Warsaw will seek compensation for damage the Nazis inflicted on the occupied capital during World War II if Germans forced from prewar homes in western Poland don't give up claims to their former property, the city's mayor said on Wednesday.
Some German groups and individuals have threatened to use Poland's entry into the EU on May 1 to regain property or seek compensation for land they were forced to give up in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in 1945.
"Our action is a reply to what is incredible German nerve," Lech Kaczynski said in an interview with TVN24 television. "That country caused the war, that country inflicted huge damage, that country carried out genocide on an unheard of scale and now it demands compensation."
Relations are generally good between Poland and Germany, which have painstakingly rebuilt ties since the collapse of communism in 1989 ended the division of Europe. Berlin strongly backed Warsaw's successful drive to join the EU.
But relations have grown tense over the property claims and over a recent focus in Germany on wartime suffering of ethnic Germans, which many Poles see as a symbol of fading remorse for Nazi Germany's crimes.
After the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, an estimated 12.5 million Germans lost their ancestral homes in present-day Poland, the Czech Republic and other parts of eastern Europe.
While the legal basis for German and Polish claims is unclear, Kaczynski insists that Poland's membership in the EU has made it eligible to claim war damages from Germany.
Kaczynski asked a group of experts last year to assess the wartime devastation of Warsaw. The work could take up to two years, Kaczynski said.
Studies done in the late 1940s put the damage at about US$30 billion, but the mayor said he expects the figure to be much higher.
"That sum will definitely be bigger," Kaczynski said, speaking a day ahead of a visit to Poland by German President Horst Koehler. "No one can say that it's possible to rebuild a city of 2 million for US$30 billion."
Much of Warsaw was flattened when the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto and brutally crushed uprisings in 1943 and 1944. The city is still dotted with war-damaged buildings that Poles could not afford to repair.
The attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump by a shooter at a rally in Pennsylvania has confirmed the worst fears of public figures warning that an escalation in incendiary political rhetoric on all sides could lead to bloodshed. US lawmakers and analysts have been voicing concern since the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot that increasingly bellicose campaign language was becoming a worrying contusion on the US body politic ahead of November’s presidential election. The danger was vividly illustrated in 2022, when then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist
US ELECTIONS: US President Joe Biden mistakenly introduced Ukrainian President Zelenskiy as Russian President Vladimir Putin at a NATO summit on Thursday US President Joe Biden vowed he would remain in this year presidential race, but two critical mistakes in the span of two hours deepened concerns about his mental acuity that threaten his campaign. Biden, 81, saw the culmination of this week’s NATO summit as a chance to reassure allies who for two weeks had fretted about his abilities following his first debate performance against former US president Donald Trump. Over a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and a nearly hour-long news conference, he spoke confidently on a range of complex issues from the tax code and trade policy to
HIGH TENSIONS: Local media reported that police had fired into the air to try to disperse an angry crowd at the garbage dump, while investigators called for calm and cooperation A total of eight bodies, all female, have been recovered so far from a garbage dump near Nairobi, Kenya’s acting police chief said yesterday, after authorities a day earlier confirmed they had found more bags filled with dismembered female body parts, the latest macabre discovery that has horrified and angered the country. Detectives have been scouring the site in the Mukuru area of Nairobi since the mutilated corpses of at least six women were found on Friday in sacks floating in a sea of garbage. On Saturday, the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said that five bags had been retrieved from
A World War I veteran is the first person identified from graves filled with more than 100 victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that devastated the city’s black community, the mayor said on Friday. Using DNA from descendants of his brothers, the remains of C.L. Daniel from Georgia were identified by Intermountain Forensics, said Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum and officials from the lab. The man was in his 20s when he was killed. “This is one family who gets to give a member of their family that they lost a proper burial, after not knowing where they were for over a century,”