Members of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party are mulling issuing a demand that Germany pay reparations for damage done during the Second World War, a move that could harm relations between the two EU member states.
According to reports, Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski commented last week that Poland was "talking here about huge sums, and also about the fact that Germany for many years refused to take responsibility for World War II.”
"Polish government is preparing itself for a historical counteroffensive,” he said.
The Polish parliament’s research office is currently conducting a feasibility study regarding the issue at the behest of right wing lawmaker Arkadiusz Mularczyk, Sky News reported.
Speaking during a commemoration marking the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising this week, the country’s Defense Minister sounded a similar note, stating that Germany had to "pay back the terrible debt they owe to the Polish people”.
Poland received billions in compensation following the war, which left millions of its citizens dead and destroyed wide swathes of the country, but its Communist government, under Russian pressure, renounced its right to further funds in the 1950s.
A spokesman for German German Chancellor Angela Merkel was quoted by ABC as citing that agreement but adding that "Of course Germany stands by its responsibility in World War II, politically, morally and financially.”
"It has made significant reparations for general war damage, including to Poland, and is still paying significant compensation for Nazi wrongdoing,” the spokesman said.
Poland has been a mixed bag when it comes to the issue of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
In recent years Poland has been censured by historians for legislating a specific Holocaust narrative that casts Poland in the best light possible.
Last year the country’s parliament passed a bill that would ban the use of the phrase "Polish death camps” and its derivatives. In 2015 the government opened an investigation into prominent historian Jan Gross over his historical statements, claiming that he had publicly insulted the Polish nation.
Poland has also come under fire over its own record when it comes to restituting both property seized from Jews during the war and afterwards during the Soviet period.
According to the European Shoah Legacy Institute, Poland is the only country in the European Union, aside from Bosnia-Herzegovina, that has “failed to establish a comprehensive private property restitution regime for property taken either during the Holocaust or Communist eras.”
Many European states have passed legislation in line with the 2009 Terezin Declaration, an international agreement that forms the basis for domestic restitution efforts in much of the west.
In recent years, lawmakers in both the United States and Great Britain have urged Poland to take action, but there has been little progress.
