Should Poland pay reparations to Germany?

Nick said:

Because the Germans had taken part in the .... and murder of Poles and started the war in the first place. By killing Germans the Poles and Russians were merely getting revenge what had been done to them earlier in the war.

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Merely?

This is known as a blood feud, and this sort of thinking has propelled many of the world's worst conflicts and humanitarian catastrophes.

Again, law provides for redemption and utterly forbids any sort of license of mass executions under any circumstances, especially notions such as vengeance, irredentism, etc. It's based on the notion that two wrongs don't make a right, which is a fundamental distinction between modern civil order, and primitive barbarism. You can't kill millions of people because they are associated with a group that did the same to you. If we were to accept this as normal and justified, we would all be accepting as legitimate our own murder - because every one of us is connected to some identity or person or group out there that has done horrible things to somebody else. Whether it's because we're white, or Catholic, or Hindu, or British or Chinese or whatever.

The flip side of that coin is that, if we want to continue to enjoy peace, we have to be prepared to accept responsibility for our actions. Teflon nationalism has got to be left behind, like all childish things.

German soldiers were all Nazis anyway, they swore an oath to Hitler when they enlisted.

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And most British soldiers swear an oath to the Queen. Does it make them Royalists? I hardly think so.

The German army was actually notoriously intolerant of fanatical Nazi devotees. This was one of the main reasons for the formation of the Waffen SS, as the most politicized Nazis were not accepted among the ranks.

These kind of comments are typical of those who don't understand the mentality of soldiering before the postwar era, which was best summed up in an expression once common in the British Army: "Ours not to wonder why, ours but to do or die." In the aftermath of WW2, this sort of sentiment became highly unpopular and eventually, forgotten, but in the 1930s and early 40s - despite having suffered something of a setback due to WW1 - this sentiment was still common among soldiers of all nations.

More importantly, very very few of the executed individuals were soldiers at all, because most of the German soldiers captured in Poland went to POW camps administered directly by the Red Army, not the provisional TRJN. Those killed by the TRJN were mostly civilians, and mostly women and children. Nor were they, for the most part, products of any sort of "lebensraum" ... they were mostly Silesian civilians, who had been majority German even before the 20th century began. I imagine many of these were probably not German at all, but simply happened to live in areas of high German concentration and for pragmatic reasons, could speak the language. Perhaps some of them simply had German fathers, or even just "looked German". I am extremely dubious of the precision of this sort of so-called "justice", since, by all other indications, precision was hardly much of a priority .... you just can't kill hundreds of thousands of people in a couple of years, and hope to get it even nearly right. At that pace you slaughter, and let the innocent be damned.

Edgewaters said:

Polish forces participated in the Anschluss of Austria, themselves annexing a portion of Austria.

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What portion was that? I have read that when Czechoslovakia was being dismembered in September of '38, Poland annexed an area around Teschen which had previously been a part of Austrian Silesia back in the Hapsburg days.

But I had not read of any Polish annexation of any Austrian territory in March of '38 in conjunction with the Anschluss.

Lucius said:

What portion was that? I have read that when Czechoslovakia was being dismembered in September of '38, Poland annexed an area around Teschen which had previously been a part of Austrian Silesia back in the Hapsburg days.

But I had not read of any Polish annexation of any Austrian territory in March of '38 in conjunction with the Anschluss.

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Sorry, yes, you are right. Poland supported Germany's aims at Munich, and contributed forces to Operation Green. One of OG's key elements was to intimidate the Czechs into offering no resistance by securing the diplomatic and military support of Poland:

For the military operations it is essential to make the fullest use of the surprise element as the most important factor contributing to victory, by means of appropriate preparatory measures, already in peacetime, and an unexpected swiftness of action.

Thus is it essential to create a situation within the first two or there days which demonstrate to enemy states which wish to intervene the hopelessness of the Czech military position, and also provides an incentive to those states which have territorial claims upon Czechoslovakia to join in immediately against her. In this case the intervention of Hungary and Poland against Czechoslovakia can be expected

O.K.W. No. 42/38

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~pv/munich/czdoc05.html

Belisarius said:

Have you got something against Poland? All this seems a bit harsh.

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Not at all. I'm simply in favour of truth, especially when it's uncomfortable.

What I'm really against is the cult of victimhood. We have attached so much moral superiority to the status of being a victim, that now it is raised as license to kill millions of people who are of no conceivable threat at all. I think this is quite wrong.

Killing Germans AFTER the war is not a war crime, per se, the war being over when the offence was committed

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Killing whole populations certainly isn't an act of peace, is it?

These things are defined as war crimes because they are a form of conflict and come under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.

Thing is, were they killed by the Soviet occupation forces or by the Polish authorities?

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Polish authorities. Red Army crimes are a separate matter entirely (and certainly no less shameful).

Again this is a very harsh statement. Do you have any documented evidence this practice was widespread, or unusually more virulent, than in any other european country with a Jewish population?

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The incidents, such as the Jedwabne Massacre, are as well-documented as any other facet of the Holocaust. Poland has acknowledged the facts and condolences were offered by President Kwaoniewski in 2001.

Edgewaters said:

Not at all. I'm simply in favour of truth, especially when it's uncomfortable.

What I'm really against is the cult of victimhood. We have attached so much moral superiority to the status of being a victim, that now it is raised as license to kill millions of people who are of no conceivable threat at all. I think this is quite wrong.



Killing whole populations certainly isn't an act of peace, is it?

These things are defined as war crimes because they are a form of conflict and come under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.



Polish authorities. Red Army crimes are a separate matter entirely (and certainly no less shameful).



The incidents, such as the Jedwabne Massacre, are as well-documented as any other facet of the Holocaust. Poland has acknowledged the facts and condolences were offered by President Kwaoniewski in 2001.

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I think that it should still be considered a war crime because the senseless killing of anyone based on political reasons is severely wrong.

Belisarius said:

What about ethnic Germans, living in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, etc. who had nothing at all to do with this dictatorship but became pawns in a political game, should they be dispossessed without any recompense?

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Recompense by whom? By the recent released from communism states? It would been not fair! The germans expulsion was a mistake, but the first responsability is beared by USA, Britain and...former USSR. It was just one of the mistake of the allies.

Nick said:

Because the Germans had taken part in the .... and murder of Poles and started the war in the first place. By killing Germans the Poles and Russians were merely getting revenge what had been done to them earlier in the war.
In 1939 Polish officers were taken and shot, not by the SS but the German army. Many civilians (including women and children) were taken and sent to the death camps.
German soldiers were all Nazis anyway, they swore an oath to Hitler when they enlisted. Unlike other Allied troops Polish and Russian soldiers were sent to the gas chambers because they were seen as an inferior race.
Shooting Nazis was merely the execution of war criminals, though without the sham trials like at Nuremburg (which were pointless as everyone knew they were guilty).

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sorry, but this is completely rubbish

Admiralwaldek said:

We can pay them with bullets and granades xD

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I can just hope, that you made a joke. If not, it shows, that Nazi spirit is common all around the world

Belisarius said:

I make no comment other than I ran across this while researching something entirely different. I apologise for it's length. It can be found at:
http://www.pacwashmetrodiv.org/events/jedwabne/pogonowski.text.htm

The Tragedy of Jedwabne Explained by the Evidence of Two Graves and German Archives
Thus, on July 10, 1941 German executioners collected Jews of Jedwabne in the town square and drove them by physical violence to the site of their murder. First they shot some 50 Jews and then burned alive 250 others (not 1600 or 1800 as inaccurately reported in the American press on the basis of false information published by J. T. Gross who ignored Soviet and other sources as well as German archives in his book Neighbors).
The executioners of the Einsatztrupen enlisted help of several ethnic Germans (the "Volksdeutche" known as traitors and spies), and a group of primitive and illiterate criminals, both local and from out of town, as well as possibly a few "avengers." The latter must have believed that they and their relatives had suffered murderous persecution by Soviet security officers and deportation to the Gulag because of the betrayal by some of the Jews living in Jedwabne. German executioners forced an additional number of Poles, at gunpoint, with blows of rifle butts, and with threats, to help bring Jewish victims to the town square (the marketplace) ostensibly to clean the pavement.
According to eyewitnesses still living today, uniformed Germans committed this wartime atrocity. They forced some 300 Jews to march in a mock-funeral procession while carrying a concrete head of Lenin that had been removed from a monument.
The Germans of the Einsatzgrupen divided the marchers into two groups. The first group consisted of some 50 Jews, men strong enough to put up a fight. The second group was formed from the approximately 250 remaining Jews, mostly old people, women, and children.
While the second group was held back, the first group was directed into a 62.4 by 23 feet wooden barn. The keys to the barn were confiscated a day earlier by uniformed Germans, who removed agricultural machinery from it and prepared it for the execution of the Jews next day. (The daughter of the owner of the barn repeatedly testified about this facts, most recently on the CBS "60 minutes" on March 24, 2002.)
The 50 Jewish men were ordered to dig a large grave inside the barn, ostensibly for burying Lenin's concrete head. (J. T. Gross wants his readers to believe that the head of Lenin was buried in the Jewish cemetery.) As the diggers stood near the grave, the Germans shot them and then ordered several Poles to drag into the shallow grave the bodies of the Jews, some slain and some wounded but possibly still alive. Lenin's concrete head was placed on top of the victims in the grave #1. The German executioners then ordered the second, more defenseless, group into the barn, which moments later would be turned into a gigantic funeral pyre.
Stefan Boczkowski, Roman Chojnowski and five other eyewitnesses reported seeing the following: A small German military truck loaded with soldiers and gasoline canisters quickly pulled up to the barn crowded with Jews. Some of the soldiers jumped down from the truck, and those soldiers staying in the truck handed them the canisters, whose contents they poured on all outer walls of the barn. The flames engulfed the barn at once. Pyrotechnic analysis indicates that the Germans used approximately 100 gallons (over 400 liters) of gasoline to soak some 1000 square ft. of walls of the barn in order to engulf all of it with fire, burn it and in process suffocate the victims (by inhalation of the hot smoke). Later (reportedly the next day) the Germans ordered Poles at gunpoint to bury the partly burned bodies emanating a horrible odor. Remains of about 250 victims were buried in the grave #2 located along the barn (the high content of water in human bodies requires temperature of some 800 degrees Centigrade for more than thirty minutes in order to obtain a complete cremation).
At that time there was no gasoline available to the local population of Jedwabne (only a small amount of hydrocarbons in form of kerosene for lamps was available to the rural population). Such small amounts of kerosene (as mentioned by J. T. Gross) with its flashpoint of about 50 degrees Centigrade could not produce a sudden fire to engulf the entire barn at once.
In the 2001 investigation by the Polish government bodies of the victims of the July 10, 1941 massacre were found buried in the graves #1 and #2. Thorough search and drilling some 170 test cores in the vicinity found no other graves of the 1941 massacre of the Jews in Jedwabne; however, at the request of an Orthodox Rabbi who objected, rigorous forensic studies and full exhumation of all victims and the determination by autopsy of causes of death of every one of them was prematurely terminated. Thus, only an approximate number of victims could be estimated by the size of the two graves. Unfortunately these unanswered questions inevitably discredit the veracity of the final report of the official investigation by the Polish government's agency, the Institute of National Memory (IPN).
The veracity of Grosses book and the film Neighbors is further compromised by a baseless, non-corroborated claim that a cut off head of a Jewish female was kicked around in Jedwabne. Jerzy Robert Nowak, the author of the book 100 Lies By Gross (published in Poland) claims that after its publication he determined additional factual errors in Neighbors.
"The book of Prof. Gross can not be considered as a serious scholarly work: it is rather a tendentious propagandistic pamphlet. He jumps to farfetched conclusions before examining the existing evidence." wrote to the New York Times M. K. Dziewanowski, Professor of History, author of: History of Soviet Russia, 5th edition, Prentice Hall, 1996.
As Alexander B. Rossino, historian at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. writes in an article to be printed in Polin, Volume 16, 2003:
"The evidence collected by the West Germans, including the positive identification of [Hauptsturmfuehrer Herman] Schaper by witnesses from Łomża, Tykocin, and Radziłów, suggested that it was indeed Schaper's men who carried out the killings in those locations. Investigators also suspected, based on the similarity of the methods used to destroy the Jewish communities of Radziłów, Tykocin, Rutki, Zambrów, Jedwabne, Piątnica, and Wizna between July and September 1941 that Schaper's men were the perpetrators... The method used to kill the Jews of Jedwabne was exactly the same that had been employed by the Gestapo [Einsatsgrupen] to kill the Jews of Radzilow only three days earlier."
During the initial investigation of 1964, German investigator Opitz in Ludwigsburg, Germany, concluded that Hauptsturmfuerer Hermann Schaper's Einsatskommando conducted the mass execution of Jews in Jedwabne. Nonetheless, Schaper gave conflicting answers to his interrogators. First, he lied that in 1941 he had been a truck driver and he used false names. Later he claimed to have been an administrative officer, and another time a hunter of double agents, when the Gestapo was busy finding and killing communist commissars and Jews.
Court documents at Ludwigsburg archives show that the chief of the German civilian administration in the Nazi occupied Łomża district, Count van der Groeben testified that Schaper conducted mass executions of Jews in his district, which included the town of Jedwabne. That notwithstanding, legal proceedings against Schaper were terminated Sept. 2, 1965 despite positive identification of the defendant by Jewish survivors of the execution in Radzilow and Tykocin.
In 1974 Schaper's case was reopened and in 1976 a German court in Giesen, Hessen, pronounced the then 68 year old Schaper guilty, together with four other members of the kommando SS Zichenau-Schroettersburg, of executions of Poles and Jews. Schaper was sentenced to a six-year prison, but was soon released for medical reasons. (The facts of Schaper's dossier are quoted from article by Thomas Urban, reporter of the Suddeutsche Zeitung; Polish text in Rzeczpospolita, Sept 1-2, 2001.)
To make any legal sense now in 2002 the Polish Government should have demanded either the extradition or deposition under oath of Schaper by a German court and not an interview which has no legal meaning and can not give legally binding information. However, the Polish government's agency IPN gave the press a report that "Hauptsturmfuehrer Hermann Schaper confirmed known facts."

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We committed enough crimes, but not all. Germans did not commit this massacre, allthough they did nothing to prevent it. The about 340 Jews were burnt by Poles. But this is a theme which is not favorite in Poland. It is so much easier if the Germans did it.

Nick said:

German soldiers were all Nazis anyway, they swore an oath to Hitler when they enlisted.

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I understand that only for the Waffen SS and other elite units was the Nazi affiliation required.

The Wehrmacht supposedly followed the rules of the Reichswehr under the Weimar constitution, which disallowed soldiers from holding political affiliations or voting, in spite of the oath that you quoted.

Have you any additional information on this issue?

Should Poland pay reparations?
There must be the question, does Germany wants reparations? The answer is NO!
Germany has accepted that the Soviet Union, supported by the western Allies had given, against all international laws, great parts of Germany to Poland. Germany has accepted, that, against all international laws, Poland, Czech and Russia have expelled millions of Germans after the war from their homes with rapes, murder and other atrocities.
While Germany paid billions of reparations to different states and apologized for their crimes a several times, in the Czech Republic, a state of the EU, the Benes decrets are still common law.

We want no reparations! Germany has done more for a peaceful, united Europe than a lot of other nations. So perhaps some of you try to keep this in mind and do not only look back to 12 years of shame

sylla1 said:

I understand that only for the Waffen SS and other elite units was the Nazi affiliation required.

The Wehrmacht supposedly followed the rules of the Reichswehr under the Weimar constitution, which disallowed soldiers from holding political affiliations or voting, in spite of the oath that you quoted.

Have you any additional information on this issue?

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No, the oath on the Führer was introduced after the death of Hindenburg, beginning with August 2nd, 1934.

BTW, not all members of SS were voluntaries or Nazis. The members of the police were integrated into the SS as Police Granadier Division, later in the war, germans were drafted by a special percentage to SS. So all is not as easy.

beorna said:

No, the oath on the Führer was introduced after the death of Hindenburg, beginning with August 2nd, 1934.

BTW, not all members of SS were voluntaries or Nazis. The members of the police were integrated into the SS as Police Granadier Division, later in the war, germans were drafted by a special percentage to SS. So all is not as easy.

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Wikipedia claims there were 8.5 millions members of the Nazi party in 1945, but without any reference. Have you any other figures?

in 1933 it were 850.000 (some say up to 1,2 Mio), in 1945 7,5 Million.

I write something more later

First of all, I think that not all nazi supporters were in the party. I support a special party too, but would never join it. So the amount says nothing about German nazis.
On the other side, some jobs made it necessary to go into the party, teachers e.g. Otherwise they had trouble. so they chose the easy way.
some years ago there were popular people in Germany accused of being NSDAP members. They were completely astonished and not only they, the public as well, because their life was so far away from nacism. The result was, that their membership was a present for the Führer. Leader of HJ e.g. subscribed for the young boys, so that they or the Gauleiter could report to Berlin, that so many new members were found.
so you can see that there were different reason. If we blame Germans for being Nazis, we must always see that Germany was not a free country. It was risky to say NO. that is a fact in all totalitarian states. One uncle of mine was shot for helping jews and others to go to the Netherlands. It was brave, but would we be as brave as him? People like him are rare. and it is interesting that such character have problems in democratic societies usually too.

beorna said:

First of all, I think that not all nazi supporters were in the party. I support a special party too, but would never join it. So the amount says nothing about German nazis.
On the other side, some jobs made it necessary to go into the party, teachers e.g. Otherwise they had trouble. so they chose the easy way.
some years ago there were popular people in Germany accused of being NSDAP members. They were completely astonished and not only they, the public as well, because their life was so far away from nacism. The result was, that their membership was a present for the Führer. Leader of HJ e.g. subscribed for the young boys, so that they or the Gauleiter could report to Berlin, that so many new members were found.
so you can see that there were different reason. If we blame Germans for being Nazis, we must always see that Germany was not a free country. It was risky to say NO. that is a fact in all totalitarian states. One uncle of mine was shot for helping jews and others to go to the Netherlands. It was brave, but would we be as brave as him? People like him are rare. and it is interesting that such character have problems in democratic societies usually too.

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Very good comment!

i like what edgewaters has been saying, especially about the cult of victimhood. the sad truth is that all nations, whether victors, losers, powerful, or not powerful, participate in the same coniving...what nation doesn't scramble for spoils and turn on another for it's own greed. it's good that a nation can apologise for wrong doing, but that won't stop them doing wrong doing a moment later.

This problem should be closed forever. What if Poland will ask Germany to pay compensation for destroyed Warsaw AFTER THE WARSAW UPRISING? This was not act of war but it was a systematic destruction of city after surrender of Polish Home Army?
What about compensation for Poles expelled from the Eastern Poland by Soviet Union?
This question is a Pandora box and should be closed forever. No more compensations ether way.