NIEMIECKIE REPARACJE DLA POLSKI ZA II WOJNĘ ŚWIATOWĄ NA TLE GLOBALNYM

Abstract

No other country in the world suffered a greater measurable and verifiable loss of human and material resources than Poland during World War II in 1939-1945. According to the first approximation, the value of human and material losses inflicted to Poland by Nazi Germany amounts to 6.495 trillion US dollars of 2018.However, Poland never received war reparations from Germany. The article is a preliminary survey of the complex issue – conducted in an interdisciplinary way combining elements of legal, economic, and political analysis, because the topic belongs to the wide and multidisciplinary field of national and international security. Refuted in the article is an internationally popular myth that communist Poland unilaterally renounced German war reparations in 1953. Then the article discusses the global background of the topic in the 20th and 21st centuries – in particular, the case of Greece whose reparations claims Germany rejects like the Polish claims, and major cases of reparations actually paid: by Germany for World War I, by Germany to Israel and Jewish organizations for the Holocaust, by Japan for World War II – at 966 billion US dollars of 2018, the largest reparations ever – and by and Iraq for the Gulf War. The article concludes with a discussion of necessary further research with advanced methodology of several sciences, and of a possible litigation before the International Court of Justice – or a diplomatic solution to the problem of war reparations.