Germany seeks Poland forgiveness 80 years after WWII start

Bloomberg

Germany made an emotional appeal for forgiveness to neighbouring Poland 80 years after the start of World War II that was met by a renewed demand for reparations by the fellow European Union member’s prime minister.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, visiting the town of Wielun, Poland, where Nazi bombers caused the first large-scale civilian casualties of the conflict in an air raid on September 1, 1939, said his country won’t forget the past and takes responsibility for the war’s terror and atrocities.
The ceremonies to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of the world’s bloodiest conflict will gather dozens of leaders in Warsaw on
Sunday, including US Vice President Mike Pence, German Chancellor Angela Merkel
and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Pence is coming after President Donald Trump cancelled, saying he was needed in the US as hurricane Dorian threatened to cause widespread damage in the southern Atlantic states.
“I bow my head before the victims victims of the attack on Wielun, I bow my head in front of the Polish victims of German tyranny and ask for forgiveness,” Steinmeier said, first in German and then in Polish, at an event hosted by his counterpart Andrzej Duda.
At a separate ceremony in Gdansk commemorating an attack on Poland from the Baltic Sea, Polish Premier Mateusz Morawiecki returned to the controversial topic of wartime reparations. He called on his nation’s western neighbour and biggest trading partner to take “responsibility” for the economic costs of its invasion and occupation.
Earlier this year, a Polish special parliamentary group published a preliminary study that showed the six-year conflict may have cost the Polish
economy more than $850 billion — or nearly two years of the eastern European country’s output. The German government has said all claims were settled long ago.
“We have to remember the victims and we have to demand compensation,” Morawiecki said. Unlike western European nations that settled World War II claims in the decades after the war, Poland says it was effectively prevented from doing so by its communist-era overlord Moscow.
Poland signed its post-war border treaty with Germany only in 1990, a year after the Iron Curtain came down.
Calls for reparations from the 1939-1945 conflict, during which about 6 million Poles — half of them Jews — were killed, have soured ties between Warsaw and Berlin since 2017. Poles claim that a 1953 declaration by communist authorities wasn’t a sovereign decision but one made by a puppet regime of the Soviet Union.
The one-sided declaration was made “in accord with the constitutional order of that era, and amid potential pressure from the Soviet Union, and can’t be recognised,” the Polish government said in 2004.