WARSAW, Poland — Polish victims of World War II should be able to claim 440 billion euros ($543 billion) from Germany in World War II damages, the head of a parliamentary commission said Thursday.

Arkadiusz Mularczyk of the nationalist ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) based the figure, which the German government rejects, on a 1990 study which found that “there were 13.32 million direct victims of Nazi Germany in Poland.

That figure takes into account deportees, labor and concentration camp prisoners, civilians left maimed during that period, widows, orphans and those who suffered from illnesses which broke out under Nazi occupation and during the conflict.

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Mularczyk said the 1990 study found that reparations of $284 billion should be paid.

“That was the sum in 1990. If we revalue taking into account dollar purchasing power in 2017 we get 1.984 trillion zloty, or $543 billion,” the PAP news agency quoted Mularczyk as saying.

The issue of German reparations had long been regarded as closed — but PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski revived the topic last year.

Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz earlier this week alluded to differences of opinion with Berlin, including on the reparations issue.

Last year, then German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said the issue had already been settled in August 1953 when Poland’s then communist administration said it renounced any right to war reparations.

At that time Polish ministers put potential compensation at around $1,000 billion (850 billion euros).

Six million Poles — including around three million of Jewish origin — were killed during the six-year Nazi occupation and the capital Warsaw was virtually razed following an uprising in 1944. </s> This Feb. 18, 2011 file photo, shows the Memorial on the grounds of the former German Nazi Death Camp Treblinka, near the village of Treblinka, northeast Poland.| AP

WARSAW: A Polish official said Friday that Germany could owe his country $850 billion (690 billion euros) for the damage it inflicted during World War II.

Arkadiusz Mularczyk is leading a team in the parliament that is assessing potential reparations to Poland. Germany killed 6 million Polish citizens and caused great material losses during its nearly six-year occupation of Poland.

"We are talking about very large, but justified amounts of compensation for war crimes, for destroyed cities, villages and the lost demographic potential of our country," Mularczyk said on Polsat News, a private broadcaster.

Last year, Poland's ruling conservative nationalist Law and Justice party said the nation deserves compensation for its losses and set up a team of lawmakers under Mularczyk's leadership to estimate how much is due.

To date, Poland has not made an official demand. Germany has repeatedly said there is no legal basis for Poland's reparation claims because the matter was settled in a 1953 agreement.

Poland's current authorities have argued the 1953 decision is invalid because it was dictated by Moscow when Poland was a satellite of the Soviet Union.

Since then, Germany has paid some compensation to individual Poles who were forced laborers or victims of German pseudo-medical experiments during the Nazis' wartime occupation. </s> WARSAW - Poland will this year look into ways of getting compensation for its destruction during World War II, Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz said on Wednesday.



"We will talk about the need to compensate Poles for the losses suffered during World War II," he told parliament in a section of a speech focused on Polish-German relations.



"We will seek legal, political and financial ways of (obtaining) due compensation," he added, as he presented his foreign policy goals for 2018. </s> WARSAW, Poland — Fifty-nine U.S. senators have called on the Polish prime minister to support legislation that would allow Holocaust victims and their heirs to receive compensation for property that was seized by the Germans during World War II and later nationalized by the Communists.

In a letter signed by more than half of the Senate and released Monday, the lawmakers expressed concern about a restitution bill under discussion in Poland that, in its current form, would require that claimants be Polish citizens and limit compensation to spouses, children or grandchildren.

The U.S senators said they are “deeply concerned” because the bill would discriminate against Jewish heirs, many of them Americans.

The effort was led by Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, and Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida. </s> Fifty-nine U.S. senators have called on the Polish prime minister to support legislation that would allow Holocaust victims and their heirs to receive compensation for property that was seized by the Germans during World War II and later nationalized by the Communists.

In a letter signed by more than half of the Senate and released Monday, the lawmakers expressed concern about a restitution bill under discussion in Poland that, in its current form, would require that claimants be Polish citizens and limit compensation to spouses, children or grandchildren.

“This draft legislation would adversely affect Holocaust victims and their heirs and is therefore of urgent importance to many of our constituents, millions of Americans, and Holocaust survivors around the world,” the senators wrote in the letter to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

The letter was authored by Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, and Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida.

The restitution of prewar property has proven to be a difficult challenge for Poland, which suffered massive destruction during the war and the changes of its borders in the postwar settlement, followed by the nationalization of property by the Communist regime. Those dispossessed included a swath of prewar Polish citizenry, among them many of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust or who fled Poland after the war.

