The Nazi occupation of Greece decimated its finances, left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and all but destroyed the country’s ancient Jewish communities. Some Greeks, including the country’s former president Prokopis Pavlopoulos, think Germany should pay reparations.
At the feet of the Parthenon last week, a cache of lawyers met to discuss the pressing need for Greece and Poland, another erstwhile victim of the Nazi yoke, to receive its dues. Germany, so far, is playing hardball. This month’s conference was the culmination of a coordinated six-year effort to open up direct avenues of inquiry with the German government regarding Nazi-era reparations – an avenue Athens itself tried and failed at throughout the 2010s.
Berlin has frequently indulged in international lectures on topics ranging from Brexit to beef, but it is quieter on this uncomfortable subject. How much longer can it ignore pleas to pay up?
Berlin remains in denial about its full role in the horrors of the twentieth century
Like its Greek counterpart, but unlike many of its close neighbours, the Polish government did not collaborate with the Nazis or the Soviets, and almost six million Poles died as a result of these occupations.
Completed between 2017 and 2022, the Polish government’s research into the impact of the Second World War on Poland’s development is the most comprehensive research of its kind. It will provide a blueprint for pursuing Ukraine’s grievances in the coming years. The report found that the material cost of the occupation was the equivalent of a trillion pounds, not to mention the irreplaceable theft of human potential.
Even this figure is conservative, merely taking into account the damages inflicted on the ‘Core Lands’ of Poland, which excludes the territories it lost to the Soviet Union.
In April, Poland’s council of ministers adopted a resolution to affirm that the country had never received reparations from Germany for their brutal occupation. German ministers have been clear: the matter is settled. But Berlin’s attempt to close the book on this issue is based on a shameful misreading of history. The Polish people never renounced its claims to reparations, nor has it already received compensation.
Those who take umbrage with Warsaw often suggest that Germany’s relinquishing of several territories to Poland in 1945 were adequate recompense for the horrors of war. Germany signed an unconditional surrender with the Allied powers who then chose to grant part of former German lands from the Oder River to Pomerania to Poland. These decisions were agreed at the Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam conferences as partial compensation for lands removed from Poland by the USSR in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Poland was not represented at these talks, and the land swap amounted to a poorly-veiled ploy by Stalin to further distance the West from his centre of power in Moscow. No honest historian could take this seriously as a fair resolution to Poland’s suffering.
Nor is the outright denial of reparations consistent with Germany’s previous response to similar requests. In 2001, the Bundestag approved compensation payments to Nazi-era slave labourers, including thousands of Poles, and similar isolated schemes had gone ahead in the 1970s and 1990s. In 2021, Germany pledged €1.1 billion (£940 million) in development projects to its ex-colony Namibia where it oversaw genocide and forced experimentation. Germany has also issued around $86.8 billion (£68 billion) in reparations to Holocaust victims.
One British delegate recounted to me in horror how a German official had privately suggested to him that Jewish people were ‘in a different league’ to Poles when it came to reparations. This bizarre remark is startlingly blinkered to the fact that many Holocaust victims and their families remain without recompense due to Germany’s bungled interactions with Warsaw, not in spite of them.
While one Polish civil servant admitted to me that there was no agreed roadmap to settling these claims, he assured me that a Polish delegation will soon visit Washington to meet with Jewish groups. Such progress can only be a positive sign that Warsaw intends to offer Jewish victims and their families their fair share of any future German reparations.
No doubt the reparations debate has become unfashionable on the right, for which the United States’ toxic ‘white guilt’ movement bears much responsibility. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Poland’s serious claims by judging them through the prism of transatlantic culture wars.
Conversely, some progressive voices complain that Poland’s push for reparations amounts to a nefarious plot by its right-wing government to ramp up support prior to this year’s election. Of course, a government is unlikely to pursue a policy they think will be deeply unpopular, but already 66 per cent of Poles support the plans, far more than the government’s core voter base. In any case, are victims of war less worthy of retribution because they are viewed as too socially conservative by Berlin’s standards?
What this saga reveals more than anything is that Berlin remains in denial about its full role in the horrors of the twentieth century. Only in 2020, did Germany finally approve plans to construct a memorial for Polish victims of Nazi aggression. Poles are in no hurry to forget that many of their historic paintings still hang in the German galleries to which Nazi looters ferried them, and this cannot bode well for an already troubled continent.
By far the most moving part of last week’s conference came in its closing moments. Accompanied by a sombre soundtrack peppered with an ominous bell chime, we were shown a short CGI reconstruction of the post-apocalyptic streets of Warsaw in Spring 1945, panning over its broken bridges as the details of its dramatic population collapse rolled in place of credits.
It reinforced the chilling truth that there are thousands of people now living in these once-ruined streets and across the world who no doubt still wake recoiling from nightmares of these horrors. These painful fissures of memory mark most Polish families in some way, and they are well within their rights to pursue some rectification. Only in 2010 did Germany cease paying reparations to France for its 1914 invasion. Why is it too late for Poland?
‘A lesson unheard cannot be unlearned,’ Pavlopoulos told the conference. Poland has done its best to back up and publicise its claims against Germany. The ball is now firmly in the court of Berlin and its international chums to take action.
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