Warsaw (AFP)

Eighty years after the explosions of the first German bombs launched on Poland, their echo resounds suddenly stronger: Warsaw claims billions of euros of war reparations.

Good neighbors and allies in NATO and the EU, Warsaw and Berlin seemed to have closed their dispute from the Second World War.

But the coming to power of nationalist conservatives in Poland, for whom mistrust of the EU and Germany is a buoyant political theme, has changed the situation.

"Poland has not yet received adequate compensation. (...) We lost six million people during the Second World War - far more than other states that received major reparations. is not fair, it can not stay that way, "Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki reiterated last week.

The issue was relaunched in 2017 by the leader of the conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Warsaw is preparing a new report, much wider than the one drawn up in 1947, which evoked the sum equivalent to 850 billion USD, according to MP PiS Arkadiusz Mularczyk.

- "Discrimination" -

"So many years after the end of the war, Germany has not reflected on its past, thinking more to protect the stability of its budget than to observe the democratic rules of the rule of law and respect the rights Man, "said AFP Mularczyk who chairs a parliamentary committee to estimate damages to compensate. According to him, Poland has been the victim of "discrimination".

Berlin recognizes its responsibility for the atrocities of war but rejects new demands for reparations, whether from Poland or Greece.

"The position of the German government remains unchanged, the issue of German reparations is legally and politically closed," said Berlin spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer.

According to Germany, Poland had renounced war reparations in 1953 on the part of East Germany. And the question was definitively settled with the "2 + 4" Treaty between the two German states and the four victors - USA, USSR, Great Britain and France. His signature in September 1990 paved the way for German reunification.

But the Polish conservatives are contesting the 1953 agreement, concluded during the communist era. And, fearing perhaps a complex legal debate, they prefer to insist on the "moral duty" of the Germans.

The Poles seem divided on the question of reparations.

For Tadeusz Sierandt, witness of the first German bombings in Wielun (center), September 1, 1939, the case is closed since the decision of the great powers to grant Poland about 100,000 km2 in the north and west of the country to Germany, while depriving it of about 175,000 km2 of land to the east for the benefit of the Soviet Union.

"I would be content with these territories recovered in 1945," said AFP the 88-year-old man.

On the other hand, for Tadeusz Olejnik, historian living in Wielun, claiming reparations remains "morally justified".

- Wehrmacht and outcry -

If the German political class is unanimous to judge the file of the reparations, it is quite different of the eventual rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht, demanded by leaders of a right-wing booming in the east of the country.

The president of the Alternative Party for Germany (AfD), Alexander Gauland, launched in September 2017, during the national election campaign, that his country could be "proud of the exploits of German soldiers during the two world wars".

These statements sparked an uproar over the rest of the German political spectrum, left and right together. These unanimous condemnations did not prevent the election, on 24 September 2017, of 94 AFD deputies. A first.

"Since the question of (reparations) has not been settled, we have come to relativize the role played by the Germans during the Second World War," commented Mr. Mularczyk.

In 1939, Poland had also been attacked by Stalin's USSR. However, "the Polish side does not currently raise the issue of war reparations for Russia," the Polish Foreign Ministry told AFP.

© 2019 AFP