Since the fall of communism, multiple efforts to pass a law that would offer restitution or partial compensation to prewar owners have all failed, with lawmakers balking at the high cost.

Without a systematic law there have been individual efforts, some of them successful, to regain properties. But the process has been marred by irregularities and fraud, with rightful heirs sometimes cheated out of their rights and tenants evicted by new owners.

With ownership of some properties unclear, especially in Warsaw, some buildings are falling into dilapidation while some plots cannot be developed.

The Polish draft legislation is an attempt to finally settle the matter.

The World Jewish Restitution Organization said it welcomed the call by the senators. Its chair of operations, Gideon Taylor, said: “With fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors alive today, we call on Poland urgently to address this historic wrong.”

The law comes as Poland has also seen its ties with the United States and Israel strained over a recently enacted Polish law that would limit some types of Holocaust speech. </s> BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany and Poland said on Wednesday they would consider setting up a commission to explore Polish calls for reparations for German actions during World War Two.

Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has revived the issue of war compensation although the government has stopped short of making an official demand.

 New Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz and his German counterpart, Sigmar Gabriel, said at their first meeting they did not want the issue to harm bilateral relations.

 Both ministers stressed the importance of the relationship between the neighbors and EU partners but acknowledged that the question of reparations was not going away.

 "We have a clear legal position that all questions about reparations have been cleared up," Gabriel said, adding that Poland's democratically elected government accepted that in the early 1990s after the fall of Communism.

 "But there is no point in talking about the legal situation if there is a debate within society in a neighboring country," he said. 

 "One way ahead could be to ask experts to look at this," he said, making clear there was no concrete plan so far and the makeup of such a panel would have to be decided but it may constitute historians and lawyers.

 Six million Poles, including three million Polish Jews were killed during the war and the capital Warsaw was razed to the ground in 1944 after a failed uprising in which 200,000 civilians died. 

 After the war, the victorious Allies awarded Poland a large swathe of German land as compensation for Polish territory annexed by the Soviet Union in the east. 

 "We want to have this debate," said Czaputowicz, who said he accepted Gabriel's suggestion. 

 Relations between Poland and Germany have improved in recent years but have taken a knock since the nationalist-leaning PiS won a parliamentary election in 2015. 

 The PiS, which says Berlin wields too much influence within the European Union, frequently talks about Poland's suffering under the German occupation in an effort it says aims to promote patriotism.

 

 (Reporting by Madeline Chambers) </s> Fifty-nine US senators have co-signed a bipartisan letter urging Poland to amend draft legislation on a restitution bill that they say discriminates against survivors living in America.

The letter sent Monday to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki concerns a measure from October that would require claimants to be citizens living in Poland and excludes all heirs except “first-line heirs,” meaning spouses, children or grandchildren.

Sens. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., co-authored the letter.

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“We are deeply concerned that the bill, in its current form, would discriminate against virtually all American survivors and heirs on the basis that they are not currently citizens of Poland and that they were not residents of Poland when their property was nationalized,” the letter says.

The letter comes amid a crisis in Israel’s relations with Poland over the enactment last month of a law that criminalizes blaming Poland for Nazi crimes. Jewish groups, which said the law prevents debate and research into the actions of thousands of Poles who collaborated with the Nazis, also harshly criticized Poland.

According to the Polish media, the country’s most senior leaders are not welcome at the White House because of the legislation.

The World Jewish Restitution Organization welcomed what its chair of operations, Gideon Taylor, called the senators’ “call for justice for Holocaust survivors and their families.” With fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors alive today, “we call on Poland urgently to address this historic wrong,” Taylor said in a statement and thanked the lawmakers.

Noting the part about the first-line heirs, the letters says the provision “would disproportionately impact Jewish victims and their families.”

Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Anna Azari, also complained about discrimination in the bill in a rare move by her Foreign Ministry. Israel usually refrains from speaking out publicly about restitution issues.

In their letter, the senators also tied the legislation to the future of US-Poland relations.

“We urge you to work with the Polish Parliament to pass fair and just restitution legislation that would both fully realize the goals of the Terezin Declaration and further strengthen the bond between our countries,” they wrote.

Restitution experts estimate that following the Holocaust, Jewish individuals and institutions in Poland lost property with a combined value exceeding $1 billion. Poland does not have laws for restitution for privately owned property. It passed a law on communal property in 1997 and has returned some of it, but thousands of claims in that category have gone unaddressed.

