Poland will demand war reparations from Germany, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of the Polish ruling party, announced on Thursday in Warsaw, during the presentation of a report on Polish losses during the war, amounting to more than HUF 527.8 trillion.

The report was prepared by the Polish parliamentary working group that has been operating since September 2017. At the presentation of the voluminous document at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Kaczynski stated that the 83rd anniversary of the outbreak of World War II "is also the day of the decision to bring the case to the international stage and to receive compensation for what Germany did between 1939 and 1945." He said: using a conservative, restrained method, the Polish damages suffered as a result of the German attack were estimated at a very serious amount, 6.2 billion zlotys (527.8 billion forints).

A significant part of the amount is paid for the compensation for the deaths of more than 5.2 million Polish citizens, Kaczynski said, adding that they did not take into account at least hundreds of thousands of lives lost by the Russians during the war. He noted that a significant part of the victims were Polish citizens of Jewish origin, but when the report was prepared, ethnic aspects were definitely rejected.

He recalled: several states received various amounts of reparations from Germany, but Poland did not. Obtaining compensation can be a "long and difficult process," he added.

"I have already heard from a very important German politician that no German government would agree to this," Kaczynski referred to Berlin's position on compensation, according to which the matter had already been settled by agreement.

Kaczynski called one of the reasons for the planned Polish steps regarding reparations that the war crimes against the Poles had not become part of the German public consciousness, except for certain circles of the elite. "If we want to protect our state and our nation from events like those that took place between 1939-1945, we must strive for a truly profound transformation of the consciousness of the German nation," said the party chairman.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who also spoke at the event , considered that the responsibility for the Second World War lies with the entire German society. "We consider the losses as war damage, but in Poland ordinary Germans and German families committed enormous robbery, and the German state carried out systematic looting," he declared. According to the Prime Minister, the parliamentary document represents a chance for future Polish-German relations, "as long as the Germans understand its deep political, material, metaphysical and human meaning".

Following the 1953 agreement between the former GDR and the former Soviet Union, the then communist government of the Polish People's Republic renounced its share of the German reparations awarded to the Soviet bloc in a statement.

According to the authors of the new Polish report, the Polish declaration made under pressure from the Soviet Union is legally invalid.

Source: MTI

Photo: MTI/EPA/PAP/Radek Pietruszka