Poland and Germany: the feud at the heart of Europe

On a windswept field in eastern Poland, a contingent of German soldiers has been operating Patriot missile defence systems since January. It forms the most significant German military presence in Poland since the second world war.

The Germans are part of Nato’s efforts to bolster its eastern flank and help Ukraine fight Russia, but their presence is also testing a German-Polish relationship that many consider to be at its worst since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, their deployment was preceded by political feuding, with Berlin rejecting a Polish request for its Patriots to be installed in Ukraine rather than Poland.

But according to the commander of the 300 German soldiers, bickering politicians are disconnected from the situation on the ground, where co-operation is good. “There are political tensions but we don’t feel them here,” says Colonel Jörg Sievers. “If anything, I’ve been very surprised by the proactive help we got from the Poles, who prepared everything for our arrival faster than I thought could be done.” 

Polish soldiers are not handling the Patriots, but they guard the area and laid 1,600 concrete slabs on which the infrastructure for the Patriots could be set up without risk of sinking into muddy soil. They also sleep in the same military compound as the Germans.

From the tragically low point of the Nazi invasion of Poland that sparked the last world war in 1939 to the high of Germany’s drive for Poland and other former communist states to join the EU in 2004, the German-Polish relationship is crucial not only to the two nations but also to the continent as a whole. That is particularly true now that western powers want to display unity to thwart president Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine also put eastern Europe at the heart of world geopolitics.

But in Berlin, there is deep disillusionment with the Polish government led by the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) and what is seen as its attempt to use Germany as a political punch bag ahead of Polish parliamentary elections in the autumn.

Poland has condemned Germany for being slow to deliver military aid to Ukraine, and for dismissing earlier Polish concerns about Berlin’s economic ties with Moscow, epitomised by the Nord Stream pipelines. German officials note that it is now the world’s third-largest supplier of arms to Ukraine, and that Poland was itself an importer of Russian coal prewar.

The Polish government has meanwhile launched a high-profile legal campaign against Germany for wartime reparations, and has accused Berlin of excessive control of the EU’s institutions. In 2021, Jarosław Kaczyński, head of the PiS, accused Germany of trying to reshape the EU into a “German Fourth Reich”.

The harsh rhetoric has left German officials feeling that, for Poland’s ruling party, “winning the elections is more important than having a constructive relationship with Germany,” says Jana Puglierin, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

In Warsaw, some opposition politicians also worry that their government’s anti-German drive could jeopardise Poland’s longer term prospects, particularly in terms of leading the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine and helping the country join the EU. Ukraine and Moldova got EU candidacy status last June.

While tussling with Berlin, Warsaw has also been separately confronting Brussels over the disbursement of billions in pandemic recovery funds, which have been withheld by the European Commission as it accuses PiS of stacking Polish courts with friendly judges in defiance of the rule of law.

Poland risks turning a moment of opportunity into an impediment, says former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski, who is now a member of the European parliament.

“If we’re talking about Ukraine joining the EU, then we must understand that this also means a further shift towards the east for the EU and that will mean that having the EU just driven by the Franco-German relationship will not be enough,” he says.

If Poland wants to play a leadership role in the next phase of Europe’s development it must “fix its relationship with both Brussels and Berlin”, he adds. “I’m afraid that if it doesn’t do that, then Romania, which is half our size, could even take Poland’s place because it isn’t picking unnecessary fights.” 

Reparations claim

The Polish pushback against Berlin digs deep into the horrors of the past century. In October, Poland filed a formal claim against Germany for €1.3tn in reparations for damages and losses inflicted by the Nazis during the second world war.

Berlin has flatly rejected this claim, insisting that the issue was settled in the 1950s with Poland’s then communist government. Germany has also since paid direct compensation to some Polish war victims, notably survivors of the Holocaust. German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said last year that while “Germany admits its historical responsibility, no ifs or buts about it, the issue of reparations is a closed one from the perspective of the German government”.

But Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki told the Financial Times last September that Poland was ready for a long legal battle. “The Herero and Nama people waited 120 years to get compensation, we also have time,” he said, in reference to a €1.1bn donation pledged in 2021 by Germany in recognition of the colonial-era slaughter of tens of thousands of tribespeople in Namibia.

Poland is drawing comparisons with other claims, but one of the peculiarities of its demand for wartime reparations is that it only targets Berlin and not Moscow — even though Poland was partitioned by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 and Moscow then forced communist rule upon Warsaw.

Asked why Warsaw was not also seeking Russian reparations, Polish state secretary Marcin Przydacz said in an interview with the FT that “we treat Berlin and Moscow in a different-civilisation way. With Berlin, we believe we can start a dialogue but with Putin this is the other civilisation. Once there will be a success with Germany, the next step could be to launch such a discussion with the other oppressor.” 

The German soldiers are stationed in Zamość, a town that is a gem of Poland’s renaissance architecture but which also suffered wartime atrocities, not least after the Nazis selected the area to showcase German colonisation in eastern Europe.

A visit to the brick rotunda that served as a Nazi detention centre and execution spot is a harrowing experience. About 8,000 people died there. Adult Poles were sent to labour camps in Germany while their children got re-educated in Germany as youth of the Third Reich. Ethnic German farmers from Bessarabia and elsewhere were relocated to the Zamość countryside.

The population of Zamość was also decimated by the Holocaust. It was the birthplace of Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg who was part of a Jewish community that accounted for more than 40 per cent of the town’s population until 1939. Its 17th-century synagogue was renovated and reopened as a museum in 2011 thanks to funding from Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Curator Daniel Sabaciński said he does not know any Jew now living in Zamość.

