Polish official: Germany owes Poland $850 billion for WWII

WaPo ^

[NorseViking]

WARSAW, Poland — A Polish official said Friday that Germany could owe his country $850 billion (690 billion euros) for the damage it inflicted during World War II.

Arkadiusz Mularczyk is leading a team in the parliament that is assessing potential reparations to Poland. Germany killed 6 million Polish citizens and caused great material losses during its nearly six-year occupation of Poland.

“We are talking about very large, but justified amounts of compensation for war crimes, for destroyed cities, villages and the lost demographic potential of our country,” Mularczyk said on Polsat News, a private broadcaster.

Last year, Poland’s ruling conservative nationalist Law and Justice party said the nation deserves compensation for its losses and set up a team of lawmakers under Mularczyk’s leadership to estimate how much is due.

[Cronos]

Snoringbear, while the Jerries have a problem (that they created themselves), there aren’t any no-go areas in Germany. even in the Turkish areas, the police and ordinary people go everywhere

[Cronos]

as someone who lives here, I think the entire request for reparation from Germany is mainly, as dfwgator says, "P*$$ off Germany, we're not going to take migrants - if you persist, we'll ask you for money for being Nutzis"

I personally think it is a stupid play - it doesn't work and makes the government look like fools

[Cronos]

that's not really true. In 1919 the Tsarist empire, German empire and Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed. Basically the entire area from the Rhine to Vladivostok was a free-for-all.

The USSR wasn't a successor state to the Tsardom.

Polish, Lithuanian, White Russian, Bolshevik, Ukrainian etc. groups all fought to create homelands for themselves

The Western Entente decided the western borders of Poland, but the east was a free for all

[Berlin_Freeper]

Stay out of the bicycle lanes or there will be rage.

[Cronos]

Bro is correct -- the French asked for Germany to pay for the damage it caused. Remember that most of the fighting was on French or Belgian lands and the French lost millions of men and francs.

The Germans also imposed crippling losses on the Russians -- taking all of what is now Poland, Belarus, Western Ukraine etc.

The "stab in the back" was actually propagated by the German Generals who told the Kaiser to leave before the fighting got to German lands, then handed over to a civilian government who had to signed the armistice and then the generals blamed the civilian government for their own foolishness

If France and the US had fought into German lands then the Germanpeople would not be so eager for war 20 years later.

Look at tGermany and Japan today -- pacifist.

[Cronos]

Germany can always recover its liabilities for WWII damages by suing France, which has invaded Germany far more times (ore-unification) than Germany has invaded France. -- Germany did not exist before 1870. France did not invade Germany until 1945.

And aren’t the French still owed reparations for Caesar’s conquest? the French of today are descendents of Caesars colonialists + the local Gauls, Acquitani and Belgae + some Frankish and Visigothic blood + increasingly genes from all over the world.

[Cronos]

I read books "the Russian origin of the Great War" which argue otherwise!

In any case my own opinion is that the Great war was the logical outcome of two incidents that occured in the late 1700s:

1. the French revolution
2. The partitions of the polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.

and two incident in the 1800s

1. the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia
2. The Anglo-French support of Turkey against Russia in the Crimean war

The partitions of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth put the Russians directly abutting the Germanic world -- it would have been more in everyone's interest to keep a weakened buffer state like poland was in the 1700s alive and on life support. If the PLC was kept in such a comatose position, then Russia would get safe access to the Baltic sea, would be able to trade with the West (forcing concessions by the Poles) and would not have to fear attacks from the West (as it would have strategic depth). Russia could have concentrated on Turkey and the Balkans

The French revolution created "exclusive space" nation states i.e. that if you were to be in this nation state you must be linguistically and culturally X. So forced Germanization and Russification alienated their minorities

The Anglo-French support of Turkey told Russia not to trust the West and instead of letting the Russians focus on winning land from Iran and Turkey, it made them focus on the west and on central Asia. If the English and the French hadn't interfered, then Constantinople would have been Christian once more

[BroJoeK]

Cronos: "Germany did not exist before 1870.
France did not invade Germany until 1945."

1. In August 1870 the French briefly entered Saarbrucken, part of the Prussian Rhine Province.
   They were quickly defeated & withdrew.

2. In August 1914 the French briefly entered Mulhouse in German Alsace.
   They met stiff resistance and quickly withdrew.

3. In September 1939 the French briefly entered the German Saarland, but quickly withdrew starting the 8-month long "Phoney War".

As stand-alone operations taken out of context, these French actions were at least provocations, if not full-fledged acts of war.
But in all three cases, iirc, the larger context was Germans (or Prussians) who first threatened and then launched major invasions into France. Certainly that was true in 1914 and 1939.

[BroJoeK]

Cronos: "I read books 'the Russian origin of the Great War' which argue otherwise!"