About 90 percent of over 3 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust. </s> Response to the letter of 59 U.S. Senators to Mateusz Morawiecki, The Prime Minister of Poland

To: T he Honorable Members of the U.S. Senate

The Honorable Members of the U.S. Senate,

As Polish American voters we write to you to express our concern over your open letter to the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki dated March 26, 2018.

First, we would like to thank you for your congratulations to the Polish people on the 100th anniversary of Poland regaining its independence. In 1918, following World War I, with the support of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, Poland was restored to the map of Europe. We are grateful for the expression of your continued commitment to the development of mutually beneficial Polish-American relationships.

As your constituents, we are, however, saddened and alarmed by the fact that your letter to the Polish Prime Minister advocates only on behalf of the Jewish Holocaust victims but ignores the millions of Polish victims of World War II. Let us remind you, that millions of properties in partitioned, German and Soviet occupied Poland were first expropriated, then despoiled, dismantled or destroyed by Germany and the Soviet Union, and then finally nationalized by the postwar Communist government of Poland. We feel that your letter not only oversimplifies a very complex issue of the so-called property restitution, but it also surprisingly and unknowingly seems to blend nationalized properties with an extralegal issue of the so-called “restitution of heirless property”, a concept which carries a clear contradiction in terms, as heirless property refers to properties of the Polish citizens that legally and orderly escheated to the Polish state. The organizations making such extralegal claims on heirless property have absolutely no legal standing.

While nationalized properties claims are a subject of a big restitution bill proposed by the Polish Ministry of Justice, the “restitution of heirless properties” should not be a subject of your concern at all, as there is no legal or moral basis for that concept. It would be unconscionable to claim expropriation from the rightful present owners of their property, which they legally and properly acquired after the war. We would like to emphasize that Jewish property claims have been handled and settled by numerous post-war compensation schemes, most notably by the Luxemburg Agreement between Israel and Germany. On the basis of this Agreement the State of Israel, Jewish claims organizations and individuals obtained a compensation from Germany amounting to100 billion 2018 US dollars. The compensation served as settlement for all the human and material losses suffered by European Jews as the result of genocidal German policies and destruction of Jewish property. We must underline that based on the international law; the Republic of Poland is not a party to any agreements or treaties that would require Poland to make changes to its inheritance law which would mandate Poland to favor any special groups of people.

The American diplomat and lead negotiator at the Claims Conference Stuart E. Eizenstat once stated regarding post-Communist Eastern Europeans: “I found a seething bitterness that their citizens, also Hitler’s victims, had never received compensation from the Germans comparable to the billions paid to Jewish Holocaust victims.”[1]We feel the same bitterness while reading your letter.

