WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s foreign minister signed an official memorandum Monday to keep Germany from easily paying some $1. 3 trillion in reparations for damages inflicted by Nazi German occupiers in World War II. .
Zbigniew Rau said the note would be handed over to Germany’s Foreign Ministry. The signing comes on the eve of Rau’s assembly in Warsaw with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock attending a security conference.
Rau said the note expressed his view that both sides act “without delay” to deal with the effects of the 1939-45 German profession in a “durable and complex, legally binding and draped manner. “
He said this would come with German repairs, as well as solving the challenge of looted artwork, archives and bank deposits. He said Berlin is striving to tell German society about the “true” symbol of the war and its disastrous effects on Poland.
Warsaw says the payment of reparations would strengthen bilateral relations through deeds and justice and close painful chapters of the past. Germany says the case was closed decades ago.
Baerbock said in Berlin before leaving for Poland that the two European neighbors and partners have a “responsibility to maintain as true what we have built together over the past 30 years. “
Baerbock that “this includes accepting and remembering the immeasurable suffering Germany inflicted on the Polish people. “
“There won’t be and there won’t be any lines drawn here,” Baerbock said.
Poland’s right-wing government says the country has been fully compensated through neighboring Germany, which is now one of its main partners in the European Union.
On the 83rd anniversary of the war, on September 1, the Poles submitted a detailed report on the damage, estimating it at $1. 3 trillion.
The Polish government rejects a 1953 through the country’s communist leaders, under pressure from the Soviet Union, that Poland would no longer make any claims to Germany.
Germany argues that the reimbursement was paid to Eastern Bloc nations in the years following the war, while the territories Poland lost in the east when borders were redrawn were compensated through some of the pre-war German lands. Berlin considers the case closed. It was Moscow that Poland would get only a small fraction of the refund.
In the 1990s, Germany paid a one-time reimbursement to former Nazi concentration camp inmates and victims of forced labor, many of them Poles.
Despite smart bilateral relations, Poland’s top tough politician, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, recently made hostile comments toward Germany, recalling its guilt during the war and claiming it dominates the European Union.
Critics see it as a tactic to move into the general election scheduled for next fall. Opinion polls recommend that the ruling Law and Justice party and its allies will lose the narrow majority that now allows them to pass laws without negotiating with other parties.
Senate President Tomasz Grodzki, an opposition member, said the anti-German rhetoric fits with the ruling party’s mantra for the upcoming elections: vote against the ruling party voting against Poland’s interests.
“This is apparent nonsense; It’s true. This is a desperate attempt to protect against polls showing declining support,” Grodzki said.
On the 83rd anniversary of the war, on September 1, the Poles submitted a detailed report on the damage, estimating it at $1. 3 trillion.
As The Times of Israel reported last month, the list of atrocities includes villages that have been the scene of Polish pogroms against Jews — the most infamous, the village of Jedwabne, where more than three hundred Jews were burned alive at the hands of ethnic Poles — as well as other Jewish deaths that may have been linked to Polish citizens.
The part of the report that sets out the request justified it by stating that the Nazis and other occupiers of Poland deserve to have prevented such murders.
“Due to Germany’s aggression, the Third Reich and the USSR occupied Polish lands. International conventions stipulate that occupiers are guilty for the safety, life and property of the population. Jedwabne under the profession of the USSR and the Third Reich, killing citizens of the Second Republic,” Mularczyk wrote in a tweet.
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