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Germany owes Poland $1.32 trillion for the Nazi invasion, subsequent Nazi occupation and destruction.
The demand for reparations were made on Thursday by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s governing Law and Justice party, as the nation marks 83 years since the beginning of WWII.
One in five (6 million) Poles, including three million Polish Jews, were killed during the war. Most cities and towns were razed to the ground, including the capital Warsaw, following a 1944 uprising in which about 200,000 civilians died.
The new estimate of damage tops a governing party lawmaker’s $850 billion estimate from 2019. The party has repeated calls for compensation several times since it took power in 2015, but Poland has not officially demanded reparations.
READ: Polish man who saved Jews from Nazis dies at 102
“The sum that was presented was adopted using the most limited, conservative method, it would be possible to increase it,” Kaczynski told a news conference before the release of a long-awaited report on the cost to the country of years of Nazi German occupation.
A young Polish boy returns to what was his home and squats among the ruins during a pause in the German air raids on Warsaw, Poland, in September of 1939. German attacks lasted until Warsaw surrendered on September 28. One week later, the last of the Polish forces capitulated near Lublin, giving full control of Poland to Germany and the Soviet Union.
Poland’s government has argued that the country, which was the war’s first victim, has not been fully compensated by neighbouring Germany, which is now one of its major partners within the European Union.
Top leaders including Kaczynski, who is Poland’s chief policy maker, and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki attended the ceremonial release of the report at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.
Polish men and boys, prisoners of war, with arms raised, walk along a road during the German invasion of Poland in September of 1939.
It was the main point of national observances of the anniversary of the war that began on September 1, 1939, with Nazi Germany’s bombing and invading Poland, for more than five years of brutal occupation.
The war was “one of the most terrible tragedies in our history,” President Andrzej Duda said during Thursday morning’s observances at the Westerplatte Peninsula near Gdansk, one of the first places to be attacked in the Nazi invasion.
“Not only because it took our freedom, not only because it took our state from us, but also because this war meant millions of victims among Poland’s citizens and irreparable losses to our homeland and our nation,” Duda said.
Germany has argued compensation was paid to Eastern Bloc nations in the years after the war, while territories that Poland lost in the East as borders were redrawn were compensated with some of Germany’s pre-war lands. Berlin calls the matter closed.Bottom of Form
It intensified after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine amid criticism of Berlin’s dependence on Russian gas and its slowness in helping Kyiv.
–Metro Voice
