Poland may demand over $1 TRILLION in reparations from Germany over WW2 – Polish lawmaker

A revised war reparations bill owed by Germany and calculated by a Polish parliamentary committee may exceed $1 trillion, the senior lawmaker in charge of a report into the matter has suggested.

Speaking to the Polish conservative weekly Sieci, Arkadiusz Mularchyk, head of the Polish parliamentary group on war reparations, said the document compiled by his group “comprehensively assesses the losses suffered by Poland during World War II.” While Mularchyk did not want to disclose the total amount of damage calculated for the report, he noted that it “significantly exceeded” the amount originally calculated at the end of the conflict and that current calculations indicated a bill in excess of $1 trillion.

In 1947, a report published by the Office of War Compensation valued the scale of Nazi damage in Poland at $48 billion – $850 billion at today’s rate. However, since entering government in 2015, the ruling Law & Justice Party (PiS) has reignited the issue of war reparations as a central part of its nationalist agenda. Mularchyk’s committee has spent the last two years trying to calculate the adjusted figure, looking at demographic losses, loss of livelihoods, mental and physical conditions suffered, and the drop in post-war productivity due to the widespread destruction and killing.

Mularchyk said that the report will be forwarded to the senior government figures for review in the coming days, including President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Moravetsky, noting that the next steps are now a “question for the leadership of our state.” However, he suggested that the report is made available for the public on September 1, to mark the 80th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s invasion.

During the brutal six-year Nazi occupation of Poland, more than six million Poles, including three million Polish Jews, were killed. Others faced forced deportations and years of slave labor and many Polish cities were left in ruins.

Warsaw is joined by Greece in demanding fresh compensation for Nazi crimes, with Athens voting last month to launch a diplomatic push for a payout. However, Berlin has repeatedly rebuffed such calls saying too much time has passed for such compensation to be justified.

The matter of reparations is unlikely to go away for Germany, despite it considering the matter closed, as PiS leadership have publicly demanded for discussions to be reopened. In December, President Duda told Germany’s Bild that the damage caused by Germany was never compensated for. Noting how the capital Warsaw was “razed to the ground” during the conflict, Duda said the matter of proper restitution was “a question of truth and responsibility.”

READ MORE: Poland cancels Israeli visit over WWII property restitution row after mass protests in Warsaw

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