“Using the above method, Prof. Ryszard Domański estimated our war losses at over USD 15 trillion, and the German part at USD 10 trillion. These are calculations for 2018” – attorney Wiesław Misiek said during the last day of the Congress for Independence, which took place on October 1-4, 2023, among others in Lublin and Warsaw, referring to the losses suffered by Poland during World War II.
Recalling the enormity of the crimes committed by the Germans against Poles: public executions, roundups, imprisonment in concentration camps and subjecting them to experiments that had nothing to do with science, attorney Wiesław Misiek drew attention to the fact that the crimes against the Polish population were committed by people belonging to the German elite. “The murderers were people with doctorates. Mengele was not the only one. There were dozens of professors from the best universities, especially medicine, but not only. They were elites” – he recalled. “Medical doctor Mengele was able to kill fourteen children in one evening, and in total he murdered over 3,000 twins because he specialized in this and experimented on them” – he emphasized. “Three thousand babies! Doctor of medical sciences! He was a real German, not a Nazi” – he added. “No one in the West knows this. There, the occupation took a completely different course, and the Germans maintained the appearance of applying the international law of war. There were national governments there, more or less collaborating with the Third Reich. There was no underground state and partisans there, as in ours, an army of hundreds of thousands. No one died there for helping to hide Jews. Himmler thanked the French authorities warmly for sending 84,000 French Jews to Auschwitz, whose property they had previously confiscated” – the lawyer recalled. “The difference in the course of the occupation is aptly described by the opinion of Jean Paul Sartre, a French writer and philosopher, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1964, who formulated it as follows: ‘We have never felt more free than under the German occupation’. In France there wasn’t even censorship. Publishers of newspapers and books signed an agreement with the Wehrmacht that they would censor themselves. In France, women cohabiting with Germans were shaved, but only after the war, unlike in Poland, when sentences issued by underground courts were carried out as quickly as possible” – he noticed.
The lawyer pointed out that when the Polish state began to mention reparations, the authorities in Berlin claimed that it was impossible because diplomatic relations had not been established. When the latter contacted us, they argued that it was too late, and then – that we had allegedly waived these reparations. “The German elites considered and still recognize Poland as a second-class country” – he concluded.
According to Mec. Misiek, the best method of calculating war losses is the income method, which estimates losses hypothetically that there was no war and our country would develop according to average pre-war data. “Using the above method, Prof. Ryszard Domański estimated our war losses at over 15 trillion dollars, and the German part at 10 trillion dollars. These are calculations for 2018. The report, which was revealed on September 1 last year, assumes that Germany owe Poland 1.3 trillion dollars to us. euro, i.e. PLN 6.2 trillion. The authors stipulate that the calculated amounts are based on – as they write – ‘conservative assumptions’. As Minister Mularczyk unfortunately admitted in an interview for Die Welt, our claim could be five or even ten times higher. Of course Germany also rejects these understated claims” – attorney said.
He also pointed out that the German generals of the Nazi period were not only not held accountable by the German state for the crimes they committed, but also received high benefits until the end. “For example, General Reinefarth, the ‘executioner of Wola’, was paid a general’s pension until the end” – he recalled. “Germans were paid eight times more compensation than Poles” – he noted.
“In the Potsdam Agreement it was agreed that Poland would receive reparations through the Soviet Union and from its pool. The relevant agreement was signed by the communist government in 1945. One historian-economist calculated that we paid an additional 600 million dollars for these reparations. Curiosities include: that in 1949 we received 6 million books by Marx, Engels and Lenin published in Polish in East Germany, and the Soviets counted it as 10 percent of all reparations supplies for that year. Every year until 1954 we supplied the USSR with 10 millions tons of coal at a price of $1 per tonne, i.e. a price many times lower than the cost of extraction. According to Soviet data, by August 2, 1945, they had taken away 1.821 million tons of factory equipment, various machines, etc. and 2,000 km of railway lines, even though they had previously promised not to take equipment from the area Poland. There is basically no talk about compensation in the civil sense in Poland” – he enumerated. “In Germany, laws developed by war criminals are still in force” – Mec. Misiek noted.
“In supposedly democratic Germany, regulations, developed in the 1950s and 1960s by former SS men and even war criminals who then held managerial positions in the German justice apparatus, are still in force. They do not allow compensation payments to Poles and citizens of Eastern European countries” – attorney said.
Referring to the public argument that Germany will not be able to bear the amount of reparations included in Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk’s report and that it will ruin the German budget, the lawyer noted that “these 6 trillion are only 1/3 – these are the data two years ago – of savings of German citizens accumulated in private accounts”. “It will not ruin the German economy, and debts must be repaid” – he concluded.
“We must reveal to the world the tragedy that we have experienced and for what we demand compensation, because they do not know. They think that, as it happened in France or in the series “Allo! Allo!”, that the Gestapo was some kind of ridiculous organization” – Mec. Misiek emphasized.
Anna Wiejak