In its diplomatic note today on World War II reparations, in addition to money, Warsaw also asked Germany to restore minority status for Poles in that country.
As clarified by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, some points in the list of Polish requests were presented for reasons of “transparency of the public debate, as well as for the correctness of the information presented by the media (the Polish opposition politicians had previously requested the publication of the full text of the document).
We recall that at the beginning of October Poland sent a diplomatic note to Germany on the consequences of the German aggression and occupation of 1939-1945 and on their settlement. The exact content of this document has not yet been disclosed, because, as highlighted in Friday’s message, the publication of the text would violate the principles of diplomacy. In the report of the Polish parliamentary commission, which is the main source of the list in the diplomatic note, the “material and immaterial” damage of the war for Poland, estimated at 6.2 trillion złoty (1.31 trillion euros).
According to a Friday statement from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this is exactly the amount that Germany is being asked for as war reparations. Warsaw is also demanding compensation for the victims of the German occupation and their families, as well as a systematic solution to the problem of the theft of Polish cultural assets and archives.
In addition to the other elements of the diplomatic list described above, the report also explains in more detail the problem of the Polish minority in Germany before the Second World War. The Polish Foreign Ministry said in early October that it was calling for the full rehabilitation of Polish minority activists murdered in pre-war Germany, as well as compensation for the losses of Polish minority organizations in that country.
In addition, Berlin was called upon to systematically regulate the status of Poles and people of Polish descent currently living in Germany, to restore their national minority status and to raise the issue of mother tongue education for the Polish minority in Germany.
There is currently a Polish community in Germany of 1.5-2 million people, which does not officially enjoy minority status. The Poles in Germany were stripped of their minority status by German decrees issued in September 1939 after the attack. Hitler in Poland.
Today’s Polish community in Germany is trying to revive the tradition of Rodlo, an organization that represented the approximately 1 million Polish minority before World War II in Germany. Most of the Rodlo leaders were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the war, and many members of the organization were sent by the Germans to the Eastern Front, from where they never returned.
As you know, after 1945 the borders of Poland were moved by the great powers in the West. The eastern territories of Germany were annexed to Poland and more than half of pre-war Poland – western Ukraine and western Belarus – to the Soviet Union. The Polish community in Germany subsequently expanded through the resettlement of Silesians with dual identities to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and then through Polish political and economic migration. In recent years, a large number of Polish workers have arrived in Germany under the rules of the single market. The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs requires Germany to recognize Poles living in this country as a national minority and, consequently, to pursue an adequate cultural policy with budgetary expenditure.
