Europe?s reparation ?war?

Poles are up in arms over German claims for compensation for their countrymen who were expelled from Silesia after 1945

WHEN six former Polish foreign ministers appealed recently for a "new opening" in relations with Germany, their statement was welcomed as timely by the national press. For the past two years, little noticed by the outside world, tensions have been brewing between the two neighbours, in a bizarre but chilling throwback to the darkest events of the twentieth century.

At issue have been new compensation demands for damages suffered in the Second World War - but this time by Germans, rather than by Poles. The results will be watched closely.

The Catholic Church has reason to be concerned in both countries. Since normal relations became possible after the end of Communist rule 15 years ago, Polish and German bishops have played a key role in rebuilding trust and confidence between their countries. Poles supported Germany's reunification in 1990, while the Germans reciprocated by backing Poland's admission to Nato and the European Union.

Yet, although both countries have been united in the EU since last May, there are fears that ties could be impaired by the latest dispute. "We're reminded of an important truth - that the reconciliation process is still going on and hasn't finished yet, as we might have supposed," explains Archbishop Henryk Muszynski of Gniezno, an expert on Polish-German relations. "Anyone who assumed our admission to the EU would automatically resolve all bilateral differences was under an illusion. There are still issues to be settled between us. What our shared EU membership does require is a mutual sense of responsibility in how we tackle them."

In the six years of occupation that followed Nazi Germany's invasion in September 1939, Poland lost a third of its national wealth and a fifth of its population, including 90 per cent of its once-vibrant Jewish minority.

Yet German civilians paid a heavy price for the crimes of the Nazi regime as well. When Poland's borders were shunted 150 miles westwards under the 1945 Potsdam Agreement between the United States, Britain and Soviet Union, as many as 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled with Allied consent.

Most reached Germany with whatever they could carry. But hundreds of thousands were rounded up by Soviet troops and paramilitary police and massacred en route, especially those suspected of collaborating with the Nazis or who had signed a Volkslist identifying with the Third Reich.

Under an intergovernmental agreement in the Seventies, remaining Germans were permitted to leave Communist-ruled Poland's Silesia region, provided they renounced their Polish citizenship and outstanding property claims. When the Communist regime collapsed in 1989, many German families nevertheless began demanding compensation. They were led by a specially formed Union of Expellees.

Polish legal experts argue that claims like this are inadmissible. Poland gained its western "Recovered Territories", they point out, under a three-power agreement it was not a signatory to, as war reparations after Germany had capitulated and accepted occupation. The territorial division was confirmed, furthermore, under Polish-German treaties in 1971 and 1991. Over the years, the German expellees have received some 80 billion euros (?55 billion) in resettlement aid from their own government. If anyone is to pay compensation, say the Poles, it should be Germany, as the Third Reich's legal inheritor. But German groups have threatened to flood Polish courts with restitution claims. They have also tried - unsuccessfully - to drum up support from Poland's surviving ethnic German minority, which is represented in the Warsaw parliament. "We don't want to throw anyone out of their home, only to settle unfinished business," Rudi Pawelka, head of the German Silesian Compatriots Association, told Poland's mass-circulation Gazeta Wyborcza daily in October. "How can you cite Communist decrees to justify infringements of the law?"

To raise the temperature further, plans have been announced for a special Berlin centre to commemorate the expelled Germans. Its initiator, Erika Steinbach, a Christian Democrat MP who heads the Expellees Union, insists the memorial will enable Germans to "mourn and remember those killed and dispossessed". But the project has been bitterly criticised by politicians and government leaders in eastern Europe, who say it will fuel misconceptions that Germans were primarily war victims. If a centre is built at all, they maintain, it should commemorate all victims of expulsion and deportation in Europe, and be sited in Geneva, Strasbourg or Sarajevo. If it recalls only German sufferings, Poles will be forced to build their own memorial.

Visiting Warsaw on 1 September for the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Nazi attack, the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schr?der, distanced his Government from Steinbach's campaign and was adamant that all mainstream German politicians favour friendly relations with Poland.

But plans for the centre were approved three years ago by Germany's Bundestag, and were supported in an October 2003 survey by well over a third of Germans. Since then, the head of the centre-Right Christian Social Union, Edmund Stoiber, has backed the compensation demands directly, promising at a Nuremberg rally last May that he would work to correct the "crime of expulsions". Views have been hammered out in German newspapers, drawing in notables from G?nter Grass to J?rgen Habermas.

Having borne the brunt of German militarism, Poles are naturally sensitive to signs of "revisionism" from their powerful neighbour. In the early Nineties, it was rumoured that Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Government had designs on Silesia, and might begin to argue for the region's repossession after encouraging wealthy German investors and former residents to buy up land and property there. Today, although Poland has renounced all claims of its own to territories it once ruled in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, there are still fears that the same may not be entirely true of Germany.

When a new German film, Der Untergang (The Downfall), was premiered in September, presenting a sympathetic view of Hitler's last days, it provoked anxious reactions in Poland. There were worries, too, when neo-Nazi parties performed well in local elections in Brandenburg and Saxony, rivalling Schr?der's ruling Social Democratic Party and the opposition Christian Democrat Union.

In the late Nineties, Germany itself agreed after protracted negotiations to award compensation to 40,000 still-living Polish survivors of Nazi imprisonment. Even then, it took several more years for the lump sum payments to come through, with former concentration camp victims, many with deep psychological scars, receiving a mere 7,500 euros.

Not surprisingly, many Poles are confused and offended by talk of paying compensation to Germans, whom they blame not only for their country's wartime annihilation, but also for the imposition of Communist rule.

