Poland demands compensation from Germany

Poland and Germany are still haunted by their difficult past. Eighty-five years after the German invasion of Poland triggered the start of World War II, the question of whether Germany should pay reparations to its neighbor is back on the agenda. “Settling the bill would be historically justified,” Donald Tusk, the newly elected Polish prime minister, told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during his first official visit to Berlin in February. Tusk, a former European Commission president, said that Germany “still has work to do” on the issue of moral and material compensation but added that the subject should not be allowed to poison relations between Germany and Poland in the future. Two weeks earlier, at a meeting in Berlin with his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski had called on the German government to “think creatively about finding a form of compensation” for Poland’s losses in World War II. Reparations row Demands for compensation are not new. For eight years, the previous right-wing nationalist PiS government used anti-German rhetoric to try to score points with its domestic audience. The PiS leader, former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, repeatedly emphasized that Germany had not yet settled its historic debt....