Sure, if you look long enough you'll find books blaming anyone, everyone and no one for starting the First World War.
But, imho, the final word comes from German scholars themselves who carefully researched their records to learn that it was the German High Command which pushed reluctant Austrians into issuing their ultimatum to Serbia.
That's the event which forced Russia to partially mobilize in defense of their ally, Serbia.

Germans then used Russian mobilization as their excuse to invade... France.
Of course none expected the war that resulted, all believed it would be over quickly and gloriously, for their own side.
Had they known, things may have gone differently, but bottom line is: the German High Command was the driving force which launched the war.

[Wallace T.]

What later became Germany was invaded several times in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries by Louis XIV, Napoleon, and others. My mother in law was partially descended from refugees from the Rhineland Palatinate that was invaded by France around the turn of the 18th Century. France annexed Alsace and Lorraine, the former being mostly ethnically German, and temporarily occupied other areas of western Germany.

France had been the bully on the block for the previous 200 years, so a united Germany felt no compunction on exacting revenge in 1870 and thereafter.

[BroJoeK]

Of course you’re right and the larger point is: until recent times nobody cared much how or who started a war, only who won it, assuming the victor would write a history to suit their purposes.

But we care a lot about who & why, especially where there are questions about just who, exactly, were the “good guys” and “bad guys”,

[sphinx]

At the risk of wandering into esoteric trivia, a note on great quotes run amuck:

I will begin with a request for group participation. My library is in some disarray from a major repair job. I have excavated my limit for today of book piles without locating my copy of Churchill's History of the Second World War. I am unable therefore to find the exact quote, but somewhere in his discussion of the fall of France in 1940, Churchill penned a great couple of lines, which is the sort of thing Churchill was in the habit of doing.

Bear with me. I think it's an important quote in terms both of the historiography and the popular imagination.

Churchill's subject was the collapse of the French will to fight in 1940. (War guilt had nothing to do with this discussion.) He was, of course, a romantic whose imagination was dominated by historical glories, especially Britain's, and the tragedy of the Great War. He was therefore sympathetic to France. He understood that France had been bled white in 1914-18 and had not recovered by 1940. But anyhow, his discussion included a great passage which I think went on to color a generation or more of historians. The quote ran something along the lines of: "Three times in the past hundred years, the streets of Paris had trembled beneath German boots, and echoed to the thunder of German guns." Good stuff. But what he was specifically discussing was not 1940 per se; it was the demoralization of France in the interwar years, including the 1930's, culminating in the collapse of 1940.

Anyhow: as a product of the post-WWII generation, one of the comments that I regularly encountered, and just as regularly disputed, was the assertion that "Germany has invaded France three times in the last century." People who said this invariably had 1940 in mind, with a dim notion about WWI and not a glimmer of an idea about the third German "invasion." When I eventually read Churchill's book, the proverbial lightbulb went off in my mind: "Aha! So that's where that comes from!" And I think that's right. A great passage seeped into the minds of a whole generation of English speaking people, and it went viral in a pre-internet sort of way. In the wake of WWII, "the Germans are in the habit of invading France" became common knowledge, even if not true.

A first problem is that since Churchill was discussing French demoralization after WWI, the three episodes of trembling streets and booming guns to which he referred did not include the 1940 campaign, which is the sole indisputable example of unprovoked German aggression against France. (Well ... one could count the barbarian crossing of the Rhine in A.D. 400, but let's not go back that far.) So: to what was Churchill referring?

This is where the exact quote would be useful if someone can lay their hands on it. The 100 year time frame is important in the context of the quote. Paris did indeed hear the boom of German guns in 1914 (and again in 1918), though the only German boots tramping the streets in that war would have been POW's. But let's give Churchill poetic license and take 1914 as one example. Take 1870-71 as another; Paris was besieged and ultimately taken by the Germans. But in 1870, France had declared war against Germany; it may be that Louis Napoleon was indeed as big a fool as advertised and that a wily Bismarck had baited him, but war guild can certainly be debated; bottom line: it was the French who declared war, even if they didn't prosecute it very well.

Finally, 100 years runs us back to 1814-15 and the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. Paris did indeed tremble beneath Prussian (and Austrian, British, Russian and allied German) boots in 1814, but I don't think anyone would regard the final allied suppression of Napoleon as a German invasion of France. (And Churchill didn't say it was; he merely noted in poetic terms that France had faced catastrophic defeat.) That particular war actually began in 1812 with Napoleon's invasion of Russia; 1812 saw the destruction of the Grand Armee in Russia; the campaign of 1813 was the liberation of Germany; and 1814 merely settled the thing, with Waterloo as a brief aftermath.

