ESSAY

FOR many in Britain, World War II is a story of unparalleled heroism, and there are many stirring films such as the new blockbuster Dunkirk. For the people of Poland, however, the war was a nightmare so black and so bloodstained, that no film could even remotely capture the depths of its horror.

Consider the incident in a German town called Gleiwitz close to the Polish border. On the night of August 31, 1939, a small group of Nazi intelligence agents, dressed in Polish uniforms, burst into a radio station. They then broadcast anti-German messages in Polish before dumping the bodies of prisoners they had just hauled out of the Dachau concentration camp, who had been made to resemble Polish saboteurs then shot and mutilated to make identification impossible.

A few hours later, Adolf Hitler rose in the Reichstag and proclaimed that the Gleiwitz incident was the final straw. He deceitfully blamed the incident on anti-German saboteurs.

By the summer of 1945, some six million Polish citizens, one in five of the pre-war population, had been killed. The great cities of Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin were in smoking ruins. Millions of books had been ruined; hundreds of libraries, schools, museums and laboratories had been destroyed.

In effect, the Germans had done their best to eradicate an entire nation, erasing its culture, murdering its middle-classes and reducing the rest to slavery. And though the Nazis were defeated, the Polish people’s ordeal was far from over. Following Hitler’s tyranny, Poland was then occupied by Stalin’s Red Army, who turned it into a brutalised Soviet satellite.

It is no wonder, then, that many Poles have never forgiven what happened on that day in 1939. And, it should maybe come as no surprise, either, that the leader of Poland’s ruling conservative party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is now demanding huge sums in reparations from the German government.

There is, of course, a political dimension to all this. Mr Kaczynski is an uncompromising and unapologetic nationalist who is currently embroiled in a fierce row about his attempts to tame Poland’s independent judiciary. Coming fast on the heels following Poland’s remembrance of the doomed Warsaw Uprising against Nazi rule in 1944, sceptics might be forgiven for suspecting that Mr Kaczynski’s outburst was more of an attempt to secure his nationalist base than a serious effort to right the wrongs of World War II.

On top of that, the legal situation is very murky. Poland actually waived its right to reparations from the Germans at the end of 1953, though Mr Kaczynski and his allies have always argued – not unreasonably, many will say – that this should not be binding because it came as a result of pressure from their Soviet occupiers.

 

OTHERS, too, will be very sceptical about the idea of reparations for historical crimes. Some activists will claim, for example, that Britain should compensate African and Caribbean countries for its involvement in the slave trade – an argument that many historians will find totally unpersuasive.

But if any country deserves restitution after its suffering in the last century, then it is surely Poland. Few of us in Britain can even begin to imagine the awfulness of the ordeal the Poles endured after the first German tanks crashed across the border.

Hitler’s intentions were chillingly clear from the very beginning. Poland was to be cleansed of its existing population, whom he regarded as sub-human, in order to make room for German colonists.

Ten days after the invasion began, he told his commanders that they should kill ‘without pity or mercy, all men, women and children of Polish descent or language’. And in March 1940, the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, was even more explicit. Soon, he said, ‘all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation considers the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task.’

The Nazis were as good as their word. While Stalin’s Red Army seized Eastern Poland, the Western, German-occupied half was immediately subjected to a reign of terror unparalleled in European history.

In the first month alone, an estimated 200,000 Poles were killed in savage bombing raids, with hundreds of towns pummelled mercilessly by the Luftwaffe.

Meanwhile, as the German tanks rolled east, tens of thousands of civil servants, landowners, clergymen and intellectuals were rounded up and executed.

In the forest glade of Palmiry, near Warsaw, the Nazis dug mass graves for at least 1,700 politicians, industrialists, teachers and priests.

Anybody who had enjoyed any success was a target: one victim was the runner Janusz Kusocinski, who had won gold at the 1932 Olympics, while others were cyclists, actresses, painters and writers. As Hitler himself had put it, the aim was to destroy Poland’s political and cultural elite for ever.

But even unremarkable ordinariness was not enough to save Poland’s men and women. Entire villages were depopulated or taken hostage, and when the Poles tried to fight back, the Nazis simply murdered them.

According to Polish sources, the total number of villagers killed in so-called pacification exercises approached 20,000 while more than 500,000 farms were burned and some eight million cattle and horses were slaughtered.

Yet the terrible fact is that staying alive was little better than dying instantly. Almost immediately, the Nazis began cleansing entire areas to make way for incoming Germans, with a staggering 2.5 million Polish men, women and children forced from their homes.

Many died of exposure, hunger and disease on the roads. The survivors were herded into the 430 prisons, camps and detention centres established across Nazi-occupied Poland.

There, thousands were executed. Indeed, 200 Poles were killed in the first inhuman experiments to discover the effects of Zyklon B gas, which was later used against Europe’s Jews in the Holocaust.