As Polish Americans, we strongly object to your letter for the following additional reasons:
• INEQUITABLE TREATMENT. The letter of 59 Senators to Polish Prime Minister (“Letter”) states that “members of the U.S. Senate on both sides of the aisle stand united in seeking justice for victims of the Holocaust and their descendants,” while in fact the Letter is concerned only with justice for Jewish victims of the Holocaust and their descendants at the expense of Polish (and numerous other) victims of the Holocaust and their descendants. By doing so, the Letter confirms and supports the recent attempts to limit the definition of the Holocaust only to Jewish victims; hence it disregards millions of Polish victims of German genocide and disrespects millions of Americans of Polish descent. Millions of Polish WWII victims and Polish Holocaust survivors and their descendants never received any compensation from the occupiers for or the return of their properties, in particular those located in the Eastern part of Poland, which was annexed by the Soviet Union.
• INACURACY. The Letter grossly underestimates the number of victims of Polish ethnicity during the Holocaust by stating: “murder of almost 2 million non-Jews and 3 million of Jewish Poles.” Such a statement contradicts the data presented by the California Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide that provides the losses of ethnic Poles in WWII at 3 million people.[2] It also ignores the findings of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) that estimates the losses for ethnic Poles at a minimum of 2.7 million people without counting the millions of Polish victims of the genocide conducted by the Soviet Union.[3]Therefore; the Letter uses inaccurate data and mimics a widespread anti-Polish bias in Holocaust scholarship and education.
• INJUSTICE. Although the Letter calls on the Polish government to pass national legislation that facilitates restitution in “a fair, comprehensive and nondiscriminatory manner,” it instead results in advocating for a privileged treatment of the Jewish victims over the Polish victims of German persecution.The Letter supports full-value property compensation against all prevailing practices. For instance, according to State Department records, the 1960 compensation agreement between the United States and Poland, administration of which was handled by the United States, resulted according to the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues in payments equal to 30 percent of actual value of the property. The above agreement compensated the U.S. citizens who had been legal owners of properties located in Poland at the time of nationalization.[4]
• The Letter calls on Poland to compensate Jewish victims for industrial assets destroyed by Germany. It would be a gross travesty of justice and falsification of history if the US Senate attempted to oblige and coerce Poland to provide restitution for property that was taken and destroyed by the willful and criminal actions of German and Soviet occupiers of Poland.
• The Letter calls for another round of payments on American citizens’ claims in direct violation of the Indemnification Clause of the 1960 Bilateral Agreement between Poland and the USA.[5]
• DISCRIMINATION UNDER TEREZIN DECLARATION.[6]The Letter bases its demands on the text of the Terezin Declaration, a legally non-binding document that openly discriminates against non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, in particular it discriminates against the ethnic Polish Holocaust Survivors.
• EXCLUSION. The Terezin Declaration deals with the wellbeing of Jewish victims defined as “Holocaust (Shoah)” and non-Jewish victims defined as “other victims of Nazi persecution.” However, when it comes to the most important compensation claims to immovable (real) property,it limits such claims to Jewish victims only. The section entitled “Immovable (Real) Property “excludes “non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.” This key section of the entire declaration refers only to the Jewish victims defined as “Holocaust (Shoah)” victims, and unreasonably and in a biased way excludes millions of Polish victims defined as “other victims of Nazi persecution.” Polish victims’ rights to property compensation are disregarded. As evidenced, the Terezin Declaration visibly sanctions the unwarranted and biased discrimination against the Polish Holocaust Survivors as well as other victims of Nazi persecution, and their heirs, with respect to real property compensation claims.
• “OTHER”. The Terezin Declaration diminishes the Polish suffering and discriminates against the Polish victims of the Holocaust by treating millions of Poles murdered by Germans merely as “other victims.” A US citizen Bozenna Urbanowicz-Gilbride addresses this insult as follows: “Today we are merely the ‘other victims.’ We have no face, no name, we are nobody. That is how the Polish Catholic Holocaust Survivors are treated. Is that the way we, human beings, should treat each other?”[7]
• NAZIS. The Terezin Declaration diminishes and attempts to eliminate the guilt of Germany for the crimes committed in Poland by, inter alia, replacing the word “Germany” with “Nazi perpetrators.” Your Letter includes the historically and linguistically incorrect term “Nazi”. “Nazi” is a stateless concept. By using such terminology, it shifts the blame for the Holocaust from Germany to some undefined “Nazi perpetrators.” Polish Americans consider such manipulation of language as a willful and immoral attempt to hide the exclusive responsibility of Germany for its genocidal policies conducted on the territory of occupied Poland. Use of the term “Nazi perpetrators” is a clear attempt to shift the blame for the German genocidal policies to the victims, the Polish Holocaust Survivors, who are arbitrarily excluded in your Letter from the proposed immovable property compensation scheme. We believe that such manipulations of language constitute a clear form of Holocaust Denial (see Article 5 of the definition of Holocaust Denial adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance[8]in that the language used does not uphold historical justice. The nationality of the real perpetrators of the Holocaust, Germans, should not be hidden behind the curtain of twisted, politically motivated revisions to language. It is exactly this flawed language that leads to the use of historically false and offensive terms like “Polish death camps” by the global media. It is this linguistic relativity and the demands of historic justice which led the Polish parliament to pass the so-called “Holocaust bill” in January 2018, which met with so many unjustified reactions among the American politicians, including the U.S. Congress and the media.
• POLISH SUFFERING. An example of the widespread and long-lasting suppression of the reporting of the suffering of ethnic Poles in World War II in the United States has been documented in the letter to the U.S. Congress by the Polish Catholic Holocaust Survivor Bozenna Urbanowicz-Gilbride dated March12, 20187. For speaking up about the Polish suffering under German occupation, she has been systematically attacked as anti-Semite, bullied, abused and even physically confronted.
• BIAS IN HOLOCAUST EDUCATION. We call on the U.S. Congress to stop supporting and condoning the anti-Polish bias in Holocaust scholarship and education, and we call on the U.S. Congress to mandate the establishment of the Polish Department of the Holocaust Memorial Museum that shall be managed and operated by Polish Americans capable of telling the story of the Holocaust from the perspective of the millions of Polish victims. The current suppression of the voice of Polish victims and the near-monopoly of the Jewish perspective in the Holocaust study curriculum has had the harmful effect of distorting the history of the World War II and of the Holocaust, and results in anti-Polonism.
• VIOLATION OF THE CONTINOUS NATIONALITY RULE. The statement in your Letter: “We are deeply concerned that the bill, in its current form, would discriminate against virtually all American survivors and heirs on the basis that they are not currently citizens of Poland and that they were not residents of Poland when their property was nationalized.” collides with and contradicts the legal continuous nationality principle. This principle implies that a State may only exercise protection on behalf of a person, natural or legal, who was a national at both the time of the injury in respect of which the claim is brought and at the time of the presentation of the claim.[9] The Terezin Declaration, a legally non-binding document characterized by a very high level of abstraction and generality, should not repress the public international law.
• VIOLATION OF THE POLISH CIVIL CODE. Your Letter states: “As a result of the Nazi attempt to exterminate world Jewry, most European Jewish families were completely destroyed, including 90% of Poland’s Jewish community. Therefore, the remaining Jewish heirs are often non-linear — such as nieces, nephews, and cousins.” This statement contradicts the Polish Civil Code, especially Articles 932 – 936, which disallows a non-linear inheritance.[10] In addition, Poland should not be held responsible for the genocidal policies of the German Third Reich, which resulted in extermination of the majority of European Jews. The proper address for such claims continues to be Berlin.We cannot repeat it enough: It was Poland and only Poland, which asked Allies in 1942 to stop the extermination of Jews by Germany. To no avail, the Allies DID NOTHING to halt the German slaughter![11]
• APPLICATION PROCESS. The Letter criticizes “the one-year window for filing claims” as too short. It must be stressed that legal and administrative venues presently exist in Poland and other European Union countries to adjudicate claims in a court of law by those individuals and organizations that have legal standing for each particular claim. The potential foreign claimants will have enough time to prepare all the documents and to submit them to the Polish courts. Your criticism is unjustified. The proposed restitution bill will not impede but will facilitate the claims handling process.

