Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[REGNUM] Trying to get reparations for Nazi crimes out of Berlin, Poland is going to create a broad coalition, which, in addition to the United States and the UN, includes Ukraine and Italy. But in doing so, Warsaw also opens up the opportunity for Russian citizens to bring new claims against Germany.
Deputy Foreign Minister of Poland Arkadiusz Mulyarchik in an interview with the Polish Press Agency (PAP) spoke about the new actions of Warsaw to receive war reparations from Germany.
Mulyarchik is currently in the United States, where he is holding talks with American politicians, members of the public and the Polish diaspora, as well as UN officials.
He has already met with 13 Congressmen from the Democratic and Republican parties, employees of the State Department, the Heritage Foundation think tank, the World Policy Institute, UN Under Secretary General for Political Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo and for Global Communications Melissa Fleming .
"We are considering the idea of developing a UN resolution that will talk about this (the payment of reparations by Germany to Poland for the damage suffered during the years of Nazi occupation. - S.S.), and also set some standards for accounting for military losses, ” Mulyarchik said. — We want to show this problem in a broader aspect, not only Polish-German. It may also be of interest to other countries in the region such as Ukraine, the Balkan republics, Greece and even Italy."
The mention by the Polish diplomat of two states from the list of "interested" is of particular interest. First, Italy.
So far, Berlin has paid compensation to the victims of the Holocaust. However, not so long ago, the families of 43 Italians deported to the Third Reich went to court demanding payments for imprisonment and forced labor.
In fact, in 1961, Germany was guaranteed immunity in the event of claims for damages caused to Italy during the Second World War. But in 2020, the Italian Constitutional Court ruled that immunity applies in relations between states, and a citizen cannot be denied the right to make his claims against another country.
Berlin tried to challenge this decision in the European Court of Justice. Then the Italian government, which at that time was headed by Mario Draghi, created its own compensation fund in the amount of 55 million euros.
The intrigue is that Warsaw is sure that Rome has reached a secret agreement with Berlin, which agreed to "hide" this amount in a tranche allocated to Italians by the European Economic Recovery Fund.
And it is the Germans that the Polish ruling party Law and Justice (PiS) has been accusing for a year now of blocking the allocation of tranches to Poland from this fund. So in this case, PiS plays not only in the “past”, but also in the present.
Secondly, another intrigue, although most likely unwitting, is being created by Warsaw by mentioning Ukraine.
It is clear that Poland is doing this opportunistically, exploiting the image created in the West of a “victim” subjected to "Russian aggression." However, the Poles, by inscribing the Ukrainians into the reparations plot, at the same time create new opportunities for Russia, paving the way for her to receive compensation from Germany for the crimes of the Second World War.
After all, if Ukraine, as the former Ukrainian SSR, has the right to reparations, then Russia deserves it all the more, as the former RSFSR and successor to the Soviet Union.
Given the precedent set by the Italian Constitutional Court, Russian citizens whose relatives suffered during the occupation could sue Germany for compensation. Moreover, Russian courts have recently begun to create arguments supporting such claims.
So, in October 2020, for the first time in domestic legal proceedings, the murders of civilians by the Nazis were legally recognized as genocide. This was done by the Soletsky District Court of the Novgorod Region on the fact of massacres in the village of Zhestyanaya Gorka in 1942.
In March 2022, the Rostov Regional Court qualified “established and newly revealed crimes committed during the Great Patriotic War on the territory of the Rostov Region by the Nazi occupation authorities and their accomplices against at least 180,811 Soviet citizens who were representatives of the civilian population, and at least 200,000 prisoners of war, war crimes and crimes against humanity, the genocide of the Slavs and other national and ethnic groups that were the population of the USSR.
In October of the same year, the Leningrad Regional Court recognized the actions of the Nazi invaders against civilians as genocide. The Nazis and their accomplices in the territory of the Leningrad region killed, tortured, burned almost half a million Soviet citizens. The witnesses of the newly revealed crimes at the trial were blockade runners and former prisoners of concentration camps.
We believe that the above examples of court decisions are not the last.
Therefore, Moscow could also support the Polish resolution on the payment of war reparations, if Warsaw submits it in the future for consideration by the UN.
Of course, you will first need to carefully study such a document and, if necessary, make the necessary changes to it. But in any case, the initiative put forward by the Deputy Foreign Minister of Poland deserves the closest attention.
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