EditPoland’s President renews call for German WWII reparations to bolster armed forces
At Westerplatte anniversary ceremonies, Karol Nawrocki linked historical justice to modern security needs to tackle Russia
Polish President Karol Nawrocki used the 87th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II on Monday to renew Poland’s long-standing demand for German reparations, arguing that compensation should fund the country’s military and reduce reliance on Western loans.
Speaking at the traditional dawn ceremony at Westerplatte in Gdańsk, the site where German forces launched their assault on Poland at 4:45 a.m. on 1 September 1939, Nawrocki framed the issue as both a matter of historical justice and a practical contribution to Europe’s present-day security.
“To make friendship and alliance a reality, I appeal from here, from Westerplatte, to the German Chancellor, to the German nation: let us settle the issue of reparations and compensation,” Nawrocki said. He directed the call specifically toward Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the German people, insisting that any payments should strengthen the Polish armed forces and defense industry. “The world has put us in a situation where a true, firm declaration of alliance toward Poland requires that our allies in Berlin and our neighbors pay us reparations, which Poland will allocate to the Polish armed forces and the Polish arms industry, so that we do not have to take Western loans, so that we receive what we are owed,” he told the gathering that included Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
The ceremonies followed the familiar ritual that has marked the anniversary for decades. Air-raid sirens sounded at the hour of the original attack. The national anthem was sung, the white-and-red flag was raised, a Peace Candle was lit, and a Remembrance Roll was read before twelve gun salutes echoed across the peninsula. Scouts recited the “Message of Westerplatte.” Nawrocki described the site as the place where “the archetype of Polish attitudes was forged throughout World War II,” a symbol of soldiers who fought for the freedom of other nations yet “always died only for Poland.”
Historical claims and contemporary security
The demand for reparations is not new. Four years ago a parliamentary team led by then-Law and Justice MP Arkadiusz Mularczyk calculated Polish war losses at 6.22 trillion zloty, roughly €1.3 trillion at the time. Successive German governments have rejected the claim, pointing to Poland’s 1953 renunciation of further reparations under the communist regime. Warsaw has long disputed the validity of that renunciation, arguing it was made under Soviet pressure and does not bind a democratic Poland. The previous nationalist government pressed the demand aggressively; the current Tusk administration has not formally abandoned the pursuit of some form of redress, though it has adopted a more measured tone. In 2024 Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski urged Germany to “think in a creative way” about compensation or other forms of acknowledgment.
Nawrocki, a historian by training and a figure associated with the nationalist right, tied the historical grievance directly to today’s strategic environment. With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine entering its fifth year, he argued that genuine alliance requires more than membership in NATO and the European Union. Poland, he suggested, should not have to borrow from Western partners to build the military strength needed to serve as NATO’s eastern fortress. He also criticized the absence of a monument in Berlin dedicated to Polish victims of the war, saying true friendship cannot exist without such recognition. Nawrocki went further, claiming that German hostility toward Poland predated Hitler and could be traced to 19th-century writers and the Weimar period.
Prime Minister Tusk, speaking at the same site, struck a different emphasis. He recalled that Westerplatte commemorations have always carried the message “never again war, never again fascism,” and he placed responsibility for the catastrophe of 1939 on both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. “There is no longer any ambiguity here,” he said. Even a vastly larger garrison at Westerplatte would have been doomed, he noted, because the free world allowed Hitler’s aggression to go unpunished. Turning to the present, Tusk warned that “evil lurks behind our borders again” and that people are dying under bombs in Ukraine. The coming months, he said, could prove decisive not only for Ukraine’s independence but for the security of Poland and the entire free world. NATO, he insisted, “cannot be an alliance on paper.”
Westerplatte and the memory of 1939
The peninsula remains one of the most potent symbols of Polish resistance. A small detachment of soldiers held out for seven days against overwhelming German force before surrendering. Across the country the first hours of the war brought aerial bombardment of civilian targets; the town of Wieluń, attacked minutes before Westerplatte, lost more than a thousand of its 16,000 inhabitants. The Soviet invasion from the east on 17 September completed the partition of Poland under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. By the time the war ended, more than six million Polish citizens, approximately one-fifth of the pre-war population, had perished, including three million Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
German officials have given no indication they are prepared to reopen the legal question. Yet the anniversary ceremonies once again placed the unresolved claims at the center of Poland’s public remembrance of the war that began on its soil 87 years ago.
Sources: FocusEurope.pl, RTÉ, Reuters
Caption: Polish President Karol Nawrocki delivers a speech during a commemoration ceremony marking the 87th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II at the Monument to the Defenders of the Coast on Westerplatte, Gdansk, Poland, 01 September 2026. World War II began on 01 September 1939 at 4:45 a.m., when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte. EPA/ADAM WARZAWA
Updated: September 2, 2026 - 05:37