Last, but not least, we must stress that Act S. 447 (Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act of 2017) was passed by the Senate on December 12, 2017 by acclamation. The Senate proceeded with the Bill without affording their Polish American constituents to be heard on the issue. Act S. 447 includes fundamentally anti-Polish extralegal elements, lacking any real legal and moral basis. If enacted and implemented, the Act would threaten Poland’s economic and political viability, if not its very ability to exist. We are deeply concerned about the possible impact and long term ramifications, which the Act S. 447 would have on Poland, and that the Polish-American voice in the process was strangely and in an unacceptable way excluded.

Let us conclude with a fragment from the speech of Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in history of the House of Representatives, dated March 6, 2018:

Now is a time for unity, not division. Now is a time for restraint, not antagonism. Now is the time for reasoned dialogue, not media taunts. And let me commend the Polish-Israeli Reconciliation Commission for its reasoned progress and recent statement. Now is the time for diplomatic excellence and military readiness, not provocative gestures, legislative or otherwise. Now is the time for robust archival restoration so the full truth of millions who perished can be known and recorded forever. Now is the time to strengthen freedom’s umbrella, not weaken it. May I extend all congratulations and blessings to Poland on its 100th anniversary of reborn nationhood.[12] </s> An Argentinian newspaper has become the first outlet to be targeted by Poland's controversial new Holocaust law, after a nationalist group filed a case on Friday hours after the legislation went live.

The law, which went into effect Thursday, sets fines or up to three years in jail for anyone ascribing "responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Third Reich".

The main aim is to prevent people from erroneously describing Nazi German death camps in Poland, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, as Polish.

The legislation has drawn widespread international criticism and ignited an unprecedented diplomatic row with Israel.

Critics, including Israel's government, have expressed concerns that the legislation could open the door to prosecuting Holocaust survivors for their testimony should it concern the involvement of individual Poles in killing or giving up Jews to the Germans.

On Friday the Polish League Against Defamation (RDI), a non-profit which is close to Poland's conservative government, lodged a case under the new law against the website of Pagina 12, a newspaper in Argentina.

The RDI said the paper had used a picture of anti-Communist Polish resistance fighters from after World War Two in an article about the Jedwabne pogrom, a 1941 massacre of more than 300 Jews by their Polish neighbours during the Nazi occupation.

RDI accused the newspaper and its journalist Federico Pavlovsky of "an action intended to harm the Polish nation and the good reputation of Polish soldiers".

Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II, losing six million of its citizens, including three million Jews.
Poland's ruling Law and Justice's Arkadiusz Mularczyk says Germany owes Polish victims of World War II a total of 1.984 trillion zloty (US$543 billion, 440 billion euros) in compensation.