A rally urging Germany to pay reparations to Poland for World War II was on Monday set to be staged in Warsaw, according to reports.

The rally was expected to be held in front of the German embassy by an organisation called the Independence March Association, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s polskieradio24.pl news website reported.

Stefan Hambura, a lawyer helping stage the rally, has told the website that he believes Poland is entitled to compensation for the massive damage it suffered at the hands of Germany during World War II.

The Warsaw rally aimed to encourage Poland’s authorities to come up with a decisive claim for the payment of war reparations by Germany, which invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, polskieradio24.pl reported.

Hambura argued that Germany was seeking to brush off the topic, while Polish-German reconciliation "must be based on truth," he said.

“In order for that to happen, we must first close all those issues that are still open and lingering from the days of World War II,” Hambura added.

Germany's ambassador to Poland Rolf Nikel in February said in an interview for Polish private broadcaster TVN that the matter of war reparations for Poland was “legally and politically closed."

Massive wartime damage

Polish and German experts last month discussed the sensitive topic of war reparations at a conference in Warsaw, according to reports.

The conference was held after Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz and Germany’s Sigmar Gabriel in January agreed that the potentially divisive issue between the two countries should be tackled by experts on both sides, Poland's Rzeczpospolita newspaper has reported.

Prof. Zdzisław Krasnodębski, a Eurodeputy for Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, was quoted as saying at the time that the Warsaw conference would “open the door to a serious debate with Germany on reparations.”

Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz in early September told German news weekly Der Spiegel that “73 years after World War II the Polish people are still talking about their suffering and losses; it's a part of our identity.”

Czaputowicz told Der Spiegel in an interview--which appeared on the weekly's website--that Poland’s losses during World War II were “much greater than those suffered by other countries.” He also said that there was a discrepancy between “the kind of reparations that Germany granted Western countries such as France or Belgium and how we have been compensated for our losses," according to Poland's PAP news agency.

Earlier this year, the head of a Polish team assessing potential reparations said that Germany could owe Poland USD 850 billion for damage it inflicted in World War II.

"We are talking about very large, but justified amounts of compensation for war crimes, for destroyed cities, villages, the lost demographic potential of our country,” Arkadiusz Mularczyk, an MP with Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice party, said at the time, as quoted by the PAP news agency.

Last year, an analysis by Polish parliamentary experts said the government in Warsaw is entitled to demand that Germany pay reparations.

German officials have said that the issue was definitively settled with Poland in 1953.

In a resolution adopted that year, the Polish communist government of the time recognised that Germany had fulfilled its obligations with regard to Poland and decided against seeking compensation.

But Poland's ruling conservatives have said that decisions made by the country's communist-era authorities are not still valid because they were made under pressure from the Soviet Union.

Jarosław Kaczyński, head of the Law and Justice party, which came to power in late 2015, said at a convention in July last year that Poland never received compensation for the damage it suffered in World War II, losses which "we have really still not made up for."

Officials in Warsaw have noted that nearly 6 million Poles were killed during the war from 1939 to 1945, when their country was invaded by Nazi Germany.

(gs/pk)

Source: polskieradio24.pl