War reparations for Nazi crimes have taken central stage in Poland’s presidential race, with candidates vying to prove their commitment to holding Germany accountable.
The debate is rooted in a €1.3tn claim for reparations, first put forward in 2022 by the ultranationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party and since also endorsed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s centre-right Civic Platform.
Rafał Trzaskowski, the Civic Platform candidate and frontrunner for May’s election, insisted at a recent campaign rally that it was impossible to repair relations with Germany without confronting historical grievances.
“We need to talk about what happened in Germany, what the Germans did in Poland. Without this it is impossible to build reconciliation,” Trzaskowski said.
His main rival in the presidential race, PiS candidate Karol Nawrocki, is more aggressive on the topic — and so is a far-right contender, Sławomir Mentzen, who has recently seen his support growing in opinion polls.
“Polish society is really moving to the right now, so all these questions about our history, identity and gaining postwar justice are very important in this presidential campaign,” said Adam Leszczyński, director of the Gabriel Narutowicz Institute of Political Thought, a government think-tank.
PiS claims to be the defender of Polish sovereignty, but “when you look at Tusk’s Civic Platform party, they are now basically saying the softer version of the same things”, Leszczyński added.
If elected president, Nawrocki pledged last month to secure German wartime reparations “on behalf of nearly 6mn Poles murdered by the German Third Reich”. He told a rally that “the Germans will see me as a partner on economic issues, but also as a tough competitor in demanding what is due to us”.
Nawrocki has been trailing Trzaskowski in the polls, but a survey in January carried out by Nationwide Research Group for the first time indicated Nawrocki could scrape a narrow victory in a run-off against his rival.
Mentzen of the far-right Confederation is polling third. The most recent survey, published by Super Express on Tuesday, showed he gained 6 percentage points to 16 per cent since the tabloid published its first presidential poll in November.
A historian without PiS party membership, Nawrocki built his career on historical grievances against Berlin and Moscow while also criticising Kyiv for delaying the exhumation of Polish victims of the 1940s massacres in Volhynia, a region now part of Ukraine.
In 2017, after the PiS government appointed Nawrocki to run Poland’s flagship second world war museum in Gdańsk, he was accused of revisionism and taken to court by the former management, a dispute that has been since settled. At the core of the lawsuit was his PiS-backed decision to add patriotic displays showing the heroism of Catholic priests and other Poles during the Nazi occupation.
Nawrocki has recently had to field allegations that he mismanaged the museum’s finances and had links to criminal and Neo-Nazi groups.
The PiS candidate denies wrongdoing, but “having to confront these accusations hasn’t helped his campaign”, said Paweł Machcewicz, a historian who co-founded the Gdańsk museum but was then replaced by Nawrocki as its director.
In the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Polish-German relations were not contentious, as historians focused mostly on Soviet-era crimes.
But anti-German sentiment became a political tool in the early 2000s, after Jarosław Kaczyński and his twin Lech founded PiS, while Tusk co-founded Civic Platform. In 2005, Tusk narrowly lost the presidential election to Lech Kaczyński after PiS publicised that Tusk’s grandfather had been part of the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of the Third Reich, without mentioning that he got conscripted by force and later deserted.
Since then, PiS has continued to portray Tusk as a stooge of Berlin, Brussels and Moscow. In December 2023, when Tusk was sworn in as prime minister, Jarosław Kaczyński said: “I know one thing, you are a German agent!”
The PiS government’s anti-German stance was also fuelled by some Bundestag MPs including Erika Steinbach who highlighted the plight of Germans expelled from Poland after the end of the second world war. After quitting the Christian Democrats in 2017, Steinbach campaigned for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Warsaw has also been stung by what it sees as a lack of interest in the German-Polish relationship from Chancellor Olaf Scholz since he took office in 2021. Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat tipped to become the next German chancellor after the elections later this month, has promised to revitalise Berlin-Warsaw ties.
But rapprochement with Berlin is not seen as a vote-bringer in Poland.
Mentzen, the Polish far-right candidate, said this month that he would “stop promoting German historical memory in Poland”. Tusk’s government, he said, “makes sure that in Poland it’s not allowed to speak badly about Germans or Ukrainians. God forbid about Jews. It’s only allowed to speak badly about Poles. This must be stopped”.
In recent decades, some academics have revisited Poland’s role in wartime atrocities, such as Princeton University historian Jan T Gross, who wrote about a 1941 pogrom carried out by Poles in Jedwabne.
“There was a genuine reaction among conservative segments of our society against narratives showing Poles as antisemites and even persecuting Germans, which is now still being exploited by politicians who position themselves as owners of Polish history,” said Machcewicz, the former director of the Gdańsk museum.
Paradoxically Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004 — despite being portrayed as an economic and geopolitical success story — also brought back some of those grievances, said Janusz Reiter, Poland’s first ambassador to Berlin after German reunification.
“The more people realised they were living in an open European space, especially with the Germans, the more some wanted reassurance that their Polish identity would not be diluted in this European integration,” said Reiter.
Additional reporting by Laura Pitel in Berlin and Natalia Sawka in Warsaw