IZ PP nr 22 - Reparations and damages in Polish-German relations (Historical overview)

In summer 2017, Poland saw a vigorous revival of the debate on German war reparations. Although the discussion on this subject had already been held in the autumn of 2004, now the intensity of the dispute which erupted after Jarosław Kaczyński’s speech on 1 July 2017 is far greater than it was thirteen years earlier.

The aim of this study is to provide a brief but fairly comprehensive account of the reparations issue and war damages viewed as a problem in the history of relations between Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany5. The present overview ends with issues related to the unification of Germany.