“I don’t really know why Germany didn’t pay for this [renovation],” says Sabaciński. “In my opinion, the reparations claim is now about domestic politics and our government is doing this not to get money from Germany but votes in Poland. But the truth is still that Poland didn’t get any real money from Germany after the war, because whatever was paid somehow went to Stalin and the Soviet Union.”

Locals sound nonplussed about the presence of German troops in Zamość town, where troops from the US and other Nato countries have spent time before. But some residents differentiate between welcoming Germans and accepting German policymaking.

“We know they are now here to protect our skies,” says Sabaciński. “But you still have to understand that older people were educated in communist times when the propaganda was about Germany being the enemy, just as the Russians are now saying they are not fighting the Ukrainian people but the Nazis and fascists who control Ukraine.”

Shortly after the German soldiers arrived, Zamość’s town hall inaugurated an exhibition about the town’s Nazi occupation. The Germans were invited to visit the show, although it was not staged specifically for them. “I don’t feel that we are being blamed by the younger Polish generation and we also all know that what matters is for this never to happen again,” says Col Sievers.

Economic interdependence

German ambassadors in Warsaw have also struggled to stick to diplomatic niceties. The appointment of Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven to the post in 2020 suffered an unusual three-month delay while Warsaw reviewed his credentials and the media wrote about his father’s alleged Nazi officer past.

“There is a certain asymmetry because for every Pole, Germany is the benchmark while for most Germans, Poland is a neighbour among many,” says the current German ambassador to Warsaw, Thomas Bagger. “The Poles resent this asymmetry of attention and they certainly don’t see themselves as a small nation.”

Dietmar Nietan, a German MP who is the government’s co-ordinator for German-Polish co-operation, takes a more self-critical view. He says that German and EU institutions contain many “arrogant Wessis” — a name for former West Germans — who look down on Poland. “They say: ‘We fought for them to get them into the EU. And now they are treating us badly.’” He adds: “Some of them do not see [Poles] on the same level as us.” 

According to Nietan, German officials should resist seeing all Polish grievances as populist electioneering and take the health of the relationship seriously: “If we fail in central and eastern Europe, the European model and European way of life that [are] now under pressure from Russia and from China [are] dead.”

Others counter that the decline of the rule of law in Poland is real and that concerns about human rights should not be dismissed as a superiority complex.

Amid the dispute over Polish pandemic recovery funds, Poland’s pro-government media regularly presents the European Commission as an institution controlled by Germany. Polish opposition leader Donald Tusk also gets portrayed as a puppet who became head of the European Council in 2014 thanks to German support. In the run-up to Polish elections, the opposition has been sensitive to accusations of being antipatriotic: many opposition lawmakers also voted for the claim for German wartime reparations.

“This narrative used against Tusk has put the opposition in quite an uncomfortable place, as we saw with the reparations,” says Michał Baranowski, director of the German Marshall Fund’s office in Warsaw. “Overall, in terms of trust, I feel the German-Polish relationship is at its lowest level since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.” 

Still, a Polish opposition election victory might not translate into an immediate improvement in relations with Germany. “I hear sometimes colleagues in Berlin say that if the opposition wins, everything will be hunky dory again but I think that the Polish frustration about the Zeitenwende and the lack of change in Germany is very much bipartisan,” says Baranowski, using the term to describe German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s promise last year to transform his nation’s approach to defence, which has been slower to materialise than many of its Nato allies had hoped.

Puglierin, the Berlin-based analyst, says that much of the German-Polish tension over Ukraine stems from a fundamental difference in perspective that is unlikely to change. “For the chancellor, what he fears most is uncontrolled escalation and the [Russian] nuclear threat. Whereas in the Polish debate, the threat perception is different: it’s about Russian tanks rolling into Warsaw.”

If anything can begin to repair ties between the two countries, it might be economic codependence.

Germany remains the main business partner of Poland and their bilateral trade grew 14 per cent last year. Among recent investments, Mercedes-Benz announced in December the construction of a €1bn plant to make electric-only vans in Jawor, southwestern Poland.

Prime Minister Morawiecki said this factory showed that “we are creating the best possible conditions for economic development”. In a corresponding example of economic co-operation, Germany struck a deal to get oil sent from Poland to its Schwedt refinery in substitution for ending Russian supplies.

Sanctions against Russia and western concerns over relying on China as a supplier could also increase economic ties between the two European neighbours, according to economists. “I would expect that the process of reshaping global value chains is going to strengthen the trading relationship between Poland and Germany as the importance of Poland as an alternative supplier base for Germany goes up,” says Beata Javorcik, chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who is Polish.

Addressing the German university of Heidelberg in March, Morawiecki said that “today Poles and Germans work closely together economically, which creates interdependence”.

But he also insisted that Germany was yet to make up for past harm. “While western Germany was allowed to develop freely, Poland lost 50 years of its future as a result of world war two,” he said. “There is no end of history.” 

Germany, whose depleted military is facing equipment shortfalls, is yet to decide whether to keep its Patriots in Poland beyond the initial deadline of June. But their security contribution so far is seen as a success at a time of political tensions.

“I think we are doing a lot of things that make the caricature of Germany look unreal,” says German ambassador Bagger, who is returning to Berlin this summer, “like having our Patriots in Poland and German uniforms on Polish soil.”

Growing trade between the two countries, he adds, also shows that “the economic relationship doesn’t always move at the same pace and in the same direction as politics”. 

But for Sievers, the colonel who returned to Germany in late April, the lasting impression from his stay in Poland is that little should divide the two countries.

“Poland is at the heart of Europe and if it wasn’t for the fact that I have to pay with zlotys, I would not really notice so much of a difference with being at home,” he says. “I’m from North Germany and I’m certainly familiar with the dry sense of humour of the Poles.”

Letter in response to this article:

Why Poles are right to seek reparations from Germany / From Arkadiusz Mularczyk, Secretary of State for European Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Poland