Posted on 10/08/2022 12:32:02 AM PDT by Trump20162020
Poland's government to continue to push for $1.3T in reparations from its neighbor Germany, despite Berlin saying matter is closed
Berlin’s claim that Germany’s World War II reparations to Poland is a closed subject is morally and legally unfounded, said a Polish government spokesperson on Wednesday.
"This is an unfounded claim, both in the moral and legal sphere, because Poland has never given up on war reparations in any way," Piotr Muller told the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
In a newspaper interview also published Wednesday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rejected Polish demands for reparations.
"Like all previous federal governments, I can point out that this issue has been finally settled under international law," Scholz told German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(Excerpt) Read more at aa.com.tr ...
Why ask now?
Gibs-me-dat $Trillion!
They probably need more reparations from Russia.
I think after getting ‘lectured’ by the Merkel/Scholz crowd enough (literally hundreds of occasions over the past 20 years)....they figured to pepper-up future lectures by continually reminding them that they were denied Marshall Plan funding, and damaged by the German Nazi government.
To think all eyes/interests were on the US prior to Joseph Stolen.
The World lacks direction.
FU, election-steeling Rats.
Maybe they think the Germans will invade again, and they are just trying to get a head of the game. 🤭
Did they really expect the German government to hand over vast amounts of cash paid by Germans now who overwhelmingly weren’t even alive when WWII was happening and many years after compensation settlements were already reached?
Should the Germans counter claim for about half the land in Poland today which used to be Germany and from which Germans suffered ethnic cleansing and estimates are over a million died as a result? Enough with the historical grievances and counter grievances. Let sleeping dogs lie.
I suggest the Polish take a page out of the Israelis book and send their agents into germany to effect retribution against the remaining living germans who “helped” during WWII.
It has taken 85 years this time around. Today the Germanic people have been strategically hammered by Merkel with muslims in some states while other states have none. The ones who opposed Merkel (the West) have the hate for another war, and they have the mulim-power to provide the Army that will rid them of their Arab Hordes;) Poland shoud think twice about who is their friends and who are the enemies!
Indeed. After the war, Poland got a huge payment from Germany--the German states of Silesia, Pomerania, West Prussia and part of East Prussia, so what more do they want? And why did they wait until now to bring this up?
The Soviets stole a huge chunk of Poland--everything east of the Curzon Line--and the Poles never got it back. The territory now belongs to Belarus and Ukraine.
Germany paid off its First World War reparations in 2010.
Iirc, the Allies did not make such demands after the Second World War, calculating that Germany would be more valuable as a powerful ally than as a weakened enemy.
This was probably more for the domestic audience, a way to rouse the base. I doubt they really thought the Germans would pony up, but for some reason the Germans aren’t popular in that part of the world, and there are less consequences to poking that bear than the other, big, Eastern one.
Just another corrupt government wanting more bribes.
🤔🤔🤔
I seem to be getting the idea that Poland doesn’t know the root cause of WWII: reparations.
I've long wondered about those WWI German reparations -- how much were they, really? At the time it was announced as DM 132 billion, in "gold marks", meaning what, exactly?
Well, in today's money it works out around $3 trillion, or circa 57,000 tons of gold, but with interest they paid ~$5 trillion said to be equivalent of 96,000 tons of gold.
Obviously, the full story is more complicated, but it still comes out to a pretty good sum of money.
For comparison, at Brest-Litovsk, Germans charged Russia only 6 billion marks, however, they also took over a million square miles of Russia (out of ~9 million total), including 90% of Russia's coal production and monthly payments of 25% of Baku oil production.
In Belgium, Germans forced the small country to pay them 35 million Belgian francs per month, in today's values roughly $35 billion, far more than the Belgian government's tax revenues. Germans also conscripted and/or deported nearly 200,000 Belgian workers, plus industrial machinery.
Bottom line: I agree the time for making WWII claims is long past and all of the former Axis powers have been good global citizens throughout the 77 years since 1945.
Our formers allies, the Russians, not so much.
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