Church leaders have criticised German demands, too, warning that the proposed Berlin centre could "falsify history". Although 7 million Germans died in the war, they point out, so did 50 million people of other nationalities, in a conflict unleashed by a dictator elected with German votes.

"Although the expulsions conformed with the rules established by the Western powers, there were indeed acts of revenge for which we should ask forgiveness," Bishop Ignacy Jez, a former Dachau inmate, told Kai, Poland's Catholic information agency, recently. "But those like myself who suffered during the war have no doubt who's guilty. Although I've devoted my whole life to building bridges between Poles and Germans, I fear a real regression in our mutual relations."

Warnings like this have special resonance. Poland's Catholic clergy was decimated under German occupation, with thousands of church personnel, like Bishop Jez, disappearing into camps and prisons. In 1945, with tacit Vatican consent, the Polish Church took over the running of German parishes in the "Recovered Territories". It took Pope Paul VI until 1967 to appoint Polish apostolic administrators, and until 1972 to establish formal Polish dioceses when the two countries ratified a border treaty.

By then, however, the Polish bishops had made a major gesture of reconciliation by writing to their German counterparts in 1965 at the close of the Second Vatican Council. The letter deplored Nazi crimes, but also acknowledged the post-war sufferings of German civilians. It ended with the words, "We extend our hands to you, pledge forgiveness and ask for it."

Some Poles believe the German Church failed to respond adequately to the initiative, which sparked angry recriminations from Poland's Communist regime. If so, Catholics in both countries appear to have made up for the omission.

In a rare joint statement in 1995, the Polish and German Bishops' Conferences recalled the "unparalleled harm inflicted on Poles by Germans", but also acknowledged the "hurt inflicted on many Germans by repatriations and the loss of family homes". The German Church has since offered compensation to Polish labourers who were forced to work in its parishes and monasteries. Its charity, Maximilian-Kolbe-Werk, has disbursed 45 million euros in aid to former concentration camp victims. In October 2003, Polish church leaders held an ecumenical ceremony at Lambinowice to dedicate the first cemetery for German civilians who died in 1945-47.

There have been some voices of dissent. The German bishop responsible for expellees, Mgr Gerhard Pieschl, a Limburg auxiliary, has backed the proposed Berlin centre, branding Polish criticisms "the typical reaction of people with a guilty conscience" in an interview with Germany's Catholic KNA newsagency a year ago. Such views are unrepresentative.

Preaching last July in Berlin's Franzosischer Dom cathedral, the head of Germany's Bishops' Conference, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, called on fellow Germans to do more to convince neighbouring countries of their wish for "complete reconciliation". Sixty years after the Holocaust, Lehmann added, Germans should be grateful they now had a chance to work with Poles in a "community of remembrance and reflection" for "a common future in a united Europe".

"The whole of Europe owes unceasing gratitude to the Polish nation's robust will to resist - and it is precisely we, the Germans, who cannot in any way relativise it," Cardinal Lehmann said. "Yet the path to reconciliation is not yet mastered. Recent controversies and conflicts show the past is not yet fully the past."

There were hopes that problems like this would have been solved for good by the time of the EU's historic May expansion, which brought in eight post-Communist countries, as well as Cyprus and Malta. Instead, EU officials fear revived historical tensions could damage the bloc's integrity.

Ethnic Germans were also expelled from Hungary, which has been at odds with its neighbours - Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine and Serbia - over plans to extend citizenship to their large Hungarian minorities. Meanwhile, several million Germans and Austrians were deported from Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland under decrees signed by the Czech President Eduard Benes in 1946-47 - at a cost, Sudeten groups claim, of 220,000 lives.

A joint Czech-German declaration in 1997 confirmed German responsibility for Czechoslovakia's wartime destruction, but included the first Czech admission that crimes had also been committed against German non-combatants. In a resolution two years ago, however, Czech parliamentarians rejected compensation demands. All "legal and property relations" stemming from the Benes decrees, they ruled, were "unquestionable, inviolable and unchangeable".

It is with Poland, however, that the feud has been most acerbic. In a resolution this September, Polish parliamentarians retaliated to German demands by declaring that their own country had not received "adequate financial compensation" for "German aggression and genocide'' and called on Prime Minister Marek Belka's Government to take "appropriate steps''.

Former German deportees, including the Bundestag chairman, Wolfgang Thierse, responded with an open letter to Polish newspapers, renouncing their own claims for compensation and repudiating Steinbach's demands. However, relatives of Polish concentration camp victims are now planning new lawsuits against Germany.

The Polish and German Governments have set up a joint legal team to block compensation demands, as well as a coordinating group to improve bilateral ties in time for a special "Polish-German Year" in 2005-6. But German expellees have pledged to continue their campaign, too, while Polish parliamentarians have threatened a no-confidence vote if Belka fails to follow up their recent resolution.

In his Berlin sermon last July, Cardinal Lehmann admitted that the Polish interpretation of events bore "emotional features''. But many Poles had worked to heal historical wounds, Lehmann added. He hoped the League of Exiles would show greater sensitivity. "Seeking justice for victims is essential, especially when we feel our own pain and must see ourselves as an element of that historic violence,'' the cardinal told Germans. "Much will depend on a culture of caution. Our efforts at reconciliation will be made credible by the way we treat the feelings and fears of our neighbours."

Archbishop Muszynski, the Polish church expert, agrees. He thinks the Church's help will be vital in overcoming remaining prejudices and ensuring new resentments don't take their place. But building trust will still take time. "Having lived for decades next to each other, upholding our own image of history, we now need to consider other people's as well," the archbishop thinks. "We can't compare our sufferings, since this will merely fuel ill-feeling. But we have to find the full truth together, and see how peace and reconciliation can translate into real life."

Jonathan Luxmoore writes for The Tablet from Poland.