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Destroyed Warsaw (photo from November 30, 1944)
Photo: EPU CAF / dpa
On September 1, 1939, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland. Hitler had previously agreed with Stalin to occupy and divide the country. Terror began immediately after the invasion, not only against the Jewish citizens: the Germans systematically murdered members of the Polish elite – teachers, professors, engineers and clergy. In 1943 the Jews cooped up in the Warsaw ghetto rebelled against the Nazis, and in 1944 the Polish underground army tried to liberate all of Warsaw. The Germans brutally suppressed both uprisings, blowing up the Polish capital house after house.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki's government has calculated the amount of compensation it believes is due at €1.3 trillion. She promotes her concerns to the EU partners and the UN. The German federal government, on the other hand, considers the reparations issue to be closed and has rejected negotiations. She sees no legal basis for this because the then communist leadership of Poland had declared in 1953 that it would refrain from German reparations.
I read with interest how the Germans keep dealing with the dark sides of their past.
For example in the current issue of SPIEGEL HISTORY: The article entitled "Aryanization: The Liquidation" describes the carefully planned and rigorously carried out expropriation of German Jews between 1933 and 1939. The National Socialists thus created the organizational framework for the persecution and murder of the Jews Jews.
The German public, it seems to me, is well aware of what was done to the Jews.
Nevertheless, what the Nazis did in Poland as a whole hardly seems to have gotten through.
Because in 1939 the killing and plundering really started.
The German invasion of our country and the six-year occupation left a wound that has not healed to this day.
We are turning to the United Nations, our partners in Europe and, of course, to the Germans to raise awareness of this issue.
A whole generation of Polish artists, writers and cultural figures fell victim to the totalitarian war machine.
The enormous cultural creativity of Poland was irretrievably lost.
It disappeared along with thousands of stolen works of art, with dozens of razed monuments, with stolen paintings, smashed sculptures, in burnt libraries and archives, in looted museums, in the ruins of Polish cities and towns.
Behind each of these lost works of art stands a person with their education, their skills and their creativity.
Culture, intellectual and artistic creation, is the thread that nations weave through the centuries and that holds them together - and that is exactly what the total war of the Nazis aimed at: Poland was to be wiped off the face of the earth, its memory erased.
The goal was complete destruction.
Germany's occupation of Poland and systematic genocide caused immeasurable suffering and material and immaterial losses.
As a result of World War II, 5.5 million people died or disappeared in Poland.
21 percent of them were children under the age of ten.
3.7 million of these victims died in the extermination camps alone.
From the beginning of the occupation, the Germans claimed works of art in public and private collections as spoils of war.
The first organized robberies took place as early as October 1939;
The Germans had works of art, such as pictures, books, sculptures, created in Kraków for the Reich.
In addition to public cultural institutions, private collections were also looted.
The occupation authorities as well as private individuals took part in this robbery;
Wehrmacht soldiers, for example, stole Polish jewelry or paintings.
The occupiers terrorized and murdered hundreds of thousands of artists, scientists, teachers and writers.
In the course of the so-called "intelligence action" against the Polish ruling class, the state lost half of its lawyers, 40 percent of its doctors, 20 percent of its university teachers - a total of around one hundred thousand people.
Cities and villages, the historic architecture were demolished.
Warsaw is the city in Europe that suffered the most damage during World War II.
The Polish capital lost 92 percent of its historic buildings.
The "Report on the war losses of Poland as a result of German aggression and occupation during the Second World War" published last year describes the actual extent of the material damage that Poles suffered during the German occupation: the total of these Polish losses was estimated at more than 6,220. Estimated at 609,000,000 zlotys (around 1.3 trillion euros).
The German occupation was one of the cruelest in European history, and it deprived at least one entire generation of their future prospects.
Millions of Polish citizens were never compensated for the unimaginable human and material losses they suffered during World War II.
We are convinced that the 1953 treaty between the GDR and the People's Republic of Poland is invalid: At that time, the Soviet Union forced a dependent Warsaw government to renounce reparations.
Attempts by private individuals to obtain compensation from German courts also failed.
In our view, the Germans paid neither for the destruction on Polish soil nor for the historically unprecedented plundering of their neighboring country.
We know how difficult it is to reach the modern world with this truth.
But in relations between people and also between states, truth and justice should be the highest values.
With this in mind, we demand that our German partners must finally assume political, historical, legal and financial responsibility for all the consequences of the attack on our country.
