Poland renounced war damages in 1953 that is what the Germans claim whenever one raises the issue of their financial responsibility for a war they triggered against Poland in 1939 and as a result of which 6 million Polish citizens died or were killed.

And then they wave a pile of documents on reparations and damages published in 2004 by the Polish Institute of International Affairs [Polski Instytut Spraw Międzynarodowych – PISM] being a Polish governmental institution established for meritocratic backup of the ministry. Indeed, all of sudden in 2004 there was found a protocol of the Polish communist government in which Poland allegedly waived German compensation in 1953. It was included in the collection issued by PISM in 2004 and which the recent report by Arkadiusz Mularczyk refers to; in polemical manner but without questioning is authenticity. It’s worse than crime. It’s a mistake.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE For the thing is that the protocol has never been seen before, members of the communist government denied its existence and the only signature on it is the one of Bierut.

Bolesław Bierut was chief of the Communist Party, head of state but he was no member of the government. Whereas it is supposed to have been a government sitting.

Grotewohl-Molotov Pact

Chronologically speaking the whole story begins with Joseph Stalin’s death at the Kremlin in March 1953. Later on, in Berlin, there was an outbreak of a workers’ uprising “that dashed the hopes pinned on the people by the people’s government” as Bertold Brecht put it. Eventually, in autumn, in West Germany, general elections, where the unification of Germany was at stake, were held. For Berlin was still one city, undivided by a wall and enjoying the freedom of circulation.

Lavrentiy Beria who had ruled the Soviet empire till December 1953 played the card of smooth unification and web of lures. He dreamt of convergence, infiltration, merger, amalgamation and any other noun that could help forging a new shape of the world. For which he was ready to abandon many communist “ingredients”, Leninist ideals and Salinist doctrine. Only fiasco of his ideologicalless policy on the German front, ferment caused by releasing people from gulags made his comrades slaughtered Beria and replace him with group having a program of ideological revival and further building of communism.

But for the time being it was before the elections upon the Rhine. And to encourage West German voters wishing to make a deal with the Kremlin the 1939 pact concluded over the heads of Poles. Back in the day it was the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, in 1953 the Grotewohl-Molotov Pact was signed. This Otto Grotewohl was the Soviet governor of East Germany and leader of the German communist party.

On August 24, 1953, “Trybuna Ludu” [People’s Tribune] published the East German-Soviet Pact with the signatures of Grotewohl and Molotov. It also published an appendix, i.e. “The Declaration of the Government of the People's Republic of Poland” – but that was an unsigned declaration, saturated with Russianisms though.

According to Adam Pszczółkowski, a prosoprographer and expert on archives: “The signature under the statement – “pap” - indicates that it was made by Julia Minc. Next to the statement, there was an editorial comment, also without a signature. One can guess that the author of the second text was Leon Kasman, an activist of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the editor-in-chief of “Trybuna Ludu”.

Strange sitting of the Polish communist government

The title of the statement indicated it was a government document. Next day, on August 25, 1953, prime minister Grotewohl, at the Volkskammer meeting in Berlin, read the German-language version of the Polish statement, which was reported by “Trybuna Ludu” on August 27.

The Polish and German texts of the statements of the Polish communist government were printed in the Collection of Documents of the Polish Institute of International Affairs No. 9/1953. But – as Adam Pszczółkowski points out – “obviously this periodical was not an official publisher of legal acts”.

Only in 2004, in the archives of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister, the officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “miraculously” found the protocol documenting the alleged meeting of the Council of Ministers, which is supposed to have met on Sunday, August 19, 1953. Bolesław Bierut, Tadeusz Gede, Piotr Jaroszewicz, Hilary Minc, Zenon Nowak, Stanisława Zawadzki, Franciszek Jóźwiak, Eugeniusz Szyr and Kazimierz Mijal would have taken the floor. The government declaration would have been adopted unanimously by 35 participants in the meeting on August 23, 1953 (the day after the adoption of the Grotevohl-Molotov pact).

However, the attendance list, the minutes of the meeting and the statement itself are not signed by anyone from the government. Moreover, it would have been the only case that the government met on Sunday. It was a day off from work even for the communists, and they held it dear very much.

According to the minutes, the course of the government meeting would have been as follows: “The chairman opened the meeting at 16.30. (...) informed the gathered about the proposals put forward in this matter by the government of the USSR (...) The government of the USSR proposes that the interested governments sign the relevant protocols. After the discussion, the Presidium of the government unanimously adopted the following resolution (...) ”. Not a single word on what was said during the discussion.

