During the Polish-German intergovernmental consultations in early July, it was agreed that Germany would develop a plan to support the still-living victims of the Nazi occupation of Poland.

According to Polish media outlet Onet, citing sources in Berlin, Germany was ready to announce the allocation of €200 million in compensation to these victims.

However, the website reported that the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, to the surprise of the German side, did not accept the proposal. He allegedly considered the proposed amount to be too low and disproportionate to the payments made by Germany to still-living citizens of Israel.

The previous PiS government had also sought reparations from Germany, however, they took a more confrontational approach and handed Germany a bill of €1.3 trillion.

The current government has said that it won’t follow this approach and seeks to tighten the two country’s relationships in other ways instead, such as providing support in securing Poland’s eastern border against Russia.

Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, who was appointed minister for foreign affairs’ plenipotentiary for intercommunal and border area cooperation in June, has given an interview to German public broadcaster, Deutschlandfunk, where he expressed he’s “optimistic” about the talks on German reparations for Polish world WWII victims.

Ruchniewicz, a historian and German scholar, was tasked with aiding the negotiations and smoothing out the relationship between Poland and Germany after Poland’s previous ring-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government put a sharp dent in these relations.

He stressed that “victims [of the war] should be at the center of attention.”