Hey Poland,
This was a hot topic several months ago, on europe subreddit, also in polish and german media.I got the impression then, that there were two dominant positions on that matter.
One group of people who claimed that Poland had relinquished all claims to war reparations so the issue was closed. The other one said that unsovereign Polish State had been forced to relinquish by Soviet Union which wanted to free East Germany from any liabilities, so the matter still stands.
I would like to present you a more nuanced perspective from influencial polish historian who is specialized in history of German-Poland relations.
The Interview was translated by DeepL, the orginal source is [here](https://www.dw.com/pl/stanis%C5%82aw-%C5%BCerko-niemcy-nie-rozumiej%C4%85-polskiej-krzywdy/a-63371656)
**Michał Gostkiewicz (Wirtualna Polska): Professor, let us clarify these seemingly mutually exclusive words of Minister Annalena Baerbock. How do the Germans reconcile the fact that in one sentence they “feel responsible” and in the other “the matter of reparations is closed”?**
**Prof. Stanislaw Żerko**: *There is a gap in German historical memory. This gap is the lack of knowledge about the scale of the destruction and crimes on Polish lands. When the fate of German reunification was at stake in February 1990, Chancellor Helmut Kohl told George Bush senior that the reparations issue should be taken off the agenda because it would delay reunification. And he added that West Germany at the time had paid a total of more than 100 billion marks in reparations, and that “huge sums” had been given to the Poles from this pot.*
**And this was not true.**
\- *By 1989, Polish war victims had received 100 million marks. And Kohl speaks of a hundred billion. What we have here is a simple lie. And he managed to convince President Bush.*
**The question of reparations did not become a condition for reunification. Will the Germans, as Mr Kaczynski wants, one day “see the negative consequences of their attitude”?**
\- *This gap in their memory needs to be bridged and the sensitive point of German phraseology – morality and ethics – needs to be used to do so. The Germans like to think of themselves as a superpower these days, but a “moral” one. They need to be reminded that even during the People’s Republic of Poland, both Gomułka, Gierek and Jaruzelski claimed that one cannot operate here only with legal concepts, but realise the sense of injustice of the Poles. In Germany, on the level of emotions, feelings, understanding of Polish injustice does not exist.*
**And are there legal and historical grounds for trying to get Berlin to change its line? President Kaczynski questions, among other things, the 1953 declaration of the Polish People’s Republic government to renounce reparations, stressing that it was issued by a non-sovereign state.**
\- *The legal path is closed for a number of reasons. First – yes, that is, Poland, specifically the Bierut government – did indeed renounce reparations in 1953. Was it a sovereign government? Was it forced into this move? As ridiculous as it may sound, in the light of international law at that time Poland was, existed, was its sovereign subject, a founding member of the UN, a state recognised by almost all countries of the world. So this declaration cannot be undermined.*
**No?**
\- *There are even opinions that the declaration does not exist. Meanwhile, it is in the archives of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister. It was published in the official collection of documents of the Polish Institute of International Affairs. It was confirmed by the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Polish People’s Republic at the UN in September 1953. Later, Władysław Gomułka personally, in a conversation with Willy Brandt in Warsaw on 7 December 1970, only confirmed that Poland had renounced reparations, and this also to the Federal Republic of Germany. And so did the subsequent governments of the Third Republic.*
**Let me try to synthesise this. The path defined by international agreements, i.e. the legal path, is closed by the decisions of the communist authorities. In contrast, free Poland after 1989 did not question this, because it had to make efforts first of all to have the Oder-Neisse border recognised by Germany?**
\- *Exactly so. In the autumn of 1989, the foreign minister in the Mazowiecki government, Krzysztof Skubiszewski….*
**…who led to the confirmation of this border in the treaties and its recognition by Germany….**
…*said in the Sejm in response to an MP’s interpellation that indeed, unfortunately, Poland had renounced reparations in a fatal way. In the 1990s, we finally closed this path for ourselves with two legal acts.*
*In 1991, the Żabiński-Kastrup agreement was signed, under which the now reunified Federal Republic of Germany undertook to pay 500 million marks to the victims of the German occupation. And on that occasion there was a declaration by the Polish government that it would not support any future compensation claims by Polish citizens. For this ridiculous 500 million.*
