A couple of bishops have angered the Polish government, led by PM Donald Tusk, so much so that it has filed a complaint with the Vatican. The former Bishop of Włocławek, Wiesław Mering, said Poles “are ruled by people who call themselves Germans” and called Tusk’s government “political gangsters.” Meanwhile, Bishop Antoni Długosz publicly supported the citizen patrols along the German-Polish border.

Now, Professor Mariusz Muszyński, a former judge and vice-president of the Constitutional Tribunal and former chairman of the board of the “Polish-German Reconciliation” Foundation, is responding to the “outrage” over the former comments, with some insights of his own in a piece in Do Rzeczy entitled “Are we really ruled by Germans?”

Starting out the piece by introducing himself as someone who has spent decades in his field and dedicated some 15 years to the legal aspects of Polish-German relations, including the consequences of World War II, Muszyński came quickly to the point:

“Working for Germany is a vast underground factory. And many things happen at levels hidden from public view. An analysis of the entire Polish state policy towards Germany after 1990 shows that, during the periods when certain political formations were in power, we can clearly identify situations where the authorities’ decisions were made decisively in the interests of Germany, not Poland,” he writes. 

He then gives an example from the 1990s, when Chancellor Kohl donated 500 million marks to the Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation, for what he calls “pseudo-reparations” for victims of Germany’s WWII crimes. This was supposed to be a much larger sum, but Muszyński explains, that the Liberal Democratic Congress (the predecessor of the Civic Platform) in power at the time was expected to accept this sum, no questions asked. 

The former judge also details the advantages over the years of being on Germany’s side. “Pro-Germanism opened the door to promotions. I recall the long-term appointment of Polish ambassadors in Germany, whose connections with Germany and Germanophilia were almost unambiguous,” he says.

As for Muszyński, he was not so lucky, as he repeatedly wrote articles and took stances that questioned the treatment of property (repossession) belonging to displaced Poles in Germany post-WWII as well as the use of funds intended for Polish victims of German war crimes. In the winter of 2008, after filing a lawsuit regarding the latter, when the PO-PSL government was in power, he was dismissed from his position as a representative of the Polish government at the German “Remembrance, Responsibility, Future” Foundation and as president of the Polish-German “Reconciliation” Foundation. The lawsuit was then speedily withdrawn. 

Muszyński also brings up the recent oil discovery by Poland in the Pomeranian Gulf, which Germany has called out for being bad for the environment and “a business whose time is ending.”

“It is not surprising when we hear statements from leading politicians that there is no legal basis for German payment of reparations to Poland. Even the current prime minister, who held such a position publicly in the presence of the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, does not hide his acceptance of the German refusal,” he writes. 

A statute from a German Basic Law provision creates the so-called German status, which in the post-war years guaranteed hundreds of thousands of German expelled people, who did not formally have the citizenship of the German state, treatment as if they were citizens. He also opened the legal gate for them to quickly obtain German citizenship and, as a result, integration with the rest of society.

Lastly, the professor calls out Polish citizens who also hold German citizenship, claiming there is a “German minority in the Polish Sejm” due to citizenship granted to those Poles from regions formerly under German rule, namely, West Pomerania, part of Silesia, Lubuskie Voivodeship, Szczecin, and Gdańsk. 

“Any person whose ancestor – grandfather, great-grandfather – lived in this area during the indicated period, and was a citizen of the Reich, or at least signed a volkslist, meets the premises of this provision – so he is German in the sense of the German Basic Law,” he writes, calling this “not only unfriendly to Poland” but “also questionable from the perspective of international law.” 

“From Poland’s perspective, all this shows that the probability that we are ruled by Germany is very high. And it is not only the Germans in the moral and political context, who built their current careers on German money, but it is very possible that even Germans in the legal sense. And if they only feel this connection with the German state, whether based on a financial or genealogical level, and put it above loyalty to Poland, whose citizenship they have, then the Polish state has a serious problem,” Muszyński concludes. 

It should be noted that Remix News checked this claim about Polish politicians having German citizenship in the Sejm and there is no publicly available data on this topic that could be found. It appears that this information is not collected. The author of Do Rzeczy does not cite where he is getting this data from or cite any specific politician.