Poland Seeks Nazi Wartime Damages Over $1.3 Trillion Losses

Wojciech Moskwa
·3 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Poland’s ruling nationalists issued a controversial demand for World War II compensation from Germany, saying destruction wrought by the Nazi regime caused damage worth about $1.3 trillion.

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The sum, equivalent to more than twice Poland’s annual economic output, revives a fraught debate over reparations nearly eight decades after the war ended. Long an issue for Poland’s Law & Justice party, the fresh claim comes along with increasingly harsh rhetoric directed at Germany a year before an election that will test the party’s sagging popularity.

And even though the loss of millions of lives is still seared in the nation’s memory, the legal prospects for the claim are thin -- and Germany has consistently said that reparations are long-since settled.

The report on wartime losses was unveiled Thursday in Warsaw on the 83rd anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s invasion, which triggered World War II. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the ruling party leader and Poland’s most powerful politician, said Germany has never really compensated the country for the atrocities.

“Germany invaded Poland and then caused us serious losses,” Kaczynski said at the ornate ceremony in the capital’s rebuilt Royal Castle on Thursday, attended by top party officials. “We can’t simply accept it and move on just because someone believes that somehow Poland stands lower than other countries.”

Still, Kaczynski conceded that “we are not expecting quick success.” The country’s communist-led government renounced its right to seek payments from Germany in 1953, though some historians argue it was done under duress from the Soviet Union.

Donald Tusk, the leader of the main opposition party, accused Kaczynski of electioneering. The ruling party has had to contend with the country’s cost-of-living crisis and the government’s inability to tap European Union recovery funds due to Poland’s democratic backsliding.

‘Descendants of Criminals’

On Germany, the party’s barbed language has escalated. At a political rally last month, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Germans are “the descendants of destroyers and criminals” who must compensate Nazi victims to finally “turn the page” on their horrific history. Adam Glapinski, Poland’s central bank chief, made a blunt claim that Germany’s push for Warsaw to join the euro was part of territorial ambitions for lands lost after 1945.

“We haven’t seen such a festival of anti-German phobia since communism ended” in 1989, said Piotr Buras, who leads the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a pro-EU think tank. “With elections a year away, Law & Justice doesn’t have many good ways to prop up its popularity, so it must go on the offensive and identify an enemy -- and Germany is a good candidate for one.”

Tusk, a former European Council president who has been vilified by the ruling alliance as too sympathetic toward Berlin, derided the move.

“Jaroslaw Kaczynski doesn’t hide it that he wants to rebuild the support of the ruling party on the back of this anti-German campaign,” Tusk told reporters in Rumia, northern Poland. Requesting compensation now “isn’t about winning more money for Poles.”

Germany has been the main contributor to the EU’s budget, from which Poland has received more than $200 billion since it joined the bloc in 2004.

Poland isn’t the only country seeking to revive wartime claims. Greece has also repeatedly pushed the issue with Germany, a subject that was compounded by tensions during the euro crisis. The Greek parliament has set a minimum claim of about 269 billion euros ($269 billion) over the Axis powers’ invasion of the country from 1941 to 1944.

Some 6 million Poles -- half of them Jews -- died during the World War II, while Warsaw was razed to the ground. The destruction gave way to Soviet occupation and four decades of communist rule. Kaczynski said Poland is ready to share potential German war reparations with Israel.

(Updates with new quotes, political details from second paragraph.)

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