Print
Email
ShareBERLIN—A lawsuit filed in the European Court of Human Rights by an obscure German group seeking reparations from Poland for property lost after World War II would seem to have little chance for success.
The German government does not support the suit, and German officials have told their Polish counterparts to ignore it.
But for Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the pietistic and nationalistic twins who serve, respectively, as president and prime minister of Poland, the suit is an insult too egregious to ignore.
The twins have threatened to reopen the 1990 treaty that was supposed to have settled all claims arising from the two neighbors’ unhappy 20th Century.
Relations between Germany and Poland have become increasingly strained since the twins came to power in 2005. The poisonous atmosphere threatens to undermine cooperation in other key arenas, including NATO and the European Union.
When the German lawsuit was filed in November, President Kaczynski said it was necessary to remember “who were the victims and who were perpetrators” during World War II.
Clearly, the Poles were victims. Their country was invaded by Germany and Russia. Six million Poles lost their lives in the war, including 3 million Polish Jews killed by the Nazis.
But in the chaos after the Nazi defeat, more than 13 million Germans were expelled from lands where they had lived for centuries. About 7 million lost their homes when Poland’s borders were pushed westward to compensate the Soviet Union and punish Germany. Three million Sudeten Germans were evicted from what then was Czechoslovakia. Others were pushed out of traditional German settlements along the Danube River in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Tens of thousands died in the process.
Only in the past few years has it become acceptable for Germans to talk about their suffering and losses under Nazism.
Rudi Pawelka was 4 years old when he and his mother and a brother were forced to flee what was then the German city of Breslau—now the Polish city of Wroclaw—ahead of the advancing Soviet army.
“For too long the rest of the world has hidden behind German wrongdoing and not faced its own wrongdoing,” said Pawelka, a retired police officer who heads the Prussian Claims Society, the group that filed the suit on behalf of 22 property owners or their descendants. The European Court of Human Rights, which sits in Strasbourg, France, has not decided whether it will take the case.
The Polish government’s position is that if anyone owes the German claimants restitution, it is the German government.
True, says Pawelka, if you are interested in a financial settlement. “But if you want your house and your garden back, you have to sue Poland,” he said.
But the lawsuit isn’t the only thing about the Germans that bugs the Poles these days.
When Germany and Russia signed an agreement to build a gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea, bypassing the usual overland route through Poland, Polish Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski compared it to the Hitler-Stalin pact. Given the Russian government’s recent attempts to manipulate energy supplies to Europe, Poland’s concerns do not appear to be misplaced.
On the other hand, Prime Minister Kaczynski did appear to be overreacting when he canceled a recent summit meeting after a German newspaper satirized the Polish twins as Kartoffelkoepfe—potato heads. The Kaczynskis demanded that the German government take punitive action against the newspaper. The Germans declined.
More substantive sticking points include Berlin’s decision to temporarily restrict Polish workers from entering the German labor market as a condition of Poland’s accession to the EU. Warsaw retaliated by placing a temporary ban on property sales to German nationals. The two neighbors also disagreed on Iraq, with Poland backing the U.S. invasion and Germany leading the opposition to it.
“The problem with German-Polish relations,” according to Kai-Olaf Lang, an analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, “is that the Germans know too little about the Poles, and the Poles know too much about the Germans.”
When the two nations signed the historic 1990 Border Treaty, they essentially agreed to disagree on the thorny issue of individual property restitution claims.
“They set aside the big problem, hoping that it would vanish in the course of time,” Lang said.
It didn’t. Even when former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, visiting Warsaw in 2004 for the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, declared that Germany would not support the claims of its citizens against Poland—a position also embraced by Chancellor Angela Merkel—the Poles were not mollified.
Lang said he did not believe that the Kaczynskis had deliberately embarked on a collision course with Germany but rather that “they are hyper-suspicious of Germany and do not yet have a clear idea of what they want from Europe.”
