The governing Law and Justice party’s president Jarosław Kaczyński announced on the 83rd anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, during the presentation of a report on Polish war losses about a decision to apply for war reparations and compensation for what the Germans did to Poland between 1939 and 1945.

According to the Law and Justice leader, “the Germans have never settled their crimes against Poland. German pedagogy and historical policy bypass German crimes committed against Poland and the Polish nation. These crimes have never become part of the German consciousness”, he regretted.

MP Arkadiusz Mularczyk, head of the Parliamentary Group for Estimating the Amount of Compensation Due to Poland from Germany for Damage Caused during World War II, presenting the report, said that Poland suffered the greatest personal and material losses of all occupied European countries during World War II. “The amount of our country’s losses is 6 trillion 220 billion 609 million PLN”, Mularczyk said.

The sum of material losses was estimated at 797 billion. MP Mularczyk said that the death toll was estimated at around 4 trillion 330 billion PLN. “This is a purely economic valuation of human lives, solely through the prism of GDP loss and it does not take into account suffering and broken families or psychological trauma”, Mularczyk explained.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who attended the presentation of the report, said that Poland had lost its development opportunities. “We lost elites, engineers, scientists who were not able to develop their thoughts into action because they were murdered. But also, we lost the whole economy, the whole of Poland, which could not develop normally. No one can compensate the families for these losses, no one can restore life. We are obliged today to count these losses as precisely as possible and to present a proper bill to those who are to blame”, Mateusz Morawiecki said.

Adrian Andrzejewski