English Translation of Commentary by Arnold Schölzel in “Junge Welt”

In his “Memoirs,” the German Defense Minister in the late 50s/60s, Franz Josef Strauß, explained the foundation for what would become (West) Germany’s “State Doctrine”:
WEST Germany does not pay unpaid bills for war and doesn’t acknowledge EAST Germany’s (GDR) war reparations to Germany’s former enemies. He and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had always argued against post-WW2 peace treaties, using the pre-1989 excuse that only a “re-unified” all-German government could have a mandate to sit at the table and negotiate war reparations.

He literally stated: “Since we are not able to constitute this all-German authority we are not able to pay reparations, thus, we do not want a peace treaty. The long-term ambitious goals and practical daily goals of German politics were both satisfied – keep the German-Reunification question in the popular arena and avoiding gigantic reparations payments at the same time.” One could hardly better explain the post-WW2 resurgence of German imperialism, at least in one part of Germany. The division of Germany at the time seemed to most people an unquestionable and obvious/necessary fact-of-life.

 This reasoning explained by Strauss remained valid even after the annexation (“reunification”) of the GDR; today it is the guiding principle of arrogance toward any country lying East/South of Germany. This naturally includes German-Polish relations, regardless of Germany’s shared interests with the clerical nationalism of Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Helmut Kohl’s security adviser, Horst Teltschik, confessed to German media on March 14, 2015, when asked why the words “reparations” and “peace treaty” did not appear in the 1991 “Two-plus-Four” reunification Treaty: “It was deliberate, because we didn’t want a peace treaty.” Moscow had already asked about the possibility of signing a peace treaty in the fall of 1989. But: “We refused (…) from the outset – most of all because of the danger of war reparations claims.“

In 2015, Athens suffered the tyranny of a German-ized Europe with its economic crisis, that led to the return of real widespread public hunger in Greece: Athens again demanded compensation for its WW2 losses during the Nazi Occupation of Greece. Olaf Scholz repeated the hard-line response made by all previous West Germann chancellors, in October 2022:
“Legally and politically, the war reparations issue is closed.”

The amount at stake, potential war-reparations, is around 300 billion Euros.
This sum is currently being squandered on “bolstering” Germany’s army and for financing weapons for the war against Russia in Ukraine.

Totally ignored in this discussion: the East Germans alone made substantial compensation payments to the USSR after 1945, to the tune of circa 100 billion Marks. This sum was considered symbolic in view of the extent of Soviet losses. Nazi Germany destroyed 1,710 Russian cities, about 70,000 smaller villages, and pulverized about 32,000 industrial enterprises, 40,000 hospitals and 84,000 educational institutions, etc. Let’s not even mention other war crimes like the siege/starvation of Leningrad.

You can still sense some sense of guilt/regret for WW2 destruction in the words of Strauß and Teltschik years ago. But none whatsoever with statements by Ursula von der Leyen or Annalena Baerbock. Ursula understands as little about Europe as Annalena does about peace. They want to pay for the current NATO/Russia war damages by shamelessly stealing Russian assets; they never mention a word about Kiev’s war that started in 2014.

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister, Arkadiusz Mularczyk, knows what is to be expected from a West German government which did not hesitate to pay bonus old-age pensions to former non-German Wehrmacht soldiers and SS members in Eastern Europe. He should express his complaints more often: “These German policies must be exposed to the world.”