Karol Nawrocki demands German WWII reparations at 87th Westerplatte anniversary

Westerplatte commemoration ceremony

Polish state officials gathered at Westerplatte in Gdańsk at 04:45 on Tuesday morning to mark the 87th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. The ceremony began with alarm sirens sounding at the exact minute the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish Military Transit Depot on 1 September 1939. Participants sang the national anthem, raised the state flag, lit the Peace Torch, and read the commemorative roll call before the Monument to the Coast Defenders. President Karol Nawrocki attended the gathering alongside Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defence Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz.

Historical memory and casualty scale

In his address, Nawrocki presented Westerplatte as the archetype of Polish military duty and Wieluń as the symbol of unprovoked civilian tragedy during the opening German air strikes. Historical accounts by Jarosław Tuliszka and Andrzej Drzycimski record that the Polish garrison of roughly 200 soldiers (with records giving between 182 and 210 men) under Major Henryk Sucharski was initially tasked with holding out for six hours. Confronted by naval artillery, Luftwaffe bombardment, and the German Kompania Szturmowa, the defenders held the post for nearly seven days until surrendering on 7 September 1939. The joint invasion by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union led to the murder of 6 million Polish citizens, equaling 17% of the pre-war population of the Second Polish Republic, with civilians accounting for almost 90% of the casualties.

Remembrance of 1 September requires truth and responsibility from us, and truth has its symbols, it has its facts, truth also has its signs.

Recovery of defenders and German relations

Nawrocki also focused on the Cemetery of the Westerplatte Defenders, recalling that the remains of Polish soldiers lay in mud and brush for decades before archaeological efforts by the Museum of the Second World War recovered them amid public criticism. Transitioning to foreign relations, Nawrocki appealed directly to the German Chancellor and the German public to resolve the question of wartime reparations. He argued that German contempt toward Poland predated the rise of National Socialism, citing nineteenth-century Prussian writings referring to Poles as eastern Iroquois alongside interwar policies under Weimar Republic leaders, including Reichswehr commander Hans von Seeckt and Chancellor Joseph Wirth, before culminating in Adolf Hitler's Obersalzberg order.

If Europe is to stay together, if the alliance is to be real, if good neighbourliness or friendship is to be realised, we finally need actions and not just fine and rounded words.

Bilateral treaties and modern regional security

Turning to the 35th anniversary of the Polish-German Good Neighbourhood Treaty, Nawrocki outlined several unresolved disputes in bilateral ties. He pointed to asymmetries in the rights granted to the Polish minority in Germany compared with the German minority in Poland, the unsettled legal ownership of the Dom Polski in Bochum, and the lack of a dedicated monument to Polish World War II victims in Berlin, where only a commemorative stone exists. Nawrocki connected earlier western cooperation with the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union to modern European economic investments in the Russian Federation, noting that prior warnings from late Polish president Lech Kaczyński about Russian expansionism had gone unheeded.