This gives us five campaigns within the time frame of Churchill's passage: 1814, 1815, 1870-71, 1914 and 1918. To which five, exactly, was he referring? Here we need the exact quote, but for discussion purposes I'll say 1814, 1870-71, and 1914. And what I think happened, in the wake of WWII, was that Churchill's wonderful wording got compacted into three German invasions of France in a hundred years.

Yes, 1940 was a German invasion of France, but Churchill wasn't including that. 1914 is arguable; I think the best assessment is that all of the European powers had grown complacent about war and that Wilhelmine Germany -- newly united and flexing its muscles -- and revanchist France -- eager to recover Alsace-Lorraine and erase the stain of 1870-71 -- were especially spoiling for a fight. Any of the Great Powers could probably have stopped the slide into war, but all of them were determined to honor their alliances. It becomes a very complicated argument.

The larger point, however, is that France -- the historic bully of early modern Western Europe -- learned in 1814-1940 that the tables had turned. France became defeatist once the French realized that Germany had supplanted it as the key power in Europe. Germany got taught its own lessons a bit later. The British also have endured a long comedown with the slow dissolution of the empire, but that was a different dynamic since it involved mostly voluntary withdrawal rather than battlefield defeat.

The above is, again, perhaps esoteric trivia, but as the WWII generation disappears, some balance does need to come back into the discussion. I'll not quarrel with (almost) anything for which one wants to condemn Germany in WWII. But the rest of the record is much more complex. France historically had viewed the various German principalities as targets of opportunity, while none of the German states, except for Austria and on rare occasions Prussia, were rash enough to even consider challenging France. That changed after German unification, but it took the French some time to catch on to the new reality, which is why 1870 and 1914 can be debated.

[sphinx]

Correction: to which three of the campaigns of 1814, 1815, 1870-71, 1914 and 1918 did Churchill refer? War guilt is a separate question; my point here is simply to nail down the "Germany invaded France three times in a hundred years" meme. I do think the idea seeped into the collective consciousness from the Churchill quote, which was actually making a somewhat different point.

[BroJoeK]

sphinx paraphrasing Churchill: "Three times in the past hundred years, the streets of Paris had trembled beneath German boots, and echoed to the thunder of German guns."

As you said, the exact quote would be worth studying.
German troops did parade though Paris in 1871, but not in the First World War, ever.
And it's hard to imagine Churchill referring here to Napoleonic wars when the Prussians & Brits were allied!

But we can make your paraphrase of Churchill accurate simply by changing the word "and" to "or".
Then it could simply refer to the First World War, as you noted, in 1914 and 1918.

In 1812 the French were unquestionably the Big Dogs in Europe and by 1942 had been unquestionably replaced by Germans.
Between those dates the issue was not fully settled, and German aggression was met with stiff French resistance:

Napoleon's Empire, 1812:

Germans parade in Paris, 1871:

Hitler's Empire, 1942:

[sphinx]

I will try to find the exact quote when I rediscover my copy of the book, but ... Churchill was writing his history of WWII in the late 1940's and early 1950's. The relevant discussion had to do with the breaking of French will in WWI and the demoralization of France during the 1930's and the buildup to WWII, so the 1940 campaign does not count. To catch is point, we must look backwards from 1918. And he framed the observation in terms of three times in the preceding century. In that context, I think he must have been reaching back to 1814/15. But again, the exact quote would be useful.

In any event, Churchill's point at hand was not German aggression; it was Germany defeating France repeatedly, and the French becoming defeatist as a result. How assess war guilt in 1870 and 1914 is open to debate. In 1814/15, the French were the bad guys. France was the earliest unified, modern nation state in Europe and, for most of the early modern period, the largest nation state west of Russia. It is not surprising that France was in the habit of throwing its weight around, and France had to lose a couple of wars to realize that a unified Germany totally changed the game.

[Truthsearcher]

They aren’t trying to collect, they are responding to Germany’s threats to levy EU fines on them for not opening their borders by saying that if you’re going to fine us we’ll sue you for $850 billion.

[x]

He's an MP who left his party to form his own, not a member of the government or a leader in parliament or the major parties.

So this is sort of fakey news.

[truth_seeker]

Poland fell under the USSR control. The USSR therefore, failed to get reparations from Germany, for Poland—immediately after the war’s conclusion.

Today Poland has about the same chances of getting reparations for events over 70 yrs. ago, from either USSR/Russia or Germany.

Did the axis powers pay any reparations to allied powers? I doubt it.

[snoringbear]

Cornos,

I read an article in the WSJ a few days ago in which Merkle acknowledged that the no-go zones were a major problem and that she would be putting a stop to them.

[NorseViking]

“” “” Poland fell under the USSR control. The USSR therefore, failed to get reparations from Germany, for Poland—immediately after the war’s conclusion.”” “”

Poland managed to receive some nice real estate from Germany although seding some which wasn’t as nice of its own to Ukraine.