Hundreds of priests died in grotesque medical procedures, while at the Ravensbruck camp, 74 young Polish women were killed in horrific experiments that saw their nerves cut, their tissues mutilated with glass and their bones deliberately fractured.

But the horror did not end there. Another three million Poles were forcibly transported to Germany as slaves, where they toiled unceasingly to serve Hitler’s war machine.

 

BANNED from using public transport or fraternising with Germans, they had to wear purple ‘P’ badges and were forced to live in special concentration camps in wretched conditions.

Among the groups chosen for slave labour, one stands out. Soon after the invasion, the Nazis began rounding up thousands of teenage girls and young women, some as young as 15, to work as sex slaves in military brothels.

A Swiss Red Cross driver in Warsaw reported in 1942 that he had seen Nazi soldiers assaulting Polish women in the street.

As for Poland’s Jews, their fate, so dreadful that words can never do it justice, is horribly well known.

To the Nazis, the Jews were the ultimate enemy, destined only for destruction. Warsaw’s ghetto was the largest in all the Nazi empire, with almost half a million people crammed into an area little more than a square mile in size.

By the end of the war, more than nine out of ten Polish Jews a staggering three million people – had been killed in the Holocaust.

We may think, of course, that no amount of money could possibly compensate for such human horror. Some of Poland’s losses, though, were more obviously quantifiable.

The destruction of its cultural heritage, for instance, beggars belief.

Polish sources estimate that the Nazis destroyed millions of books, while the historian Darlusz Matelski has worked out that the German occupiers stole a staggering 11,000 Polish paintings, 2,800 European paintings, 1,400 sculptures, 75,000 manuscripts, 25,000 maps, 22,000 antique books and 300,000 antique prints.

Among the 63,000 works still missing are paintings by Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Durer and van Dyck. Some are probably still hidden in the archives of Russian museums, having been looted by the Red Army; others were doubtless destroyed for ever.

The wider economic damage, however, is almost impossible to measure. While hundreds of villages were razed to the ground, the national capital, Warsaw, was almost completely destroyed during the Nazi repression of the doomed Polish Uprising in the summer of 1944.

The cities magnificent libraries were burned, its palaces obliterated, its public spaces shattered. By the time the Soviet army entered the city in January 1945, the Germans had destroyed 90 per cent of Warsaw’s buildings.

Of course, it was rebuilt afterwards at a staggering cost, with the Old Town meticulously reconstructed, brick by brick. Even so, it has never recovered its former glory.

The tragedy, though, is while all this was bad enough, there was still more suffering to come.

Though Britain and France had declared war on Germany to save Poland, the war ended with the Poles enslaved by yet another tyrannical dictatorship – this time, Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Not until the 1980s, when the Solidarity social movement dealt the first real blows to Soviet Communism, did Poland begin to regain its freedom and its pride.

So, it is no wonder that even today, many young Poles still feel bitter about their country’s fate – especially when they see their high streets invaded by German businesses, or when they cross the border to see their German neighbours cruising past in their powerful and expensive cars.

In Berlin, the Germans are understandably handling the issue of this demand for reparations with great caution.

While Angela Merkel’s spokesman maintained that Germany would face its responsibility for the war, ‘politically, morally and financially’, he was also careful to point out that ‘the question of German reparations for Poland was dealt with conclusively in the past, legally and politically’.

We should suspect that any Polish person might well echo Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s demand for financial redress. Others, however, such as outsiders and historians, are likely to be wary of the argument for reopening the reparations issue.

If Mrs Merkel did agree to Poland’s demands, where would it end? Who would be next?

 

WOULD the Greeks, for example, suddenly discover that they, too, had been insufficiently compensated for the wrongs of the past?

(Many of the furious Greek protests against draconian German financial strictures in recent times referred to atrocities the Nazis carried out on thousands of Greeks during the war.)

Why stop there? After all, there are plenty of countries around the world that might relish the thought of seeking payments from their former masters, which could easily see Britain facing massive financial demands from its old territories.

But the really striking thing is that this debate has resurfaced at all.

After all, this year marks the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome – the foundational movement in the history of the EU, the organisation that was supposed to have banished memories of World War II for ever.

What is now very clear, however, is that the nationalist passions of the past have not gone away.

Far from wiping the slate clean, globalisation, austerity and mass immigration have reawakened the old resentments, not just in Poland, but neighbouring countries such as Slovakia and Hungary, too, where migrants from the Middle East have been treated with open hostility.

Suspicions may arouse that Mr Kaczynski’s real aim is not so much to heal the scars of the past as to fire a shot across the bows of the EU. Like many of the new nationalists who have come to power across Central and Eastern Europe, he is determined to assert his own independence from what he sees as the interfering busybodies of Brussels and Berlin.

We should be surprised if Mrs Merkel gives the Polish demands more than a moment’s consideration, but we should be even more surprised if this is the last we hear of them.

The ghosts of history are not easily silenced, and beneath the pieties that so often pass for political discourse in Europe today, the old monsters may well be waking up.