Three reasons that speak against German reparations in the trillions

It's probably just a coincidence: one day after the German government had finally reached an agreement on compensation of 28 million euros with the descendants of the victims of the terrorist attack on Olympia in 1972, Poland's national-conservative governing party PiS published a "report" that had been kept secret for a long time. It puts the damage that Hitler's Germany war caused in Poland at today's sum of 1.3 trillion euros.

The payment to the relatives of the Munich victims is about individual compensation, while the Polish paper is about reparations. That is the key difference.

At least three points speak against the Polish demands, which have not yet been formally raised but are openly transparent: First, reparations have never brought anything positive – neither after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 nor after the First World War in 1918. On the contrary, they only breed new resentment .

It was therefore wise that after the Second World War the western victorious powers actually refrained from reparations from their zones and the USA instead gave loans to enable the development of a peaceful (initially western) German state.

Secondly, unlike individual reparations, reparations always have a dual character: on the one hand, they are about compensation for specific financial losses, and on the other hand, they are about humiliating the defeated opponent. The damage that Poland suffered as a result of Hitler's war is enormous - but how should it be offset against the territory ceded after 1945?

This discussion is getting nowhere, because there are always earlier events in the past that speak against reparations. Poland, for example, bloodily conquered the areas that Stalin had taken from the country in 1945 and “compensated” with East German territories in 1919/1920 in a war against the Russian Bolsheviks.

Third, the purpose of the "report" is no secret: it's actually not aimed at Germany at all. Rather, PiS wants to mobilize its own electorate with anti-German rhetoric. This is classically short-sighted, yes: wrong policy. Because between states it is about enabling a common future. Poland needs Germany as a partner, especially in view of the serious challenges posed by Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine and its foreseeable political consequences. Everyone in Poland knows that too – everyone except the nationalists.