Polish deputy FM hails local councillors’ call for WWII damages from Germany

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk has said that a resolution in support of Poland’s push for war reparations from Germany, adopted by local councillors in the southern town of Bochnia, represents “big moral support” for the government.

“It’s very important that places which were affected very painfully by World War II, losing thousands of citizens and incurring material losses, are speaking up today,” Mularczyk said in Bochnia, according to Polskie Radio.

Mularczyk told reporters at Bochnia Town Hall: “It’s vital that members of our local communities, such as Bochnia, are aware of the terrible crimes that were committed in the past.”

He mentioned the massacre of 52 Poles by the Nazi Germans at Bochnia’s Uzbornia Hill on December 18, 1939.

The town lost some 15,000 inhabitants in the war, including 1,000 in mass executions between 1939 and 1944, according to the government.

Mularczyk stated: “The fact that local councillors say the issue of reparations for World War II should be settled represents big moral support for the government.”

He added that recently US Republican Congressman Chris Smith and the Rabbinical Council of America came out in support of Poland’s claim for compensation for World War II from Germany.

In their resolution, adopted on August 31, Bochnia’s councillors called on the Polish government to take “firm diplomatic and legal action to secure redress from Germany,” the PAP news agency reported.

The councillors added: “Poland ought to receive it out of a basic sense of justice, in the name of historical truth and in the interests of true Polish-German reconciliation.”

In April, Poland’s government adopted a resolution “on the need to regulate, in Polish-German relations, the issue of reparations, compensation and redress” for the losses caused by the German invasion and subsequent occupation of Poland during World War II.

The Polish government said that the document “confirms that the issue of compensation for the damage and harm caused by Germany during World War II has not been settled in the form of an international agreement between the Republic of Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany, and that such an agreement must be entered into.”