Warsaw, Poland: Poland's foreign minister signed an official document on Monday requesting nearly $1.3 trillion in reparations for the Nazi Germans' occupation during World War II.
Its main element was the publication of a report prepared by a special parliamentary committee of experts on the estimated value of losses suffered by Poland as a result of the Second World War.
Politicians estimate the total loss of Poland during the German occupation at PLN 6.2 trillion (€1.3 trillion), adding the loss of human capital, damage to buildings and infrastructure, and reparations for Nazi Germany's crimes.
Zbigniew Rau said the note will be handed to Germany's Foreign Ministry. The signing comes on the eve of Rau's meeting in Warsaw with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who will attend a security conference.
Rao said the note expressed his view that both sides should take action "without delay" to address the consequences of Germany's occupation of 1939-45 in a "permanent, complex, legal and material manner".
He said this would include German reparations and solving the problem of looted artworks, archives and bank deposits.
Warsaw says that payment of reparations would strengthen bilateral relations through truth and justice and would close painful chapters from the past. Germany says the matter was closed decades ago.
Baerbock said in Berlin before departing for Poland that the two European neighbours and partners have a "responsibility to preserve the trust we have built together over the past 30 years."
Baerbock stressed that "this includes coming to terms with and remembering the immeasurable suffering that Germany brought upon the people of Poland."
Poland's right-wing government argues that Germany, now one of the EU's main partners and neighbour, has not fully compensated the country.
Under pressure from the Soviet Union, the Polish government reneged on a 1953 declaration by then-communist leaders that Poland would make no further claims on Germany.
Germany argues that the Eastern Bloc countries were compensated in the post-war years, while the territory lost to Poland in the east due to the redrawing of borders was made up of some of Germany's pre-war land. Berlin closed the matter. It was Moscow that decided Poland would receive only a small fraction of the compensation.
In the 1990s, Germany paid one-time compensation to former inmates of Nazi concentration camps and victims of forced labour, including many Poles.
Despite good bilateral relations, Poland's most powerful politician, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has recently made increasingly hostile remarks about Germany, recalling its wartime guilt and its dominance of the European Union.
Critics see it as a ploy aimed at rallying support ahead of next fall's general election. Opinion polls suggest the ruling Law and Justice Party and its allies could lose the slim majority that would allow them to pass legislation without negotiating with other parties.
Around 6 million of Poland's citizens, including 3 million Jews, were killed in the war. Some of them were victims of the Soviet Red Army that invaded from the east.