Wojciech Kosc | Wielun, Poland | Sept 1

Transitions - The anniversary of a fateful day for two nations brings painful memories, renewed claims and counter-claims, and reconciliation.

At 4:40 this morning, the people of Wielun woke to the deafening roar of aircraft diving toward the rooftops. Some in this town of 26,000 probably swore at that sudden interruption of their sleep. But others vividly recalled how they cowered in their homes at that exact hour, 65 years ago.

Poles are usually taught that Nazi Germany's blitzkrieg assault on Poland on 1 September 1939 began hundreds of kilometers north of here, in Gdansk, when a battleship opened fire on the Polish military post at Westerplatte at 4:45 a.m. But the people of Wielun have always known that their town in central Poland had shaken under German bombs five minutes previously, and so the town's authorities decided to stage today's rather unusual commemorative event.

Today, Wielun has claimed a historical justice of sorts. But while locals may take a sort of perverse pride in their town making current-day headlines, the anniversary has reawakened the vexed question of responsibility for the sufferings of civilian victims of the war, Poles and Germans alike.

GAMES AND GAMESMANSHIP

On the east side of the River Oder that marks the frontier of the two neighbors and allies, many Poles doubt Germany will ever compensate them for the war that left 6 million Polish citizens dead and a large part of the country in complete ruins. The doubts often rise to anger and extremism at the regular demands by groups representing millions of Germans expelled from Poland after the war, who call for compensation for the property they were forced to abandon.

As the highly charged twin anniversaries of the outbreak of the war and of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising loomed this summer, even the release of a new computer game sent many Poles ballistic. The imminent appearance on the Polish market of "Codename: Panzers,"a game where players command German troops invading Poland in 1939, led to outraged media reports that the game's German publisher was rewriting history, blaming the outbreak of the war on Poland, and showing "our soldiers as drunks and cowards."

The furor over the game reached a point that the Polish and German diplomatic corps and the Polish research and educational Institute of National Remembrance issued statements on the game's content. The rhetorical flames began to die down when it emerged that the popular game's developers were not German but Hungarian. Though the game in fact did not blame Poles for starting hostilities, the controversy certainly did not deter sales when the product hit the stores on 27 August--it is already respectively the second- and third-best selling PC game in two of Poland's largest retailers, according to the game's Polish distributor. The outrage it set off, though, is symptomatic.

Since the rise of the Bund der Vertriebenen (Federation for Expellees), the group making the loudest demands for compensation payments to German expellees, Poland has become even more sensitive to the matter of compensation. Discontent grew even further at the announcement last month by a group called Preussiche Treuhand, or Prussian Trust, that it is preparing to file lawsuits at the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of Germans who lost property in what is now Polish territory.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's homage last month to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, when he spoke of "Polish glory and German shame," and his explicit rejection of claims by German citizens against Poland, were not enough to drown out the din over compensation.

Schroeder might have put an end to the dispute, argued Wlodzimierz Kalicki, a journalist with Poland's leading news daily, Gazeta Wyborcza. All the German chancellor need do, he wrote on 26 August, is accept the German state's financial responsibility for the expellees' claims.

"It wouldn't be condescension, but merely paying just one of the many bills from 60 years ago," Kalicki wrote.

SETTLING FOR 10 PERCENT

Some Polish politicians, however, want compensation to be paid in full. In the week leading up to today's anniversary, the Polish Sejm, or parliament, debated claims and counter-claims almost as though the war had just ended. Several right-wing parliamentarians proposed a resolution demanding that Germany pay the full amount of war reparations, estimated by Poland's Bureau of War Compensations in 1947 at an astronomical $634 billion. "Even 10 percent of that estimate is an enormous amount of money," remarked a supporter of the motion, Janusz Dobrosz, of the League of Polish Families. The fact that a Polish government withdrew from compensation talks with West Germany in 1953 was not relevant, he said, because the then-Stalinist Polish regime was illegitimate.

Politicians on all sides agreed on one issue: that it is unthinkable that Poland should pay reparations for the lost property of German nationals, citizens of the very state responsible for the deaths of six million Poles.