In the year 2004, Kazimierz Mijal, one of the ministers allegedly speaking at the meeting in 1953, was still alive. He immediately sent a statement to the press that there had never been such a government sitting.

As Adam Pszczółkowski says: “Kazimierz Mijal was a colorful figure. An honest communist, so much so that during the reign of Gomułka he fled from the Polish People’s Republic to Albania to establish a truly communist government in exile. Then he was active in People's China. He returned to Poland in 1983 in order to overthrow General Jaruzelski and to beat the arguments of Solidarity, which, in his opinion, was not sufficiently workers’ in its postulates”.

Officials find the protocol

The compensation renouncement protocol was found a few days after the resolution of the Diet, in which it was indicated on September 10, 2004 that Germany had never paid Poland any damages.

In 2004, the minister of foreign affairs was Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz. It was him who “found” the document and it was he who ordered its publication as authentic. So the document was assigned number 27A / 53. The letter “A” has been added to cram the protocol between the existing Nos. 27 and 28.

Officials subordinated to the prime minister Marek Belka refused to confirm the authenticity of the document, so it was not given a reference number of the archive of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister.

Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz's decision was fraught with consequences. There was no other official document before it that would confirm the Polish waiver of German damages.

It is true that as a consolation Cimoszewicz allowed to print commentaries in the same collection as the protocol and other suddenly disclosed top-secret documents on reparations and damages. In those commentaries, professors Jan Sandorski and Marian Muszyński emphasized that the protocol was most likely falsified. They did not explicitly indicate that they were accusing the incumbent minister of foreign affairs of complicity in the fraud. Neither Sandorski nor Muszyński found any direct evidence that would prove the falsification. Although Muszyński was very close. He had read – and quoted – the UN protocols of 1953 because, under international law, the waiver had to be filed. However, he only read them in English. Whereas the evidence is hidden the protocols in Russian and French.

Gaspadin Naszkowski waives reparations

Only the Russian minutes of the session of the General Assembly of the United Nations of September 23, 1953 - that is, a month after the alleged resolution of the Polish government - contains an annotation that in the case of compensation, the Polish deputy foreign minister “gaspadin Naszkowski spoke French” and not in English.

General Marian Naszkowski was a very enigmatic character. Adam Pszczółkowski reminds that: “during WWII he was an officer of the Red Army within special units of the NKVD”. Later, he led the personnel policy of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs with an iron fist, and although there was the anti-Semitic campaign against him in 1968, he survived it and the decline of his career should be associated only with the fall of the so-called Noblemen's group in the next decade.

Naszkowski in New York began his speech referring to “anti-peace provocation” which was the “West-inspired” uprising in the GDR to smoothly move to the weapon offered by the East. Only communist countries, Naszkowski proclaimed, ensure peace and friendly relations. “Poland's contribution to the promotion of peace and the restoration of united Germany” continued the deputy minister, is the decision to renounce “its share in the war reparations paid as of January 1, 1954".

War reparations and damages are two different things, which Cimoszewicz – as a lawyer by profession – was well aware of.

Reparations are about covering losses in infrastructure, such as damaged bridges or factories. Reparations are paid to the winning sides of the war, in this case the four powers that sat in Potsdam and ordered the division of Germany into zones of occupation. Therefore, the Germans paid the Soviets in locomotives or typewriters, and the Soviets gave some part of it to Poland.

On the other hand, damages (Polish odszkodowania, French dommage, German Schaden) concern not only objects but also people – with 6 million Polish citizens perished in WWII. Their loss of life and the loss of health by others have never been resolved legally. After all, the Polish army numbered one million soldiers in September 1939, that is, most of the victims were civilians. They did not fight, so the Germans committed genocide on them.

The question of genocide is therefore not only a matter of crime, but also of a quantifiable damage. Unless a really unsigned document without a signature, allegedly from 1953, is authentic. Then the Germans may rub their hands, saying that Poland has renounced not only reparations, but also compensation for crimes, i.e. the damages

However, the Polish communist authorities did not think so. Even after 1970 when the German chancellor Willy Brandt accepted the border to be fixed on the Oder and Lusatian Neisse, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs there were lawyers, led by Zbigniew Resich (privately father to the journalist Alicja Resich-Modlińska), then a judge of the Supreme Court, still working on the question of damages for German war crimes.

Finally, it remains to ask: what interest would Cimoszewicz have in legalizing the “protocol”? The answer is not clear. Could he have meant gaining favor with the German media and press power in the upcoming presidential elections in 2005? Probably not. After all, he was the undisputed leader of the polls. In addition no statesman would do the dirty on his own nation. So it’s probably about something else.

–Andrzej Kozicki
-Translated by Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists