BIG BULLETIN: GERMAN RESTITUTION TO POLAND IS A FARCE

• Far from showing “exemplary repentance for Nazism”, as is often said today, the opposite was the case. German repentance, when it occurred, was forced by external circumstances, was much delayed, and was selectively centered on the Jews from the beginning. For details, please see this Bulletin:  https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2023/11/21/big-bulletin-phony-and-jewish-serving-german-repentance-for-nazism/
• During the flurry of early-postwar German reparations, Poland was defrauded. The powerful Soviet Union usurped control of Poland’s share of reparations, and did not give Poland her share without connecting it to a forced Polish purchase of grossly-overpriced Soviet coal. This creative fraud enabled the USSR to recoup the German reparations to Poland through the overpriced coal (Zyblikiewicz 2022, vol. 1, p. 40).
• For the longest time, Germany gave the “no final resolution of the war” creative excuse for not compensating Poland, though it was an admitted legal fiction (Authers 2008, p. 423), and a bogus issue. The victorious Allies had imposed their will upon the defeated Germans (debellatio). That was the “final resolution of the war”!
• Closely related to the “final resolution” canard is the one about Poland already compensated through the Recovered Territories [revived as recently as 1989 by Helmut Kohl: Roth and Ruebner 2022, p. 261]. In actuality, the Recovered Territories are not owned by Germany, any more than the moon is owned by Germany, and so cannot be given up by Germany in exchange for anything! Germany may as well insult the Poles by offering Poland the moon as part of reparation negotiations.
• “Poland renounced further reparations in 1953” was Soviet-forced and, in any case, is not legally binding (Zyblikiewicz 2022). It is so bogus that even some German scholars (Roth and Ruebner 2022) have repudiated it.
• The “Poland behind the Iron Curtain” German pretext (Berger 2012, p. 56), for not compensating Poland, is all the more cynical owing to the fact that it was because of German aggression that there was Soviet Communist rule over Poland, for 45 years, in the first place. This pretext is not even internally consistent, as Germany has previously paid aggrieved peoples located behind the Iron Curtain (Authers 2008, p. 423).
• In 1973, German courts again rejected the reparation claims of Polish forced laborers, based on the pretext that such claims could not be pursued by individuals (Berger 2012). Otherwise, a meager 500 million dollars of German reparations went to Poland in 1975 (Feldman 1984, p. 93). As of at least 1987, 42 years after the war, Polish concentration camp victims had still not been compensated (Roth and Ruebner 2022, p. 217).
• Not until August 2000, over 55 years after the war and after the vast majority of forced laborers were conveniently dead (Sporer 2002, pp. 10-12), did German corporations and the German government set up the Foundation named Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future (EVZ) for compensating forced laborers. The German corporations paying into the fund did so very lopsidedly, and the payments made to the few surviving forced laborers were meager (2,560-7,670 euros per person)(De Jong 2022).
• The EVC Foundation was not created out of any suddenly-discovered German sense of justice to Poland. It happened in response to increasing lawsuits filed against German companies for reparations (Authers 2008, p. 421).
• The EVC was intended to exclusively compensate Jewish forced laborers (Goschler 2017, p. 28, 82). Only the fear of an anti-Semitic backlash eventually forced the EVC to pay a little bit to the Poles and other non-Jewish forced laborers (Wunberg 2007, p. 86).
• The German side also tried to wriggle out of paying compensation to Polish laborers by arguing that agricultural laborers (most Poles were) should be ineligible for any reparations (Goschler 2017, pp. 132-133).
• The eventual payouts were a travesty of justice. All 75,000 Jewish claimants were deemed eligible, while half of Polish claimants, that is, 165,000, arbitrarily were not (Sporer 2002, p. 15).
• Even more telling, the 75,000 Jewish claimants got 28,324 DM (Deutschmarks) per person, while 36,000 Polish claimants got 15,000 DM per person, and a whopping 175,000 Polish claimants got a jocular 7,889 DM per person (Sporer 2002, p. 15.) The better than 3:1 payment favoritism towards the Jews is confirmed by Marrus (2009, p. 21) and Jansen (2008, p. 211).
• It could have been even worse. Jews wanted a 5:1 payment in favor of the Jews: Polish pushback reduced this to a 3:1 Jewish advantage (Authers 2002, pp. 234-235).
• The “Jewish laborers were to be worked to death” and “Jewish laborers had it exceptionally bad” pretexts for paying Jewish laborers more than 3 times more than Polish laborers, are unvarnished lies. Fact is, Nazi Germany never had any plan of working Jewish laborers to death (Bartov 2015, Gruner 2006). Nor did Germans generally single out Jews for exceptionally harsh work (Buggeln 2014).
• The high-ranking American Jew Stuart Eizenstat (2002, p. 28), active in the U. S. government on behalf of Jewish restitution claims, candidly said, “I found a seething bitterness that their [Polish] citizens, also Hitler’s victims, had never received compensation from the Germans comparable to the billions paid to Jewish Holocaust victims.” As well they should.
• The Germans and Jews have fabricated an “only Jews were victims of authentic racial persecution” Judeo-racist excuse for refusing, until recently, to compensate non-Jews (Ferencz 1979, p. 51; Joskowicz 2023, p. 140). Nazi Germany, by any rational measure, had persecuted Poles on racial grounds (Sporer 2002, p. 6).
• The so-called “Foundation for German-Polish Reconciliation”, as admitted by German scholars Roth and Ruebner (2022, p. 271), imposes German narratives on Poland. Because of this Foundation, Germany squeaked out 4 billion Zloty (under 1 billion euro) in reparations to Poland (Goralski 2007, pp. 156-157), which is much less than that given to the Jews, and is a drop in the ocean compared with the 1.3 trillion euro that Germany owes Poland (Zyblikiewicz 2022, vol. 1, p. 408).
• Today’s Germans do not even have the basic decency of returning identified stolen works of Polish art (Polish Institute of International Affairs 2024, p. 50). Their rationalization is, “Keeping art that was stolen long enough ago is consistent with German law”. Ironically, this same “consistent with German law” exculpation was used by the Nazi German defendants at Nuremberg to argue for their innocence.
• Failure to recognize and compensate victims of genocide is not merely unjust. It is a “second wounding” of the affected peoples (Govier 2015). The victims’ trauma cannot be resolved until the victim senses social recognition for the wrong that had been done (Wustenberg 2017, pp. 237-238)–to say nothing about reparations that are due. This issue will not go away. No justice, no peace! An injustice to one is an injustice to all.
• The “World War II was so long ago” continued German excuse for not compensating Poland is all the more cynical in view of the fact that it was German stalling that prevented Poland from being paid long ago, and in view of the fact that Germany keeps compensating the Jews to this day. We never hear “World War II was so long ago” in reference to the Jews’ Holocaust!

Source: JewsandPolesDatabase.org (this website)

NOTE: All 18 Detailed Bulletins can be accessed by typing in “Big Bulletin” into the search box on the upper right of this page.

Authers. 2002. The Victim’s Fortune, pp. 234-235

Authers. 2008.  in DeGrieff. Handbook of Reparations, p. 421, 423

Berger. 2012. War, Guilt, and World Politics After World War II, p. 56, 64

Bartov. 2015. The Holocaust, p. 114

Buggeln. 2014. Slave labor in Nazi concentration camps, pp. 1-2, 63, 90-91

De Jong. 2022. Nazi Billionaires, p. 281

Eizenstat. 2002. Imperfect Justice, p. 28

Feldman. 1984. The Special Relationship Between West Germany and Israel, p. 93

Ferencz. 1979. Less Than Slaves, p. 51

Goralski. 2007. Poland-Germany 1945-2007, pp. 155-156

Goschler. 2017. Compensation in Practice, p. 28, 82, pp. 132-133

Govier. 2015. Victims and Victimhood, p. 11

Gruner. 2006. Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis, pp. 291-292

Jansen. 2008. “A Mutal Responsibility and a Moral Obligation”, p. 211

Joskowicz. 2023. Rain of Ash, p. 140

Marrus. 2009. Some Measure of Justice, p. 21

Marwecki. 2020. Germany and Israel, p. 21

Polish Institute of International Affairs. 2024. PRISM Report, p. 9, pp. 46-47

Roth and Ruebner. 2022. Repressed, Remitted, Rejected, p. 217, 261, 266

Sporer. 2002. The compensation of Nazi Germany’s forced laborers. POPULATION STUDIES 56(1)5-21

Wunberg. 2007. Restitution and Memory: Material Restoration in Europe, p. 86

Wustenberg. 2017. Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, pp. 237-238

Zyblikiewicz. 2022. The Report on the Losses Sustained by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation During the Second World War, vol. 1, p. 7, 40, 408

Jan Peczkis

Full article here: https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/09/17/big-bulletin-german-restitution-to-poland-a-farce/