When the Polish and German governments meet for annual political talks in Berlin on Monday – the first time since Friedrich Merz became chancellor – Ukraine is likely to dominate the spotlight.
Amid growing US pressure for a peace deal with Russia, Warsaw and Berlin would like to send a signal of support for Kiev and unity between Central Europe’s largest – and militarily strongest – countries.
But below the surface, bilateral relations are becoming increasingly complicated. Poland, long considered a junior partner, no longer sees itself in an inferior role. This is not only because of its economic success since the fall of communism in 1989, but because it has avoided German policies that it sees as missteps, namely on migration and relations with Russia.
“Poles have become more self-confident, especially in relation to Germany because it has always been a reference point,” says Dr Agnieszka Lada-Konfal, deputy director of the German Institute of Polish Affairs, who co-leads the study of Polish-German relations.
The study this year, which tracked mutual sentiment over the past 25 years, showed near-record levels of hatred on the Polish side, with only slightly more Poles having positive than negative attitudes toward Germans. This is a stark contrast to how Germans view Poles, with the study recording the lowest percentage ever recorded of people expressing negative views of their eastern neighbours.
Lada-Konfal says the Polish mood was driven by the anti-German rhetoric of the previous, conservative-populist Polish government of Law and Justice (PiS), which regularly portrayed its rivals – notably Poland’s liberal Prime Minister, Donald Tusk – as agents of Berlin involved in anti-Polish collusion. The emerging far-right Confederation coalition also regularly accuses Tusk of being beholden to Germany.
“But… these[comments]fell on fertile ground: somewhere in the Polish soul… there were deep uncertainties about the Germans… and that’s why these sentiments began to resonate,” she says.
The extreme politicization of the relationship has also made it difficult for Tusk’s government to reestablish it without securing meaningful concessions from Germany, making it too passive to shape its narrative.
Dr. Ben Stanley, associate professor of social sciences at SWPS University in Warsaw, says, “The aspect of PiS as a defender of Polish identity against Germany and the accusation that (Tusk) represents ‘hidden German tendencies’ is a major gap in Polish politics, no matter how unjust and exaggerated, so any action will inevitably be viewed through that lens.”
Hopes were briefly raised this year when Merz decided to make his second trip abroad to Poland, but then – facing domestic pressure from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland over migration – he clashed with Warsaw over border controls, a sensitive topic for many Poles.
Analysts say many Poles still hold grudges about Germany’s slow response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and are frustrated that peace talks involve Berlin more than Warsaw.
Professor Alex Szczerbiak of the University of Sussex recalls that during a recent joint visit of Polish, German, French and British leaders to Kiev, Merz, Macron and Starmer rode together in a separate carriage to Tusk.
While the reasons behind it were functional, the symbolism of riding solo during a tense presidential campaign in Poland was “terrible”, says Szczerbiak, and was exploited by Tusk’s rivals to claim he was “second-tier” when it came to running European foreign policy.
Szczerbiak says Germany’s push to give Poland a “more central role” in the talks would send a better signal, reflecting its importance as Ukraine’s neighbor, a logistics hub and home to 1.5 million Ukrainians.
But it is the legacy and memory of the Nazi German invasion of Poland in 1939 that remains the most difficult tension to resolve. Polls show that 58% of Poles expect Germans to do more to pay reparations to their country.
In 2022, the Polish Parliament almost unanimously adopted a resolution emphasizing that Poland was never properly compensated, rejecting Berlin’s argument that a Communist government in the 1950s had waived rights to compensation.
A report prepared under the PiS government calculated them at €1.5tn (£1.3tn), three times Germany’s debt-heavy 2026 budget. Arkadiusz Mularski, the former minister who led the work, says this was a “conservative” estimate and compares it with the €2tn paid by the Federal Republic for investment in East Germany after reunification.
Tusk’s government distanced itself from this demand, but urged Berlin to “think constructively”, especially regarding the 60,000 surviving victims of the war. Polish media reported that a proposal for a one-time payment of €200m – €3,300 per person – was rejected by Warsaw last year as inadequate.
Poland’s new president, Karol Nawrocki, also indicated his support for the issue during a recent visit to Berlin, and suggested German investment in the Polish military as part of the agreement.
But when Mularsky offered to brief Germany’s ambassador to Warsaw, Miguel Berger, on the report last week, the diplomat dismissed the debate as “stoking division that only helps Putin.”
The question of ownership of Nazi-looted artworks also looms large over the relationship, with a long list of artworks and other objects wanted by Poland and regularly turning up in German collections or in controversial auctions. Monday’s meeting in Berlin will reportedly see the “historic return” of many valuable items looted during the war, Polish media reported on Sunday.
However, a long-awaited memorial to Polish victims of the Nazis in Berlin is not yet completely ready. A temporary memorial stone was unveiled this summer, but the final memorial has not yet been designed or budgeted for.
In a signal of intent ahead of Monday’s meeting, the two parties that make up the German government proposed a Bundestag motion calling for the actions to be expedited. But the Polish side is losing patience with politics.
“While Germany has been a hot topic in Poland for years … in Germany, Poland has been a cold topic, or … more precisely, an ignored topic,” says Professor Robert Traba, vice-chairman of the advisory council of the German-Polish Cooperation Foundation, who warns of an “asymmetry” of knowledge.
In 2018, he reviewed 40 German history booklets, and found that only two mentioned the Warsaw Uprising of 1943 and 1944, and none covered the Nazi German occupation of Poland under the General Government.
Traba explains that for the Germans, the post-war reckoning “was about Franco-German and German-Jewish reconciliation”.
“There is hardly any scope for Polish-German rapprochement and sensitivity on this issue,” he says. The new German Republic’s focus towards the West meant that “relations with the East had been operating for years from a position of a certain superiority”, making Poles even more nervous.
Traba says that in this sense the temporary memorial in Berlin inadvertently captures the politics of Polish-German relations well. He says, “They… are more like a temporary arrangement, not a real relationship between two very important partners and neighbors in Europe, which can give a new direction to European politics.”
“That’s why I’m talking about the speed we need; emphasis on saying: We want to do it differently.”
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