Dobrosz argued that the remaining German minority in Poland already possessed "special rights ... financed from the poor Polish budget," a reference to that ethnic minority's exemption from the 5 percent vote limit other political groups are required to meet in order to gain seats in the Sejm.

"In Poland, there's a strong front that defends German interests, a huge group of people who live on German money and who pretend to be independent scholars and publicists," said the leader of the Law and Justice Party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, without naming names.

When Boguslawa Towalewska of the governing Democratic Left Alliance urged her colleagues to reject the resolution, because "German compensation claims and Polish demands for reparations would only awaken the ghosts of World War II," she heard calls of "treason!" and "shame!"

The fate of the controversial resolution is still to be decided, possibly in the second week of September. Enough support was rallied to pass a weaker resolution, however, calling on Germany "to accept, once and for all time, full responsibility for the outbreak of the war."

CODENAME: ZERO OPTION

Most observers in Poland agreed that the reparations issue wouldn't have surfaced this summer if not for the renewed threats of legal action by German expellee groups. And despite the dubious accuracy of Kaczynski's and Dobrosz's oratory, there was a certain sense to it, some said.

The debate in the Sejm "was an answer to the threatening wave of individual Germans' compensation claims," wrote Kalicki. "The debate was a signal sent to the other side of the Oder. It should help Germans realize that Polish fears of the compensation claims are not a mere 'obsession' ... The stake in the game started by the [Federation for Expellees] and the Prussian Trust is the condition of the Polish-German relationship achieved in the last 30 years," Kalicki added.

Jerzy Haszczynski, writing in another successful mainstream Polish daily, Rzeczpospolita, also saw the debate as a means of setting the record straight on "who started the war, committed murders, pillaged and destroyed Poland." Poland should prepare a list of wartime losses, he wrote, arguing that the total amount would dwarf any potential sum the German claimants might present, "not as a demand for reparations but as an answer to possible German compensation claims; a whip in the waiting, encouraging Germans to take the zero option."

The "zero option" is the mutual cancellation of claims, or, better still, a declaration of the German authorities to take financial responsibility for whatever compensation claims might appear. So far, Chancellor Schroeder has refrained from declaring anything of the kind.

Even the controversial Federation for Expellees head Erika Steinbach hinted that her government should consider such a move. Schroeder's rejection of German claims was "a pusillanimous step that does not create any legal security for the Poles," she told a German paper following the chancellor's visit to Warsaw last month, this according to the Warsaw Voice. Steinbach went on to say, "if Schroeder really wanted to achieve something he should have said: 'We give up German property and will regulate these issues under German law.' But he did not have the courage to say that."

Germany's respected Sueddeutsche Zeitung foresees that the reciprocal compensation claims will remain a thorn in the side of both governments. The paper predicts passage of the hotly disputed resolution in the Sejm, followed by "more complications" for the Berlin-Warsaw relationship.

When the expellee-compensation resolution does come up for a vote, though, it is likely to be framed in milder language than the version debated last week. The text is now being revised by a parliamentary committee, and the centrist opposition Civic Platform party has said it would like to see the inflammatory call for reparations replaced by an appeal to Berlin to finance the German expellees' demands.

Meanwhile, away from high politics, the people of another mid-sized Polish town are setting an example of how to deal with the tragic past. On 29 August, local authorities in Nieszawa, alongside one of the town's former German residents, unveiled a monument to all of the town's war victims, Poles and Germans--the first initiative of its kind since 1945. German donations covered most of the monument's costs--far from the billions parliamentarian Dobrosz demands, but perhaps a contribution that will further reconciliation rather than inflame old hatreds.

The article should note that the 'rise' of the BdV is a relative one.  It is still at nowhere near the level of power it had in earlier generations.

The problem with a German Chancellor renouncing all claims is that according to the German Constitutional Court the German state becomes liable for a full compensation of all losses - i.e. the full and total value of all property in one third of today's Poland, one quarter of interwar Germany.  That's a lot of money.