“The position of the German government is unchanged, the issue of reparations is closed,” a foreign ministry spokesman said. During a visit to Warsaw in December, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ruled out reparations, saying the issue was covered by treaties signed in the 1990s. He added that Germany also paid a lot into the EU budget. Poland has benefited from EU funds that, for example, helped to rehabilitate previously cracked transport infrastructure. Arkadiusz Mularczyk, head of the petition group, said it was impossible to put an economic value on the loss of some 5.2 million lives that he blamed on the German occupation. It listed losses in infrastructure, industry, agriculture, culture, deportations to Germany for forced labor, and attempts to convert Polish children into Germans. A team of more than 30 economists, historians and other experts have been working on the report since 2017. The issue has created bilateral tensions. Members of Law and Justice, the ruling party in Poland’s governing coalition, have often called for compensation in the past. Radek Sikorski, an opposition politician and former Polish foreign minister, described the push for reparations as “propaganda and fairy tales for the naive”.
