German conservative newspaper threatens Poland with territorial demands - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/16/pola-s16.html
German conservative newspaper threatens Poland with territorial demands
By Peter Schwarz
16 September 2017
The Polish government is demanding reparations from Germany for the war crimes committed during the Second World War. The demand is not new, but has never before been raised so persistently.
The chairman of the governing right-wing nationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS), Jaroslav Kaczynski, breathed new life into the reparations debate in late June. Ever since, Prime Minister Beata Szydlo has issued repeated demands on the issue. She told the RNFFM radio station on September 7, “Poland has a right to reparations, and the Polish state has the right to demand them.” Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski stated that Poland’s demand amounted to €840 billion.
The Bureau of Research of the Polish parliament published a 40-page report on Monday justifying the Polish demand. According to this, an official 1953 statement in which the Polish government relinquished its right to claim reparations from Germany is not legally valid because it was made under pressure from the Soviet Union and only applied to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), not Germany.
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