The German government has repeatedly stated that it believed the issue of reparations to Poland had already been formally and politically resolved.
Leader of Poland’s ruling party Jaroslaw Kaczynski has stated that Poles completely changed the sense of World War II, where, as he recalled, they were the first to resist Hitler and that resistance was put up until 1945.
“This is a Polish-Germany issue, I mean it was Germany who invaded Poland, murdering millions of people, destroying material goods and we must be compensated for this,” Kaczynski said in an interview with public radio after several weeks in a hospital.
Members of the Polish ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party have regularly claimed that Warsaw has the right to demand reparations not only from Berlin but also from Moscow — on the grounds of the 1921 Treaty of Riga between Poland and Soviet Russia.
In 2017, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said that Poland had the right to demand compensation from Germany for crimes committed during World War II.
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, where they attacked German radio station Sender Gleiwitz marking the beginning of the war. It took Germany just over a month to occupy Poland, which was liberated by Soviet troops only in 1945.