“We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past and look to the future.”
Winston Churchill, September 19, 1946, Zurich
Germany and Poland are European Union and NATO members, neighbors committed to the fight against an expansionist Russia with a combined massive economic might. They should be the closest of natural allies, but something is amiss.
On my way to Warsaw for the first time this summer, I listened to a podcast about the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland. One of the co-hosts explained that at the time Germans used to view Poles like the English once saw the Irish – uneducated, unsophisticated and backward.
Warsaw is an impressive city. Humming boutiques and chic restaurants line the streets. Poland today is in the G-20 club of wealthy nations. Many who once left to work for better pay in Germany or England have returned home to thrive in a growing economy.
But this promise of a bright future is interspersed with plaques and monuments detailing Nazi barbarism from a horrible past, namely the Warsaw Uprising launched by the Polish underground in August 1944 to overthrow German rule. Barbarism doesn’t begin to describe the atrocities. The Germans killed around 200,000 Poles – around the same number of Japanese who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The Nazis burned patients alive in hospitals, shot children in orphanages, and hung corpses around the city for all to see.
Every Pole, every family has a story from the war. The memory is deep. An estimated six million or one-fifth of the population died. About half, three million, were Jews and the Germans murdered about 90 percent of Poland’s Jews (tragically sometimes with the collaboration of Christian Poles). But suffering pervaded every corner of the country. The Nazis viewed the Poles and Slavic peoples as subhuman and treated them with corresponding brutality.
Poland remembers other horrors as well. Russia has excelled at subjugating its western neighbor for centuries. Not only did Stalin carve up Poland in collaboration with the Nazis in 1939 but he also extinguished the country’s military elite and sent hundreds of thousands of Poles east to the gulagsK between 1939 and 1941. The Polish underground, led by its labor unions and supported by its Catholic church, challenged and broke Moscow’s yoke until the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s. But any window for Polish hope on its eastern border quickly came to an end with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.
Germany would much rather move on from the war. And they have done a commendable amount to confront their brutal past.
Many Germans say we are not the same people or country. That was our grandparents or great grandparents. We are a modern democratic state with no territorial ambitions outside our borders. We recognize our brutal past, honor the victims, and forward we must go. We signed a binding international border treaty in 1990 with Poland. The four victors of the war resolved any outstanding international issues when Germany reunified in 1991. Moreover, we have paid compensation to victims of Nazi crimes. Our support for Israel is unwavering. We proudly put up Israeli flags across the country after the Hamas attacks of October 7th and the Israeli flag flew next to those of Germany and the European Union on top of the Bundestag. Case closed as far as Berlin is concerned.
But it very much remains open in Poland.
Poland’s recently elected President Karol Nawrocki campaigned in part on German reparations for the war. He and his conservative Law and Justice party predecessors argue that Germany owes Poland 1.3 trillion Euros. He traveled to Berlin in September with that demand in hand and got a stern NO from Berlin, as expected. A press conference between German Chancellor Frederich Merz and Nawrocki was cancelled even as both nations pledged to continue to work against the common Russian threat and the largest war in Europe since 1945.
Meanwhile, Chancellor Merz and his Christian Democrat-led coalition government is undertaking the largest shift in German security policy since the end of the Cold War. The limit on German debt spending was lifted in the spring, to allow for increased defense spending without significantly cutting social welfare spending. The country is on track to be the fourth largest defense spender in the world after the United States, China and Russia, if plans and promises are implemented. It has committed to the NATO goal of 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035. German troops are stationed in Lithuania for the first time since World War II.
The Chancellor visited Washington where he was warmly welcomed by President Trump, negotiated with the British and the French on a path forward with Ukrainian President Zelensky, and creatively worked to purchase American weapons systems for deployment in Ukraine. All a welcome change.
In early September, at the annual gathering of German ambassadors in Berlin, Merz spoke powerfully of a robust German and European national security posture, about standing up for European values, and of Germany’s vital relationship with the United Kingdom, France, and Ukraine.
But something was missing; he didn’t once mention Poland.
That should not happen given Poland’s geographic position between Germany and Russia, its sizable army, and its defense spending at 5 percent of GDP – well ahead of “old Europe,” in the words of the late American Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Thinking back to that podcast and after talking to German and Polish friends, I have the distinct impression that this might well be driven by both a deep-seated German belief that they have paid for their sins and a residual sense of superiority.
I can’t help but be reminded of residual English elite condescension towards the Irish. But the divide between the English memory of empire and dominance of a century ago and the economic reality of today’s Celtic Tiger is massive. Today Ireland’s per capita GDP is second in the EU only to Luxemburg and double that of the United Kingdom. Life in Ireland today is not that of the stereotypical peasant potato farmer of the 1800s.
Similarly, life in today’s Poland is not what it was 20 or 50 years ago. Poland’s economy is not that of its western neighbor, but its achievements are impressive. A prominent American banking executive told me that Poland is a leading growth market for his industry. Multinationals dot the Warsaw skyline.
German and Polish economic interconnectivity is significant. In the first half of 2025, bilateral trade between Germany and Poland reached a record €90 billion, a 5.4 percent increase over 2024. With the United States changing economic course, the European bloc needs to work together more than ever to survive. The Poland-German relationship is important because they need each other to provide a secure and prosperous future for their citizens.
Regarding bilateral political relations, German reparations may be off the table, but Berlin needs to reassess the lasting impact of its Nazi past on contemporary Polish politics and find a reasonable means of trying to heal those wounds. Sharing some of the financial burden that Poland bears as a frontline state against Russia might be a reasonable place to start discussions.
For Poland, it is also important to hear Churchill’s words from 1946. The grand European experiment was designed to override historic feuds with economic and political ties and a collective European future. Germany has consciously chosen its European identity and has become the largest net contributor through the Union to other member states. This experiment has worked, despite many challenges.
Russia is threatening the European order that is integral to both countries. Heightened internal and external economic pressures across the continent are a real challenge to a prosperous future. Too much is on the line for these two countries not to chart a productive future together. Berlin must address its soft bigotry against Poland by recognizing it as the power it is, and Warsaw must work to move past the deep wounds and memory of war.