*We cannot go to the Hague tribunal with the reparations issue either, because in 1996 Poland stipulated that it would not submit to the jurisdiction of The Hague when it comes to matters from before 1989. A similar stipulation was made by Germany around that time. They, from Chancellor Adenauer to Scholz, have consistently taken the position that the issue of reparations and reparations – more on this later – is completely closed. And this grates on me when it comes to declarations of reconciliation. Most Germans are against reparations, but something is beginning to break through in their consciousness. Good, because foreign policy should be based on values such as morality.*
**This is obviously a very comfortable position for Germany.**
\- *And let me remind you of two more little-known facts. 10 September marked the 70th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement, in which Germany pledged to Israel to pay almost 3.5 billion German marks at the time for people living in Israel and other countries over a period of twelve to fourteen years. Germany’s annual budget at the time was 27.85 billion marks. On the other hand, as a result of the 1972 German-Polish treaty, the aforementioned 100 million marks were paid to Polish victims of German pseudo-medical experiments – and not as compensation, but as ‘humanitarian aid’. Until 1990, this was the only payment Germany had made to Polish victims of World War II.*
**Professor Christian Tomuschat argues that Germany lost its territories in 1945 and, as a result, Poland got more than any Eastern European country. This is about the Western Territories. What you wrote in the analysis of the Western Institute is the antithesis of Prof. Tomuschat’s claim. In your opinion, should the loss to Poland of territories that belonged to Germany for several hundred years be taken into account in the reparations debate?**
\- *This is an expression of the historical ignorance of German lawyers, who fail to take into account the fact that at the conferences of the Big Three after the war it was agreed that this would be compensation for the lands lost to the USSR in the East, and that regardless of this Poland would receive the aforementioned amount of one and a half billion dollars in reparations – admittedly small when converted to today’s dollar value – that is, perhaps, 120 billion zlotys.*
**According to the Allied agreements, Poland was entitled to 15 per cent of the amount of German reparations to the USSR.**
\- *And here let us go back to 1945, when Poland was then assured by the USSR that it would receive the equivalent of one and a half billion dollars. Between 1946 and 1953, we received ships, steam locomotives, rolling stock, fuel, machinery, equipment, sometimes even the equipment of entire factories, but at the same time Poland had no way of knowing how much of this 15 percent it was entitled to receive.*
**Shouldn’t we address this report, which was presented on 1 September and on the basis of which the Foreign Ministry sent a diplomatic note to Germany, to the Kremlin?**
\- *Not really. Firstly, it cannot be settled in The Hague, as we have just said. Secondly, reparations are always paid by the country that lost the war. The USSR, as we know, won the Second World War. On 4 July 1957, Poland obtained certain amounts from the Soviet Union under a bilateral protocol.*
**To quote these sums after “Polityka”: the size of the reparations amounted to about 3 billion dollars “according to 1938 prices”, of which the People’s Republic of Poland was entitled to 7.5%, i.e. about 231 million dollars, of which, as of 1957, we were supposed to have received as much as 228 million dollars.**
\- *To date, Poland has received about six billion zlotys from the Federal Republic of Germany, according to Prof. Jerzy Sulk’s calculations. Other researchers put the figure closer to 10 billion zlotys. Taking inflation into account – let it be even a dozen billion zlotys. For comparison – the annual cost of servicing the 500+ programme is around PLN 40 billion. It is clear that Poles have been treated in an undignified manner.*
*Secondly, Poland was forced to supply the USSR with millions of tonnes of coal a year for the entire time it was receiving reparations, at below world prices. Perhaps even giving up reparations in 1953 paid off for us in the conditions of the time. In 1953, most of what could be exported from the German Democratic Republic – and it was from this pool that the USSR and, through it, Poland collected reparations – had already been exported. The value of some goods was questionable – in 1949, for example, we received 7 million copies of Lenin’s and Stalin’s works, printed in Polish in East Germany. And millions more tons of coal from Polish mines were going to the East, almost for nothing….*
