Poland justifies reoperations from Germany to 50 allies
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Poland sends letters to 50 of its allies justifying as rightful its demands for wartime reparations from Germany.
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Belgian PM Alexander De Croo, Croatian President Zoran Milanovic, Polish President Andrzej Duda, and US President Joe Biden at the NATO headquarters, in Brussels, on June 14, 2021 (AFP)
Poland contacted 50 allies in Europe via official letters to explain that there was a legal basis for the wartime reparations Warsaw has been demanding from Germany, a Polish deputy foreign minister said Wednesday.
The lower chamber of Poland's parliament voted in mid-September to demand Germany pay $1.3 trillion in reparations for damages sustained during the Nazi era.
By a majority vote of 418 to 4, the reparations law was adopted by both the opposition and Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Since coming to power in 2015, Poland's governing Law and Justice (PiS) party has often championed the issue of war reparations.
Work on the reparations report began in 2017 when the conservative government insisted that Germany had a "moral duty" in the matter.
"The Polish state has so far received no response… In this regard, I want to announce that we have taken action to inform our international partners about the legal basis for filing this note," Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk told reporters.
"We decided to inform our partners in the European Union, NATO, and the Council of Europe about Poland’s position, the legal, practical, and moral grounds for sending the note to the German state. The note was sent to some 50 EU, NATO, and Council of Europe nations," the Polish diplomat said.
This comes after researchers claimed that some of the atrocities mentioned by Warsaw were really perpetrated by Poles, making the demand contentious.
The repeated demands strained ties between Berlin and Warsaw, with Germany stressing that the issue was off the table since Poland relinquished demands for further reparations under a deal reached in 1953 with Warsaw's communist government and in agreements reached with the USSR, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in 1990 by East and West Germany.
A spokesperson for the German Foreign Ministry said back in September that the issue of the Polish WWII reparations was "closed", stressing that Berlin's attitude toward them was unaltered.
"The position of the federal government is unchanged, the issue of reparations is closed. Poland refused further reparations a long time ago, in 1953, and repeatedly confirmed this refusal. This is a necessary basis for today's European order," the spokesman said.
He continued by saying that Germany was still morally and politically accountable for World War II.
