratic government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki (1989-1991) and the governments of Leszek Miller (SLD) in 2004 and Beata Szydlo (PiS) in 2017.
In 1945 it was agreed that Poland would receive 15% of the reparations received by the USSR from Germany (about $1.5 billion in 1945, which today would be $25 billion or €24.4 billion).
However, when Poland received transfers from the USSR, it was forced to send millions of tons of coal to the USSR at heavily discounted prices.