**We were doubly unlucky. Both as a victim of the war, in whose area all the greatest horrors happened, and also afterwards. We were the only country to be assigned to the same reparations distributor as the USSR. In the other were all the other countries.**
\- *And let us remember that one of the consequences of what happened on 1 September 1939 – apart from the terrible human tragedies – is that Poland was dominated by the USSR for 45 years. If it had not been for 1939, there would have been no Bierut government, which renounced its right to reparations.*
*The Western Institute has published a book prepared mainly by Dr Karl Heinz Roth, whose subtitle contains words about the “German reparation debt” to Poland and Europe.*
**Only that his statement is literally the only sultana in this cheesecake. The cheesecake claims that reparations are not due. And the one sultana claims that maybe something is due there after all.**
\- *But Prof. Stephan Lehnstaedt from Berlin, for example, is also of this opinion. And recently an article appeared in Die Welt in which the author writes that it is undignified for Germany to hide behind legal tricks in this matter.*
*Let me remind you of the case of Winicjusz Natoniewski, who as a 6-year-old suffered facial burns during the so-called pacification of his home village (Szczecyn, Lubelskie). With a disfigured face he lives to this day. He has never received any compensation. He sued the German state in a Polish court, but could not obtain anything because of the foreign state’s immunity from jurisdiction. I would remind you, in this context, of the hundreds of thousands of victims who died without receiving reparation.*
**Are we in a position to inject the Polish point of view into the German historical-legal debate?**
\- *Perhaps it would be a good idea to set up some kind of foundation for the Polish state? Maybe it would be worth providing additional resources to the Polish-German Reconciliation Foundation? Maybe the Federal Republic of Germany could get involved financially in the reconstruction of Polish monuments destroyed by the Nazis? Or perhaps it would be a good idea to do what the director of the PiSM, Dr. Slawomir Dębski, proposed a few years ago – to subsidise NATO’s eastern flank, i.e. to rearm the Polish army? After all, even the German arms industry would benefit from this.*
**In a previous conversation with the WP, you said that there remains an outstanding issue of compensation for the still living victims of Nazism. And that Poland should pursue reparations precisely for these people.**
\- *A distinction must first be made between reparations and reparations. Reparations are payments or confiscations of property of the state that lost the war to the state that won it. Reparations are individual payments to specific victims of the Second World War.*
*Only a handful of victims of the German occupation are alive today. I have the impression that the Federal Republic of Germany has been playing for time for years. On 14 September 1972, when Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany established diplomatic relations, the Poles heard that the deadline for applying for compensation had passed on 31 December 1969. Later, the Germans referred to a statement by the Bierut government and to property in the Recovered Territories. In 2005. European Court of Human Rights rejected the individual claims of the so-called ‘expellees’ in this case.*
***Can the Polish moral a*****nd ethical argumentation be an effective tool? Both states are doomed to cooperate within the EU. From the perspective of a historian, do you consider the payment of reparations by Germany to be realistic?**
\- *In the mid-1990s, it was additionally possible to conclude an agreement with Germany on humanitarian aid payments to former forced labourers, but these were still relatively small amounts. Let us also note that Germany consistently avoids the terms ‘reparations’ and ‘reparations’. And there were still some people left who did not receive either a pfennig or a mark.*
**A day after Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau signed a diplomatic note to Germany on reparations, the head of the German Foreign Ministry, Annalena Baerbock, in Warsaw, reiterated Germany’s position, which Berlin had expressed in response to the Polish report on Poland’s war losses: that in Germany’s view, the case is closed.**
\- *A previous diplomatic note on reparations was submitted to Germany by the government of Mieczysław Rakowski in 1988. I am convinced that today the Germans will not be able to simply reject the new Polish note. If it had not been accompanied by an anti-German campaign, if it had been drafted as a proposal for the opening of partnership talks, using this “conciliatory” phraseology in which the Germans have specialised….*
*But I think there is something to be gained. It certainly won’t be trillions. But it is likely that some more serious sums can be negotiated.*
I hope it was an interesting read for you.ps. Moderators of r/europe didn’t like it, so they removed similar post
by zygzyg