Tuesday MFA reported that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany had responded to Note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland dated October 3, 2022 concerning compensation for Polish losses suffered as a result of German aggression and occupation during World War II. According to the German government, the question of reparations and compensation for war losses remains closed and the German government does not intend to enter into negotiations on this subject.
The Deputy Head of Polish Diplomacy was asked about this on Thursday on Polish Radio 24 Arkadiusz Mularczyk. It’s only a matter of time when Germany they will have to face their infamous history, which for years, decades, they wanted to obliterate, blur – he said.
Mularczyk on Germany’s response to the note
Mularczyk pointed out that the German Foreign Ministry’s “laconic one-sentence” response to the Polish memo MFA “unfortunately, but it must be said, this is the worst testimony of German diplomacy.”
He noted that such a response was issued by the German side “after receiving a report containing more than 1,500 pages, with data, charts, statistics, description of all German crimes and atrocities on the ground Polish”. This response from German diplomacy is absurd, bizarre and also illogical, because you cannot close something that has never been opened. – he said.
Mularczyk also said, among other things, that German politicians, services, mediadid a gigantic job “to erase this negative image of Germany, it was just a question of erasing its history, the map, of throwing the responsibility on others, preferably on the neighbours, of getting along with the Jews, to pay them allowances, and to be silent about all the others.” History favored them, because Poland and many of the central and eastern European countries that were affected, the Balkan countries, were under Soviet occupation, so it was not possible to actively raise the case at that that time. he underlined.
He pointed out that Poland returns years later. The problem is that today we have to do a job that the Polish state has not done in the last decades. We have this window of time, there is absolutely a political will. (…) We must undertake an information campaign in Germany and Western Europe, and of course also in the United States, to convince our partners, allies, companies and politicians that Germany simply has not settled its accounts with the war and erased its past – he said.
The Germans will not run away from this subject. We prepare versions not only of the main report, but also of such abbreviations, summaries of the report. We are absolutely at the start of the information campaign, which I am convinced will be crowned with success. he underlined.
At the beginning of January, Mularczyk announced that he was turning to UN leaders for cooperation and support for actions to obtain war reparations for the losses caused to Poland by Germany. We have sent a report and letters from four senior UN officials – the Secretary General, the President of the General Assembly in New York, but also the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the representative of the UN in Geneva (…) asking that they look into the matter – underlined Thursday the deputy head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
September 1 presented a report on the losses suffered by Poland as a result of German aggression and occupation during World War II. October 3 Minister of Foreign Affairs Zbigniew Rau signed a diplomatic note to the German side regarding war reparations. In this document, Poland demands, among other things, compensation for material and immaterial damage in the amount of PLN 6 billion 220 billion 609 million and compensation for damages.
Author: Sylwia Dąbkowska-Loan
