One of the founders of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has called on Poland to pay his country €1.3 billion as reparations for its alleged “complicity” in the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines that linked Germany with Russia across the Baltic Sea.
Kay Gottschalk, the AfD’s parliamentary spokesperson on financial matters, responded last week to a social media post by Dominik Tarczyński, a Polish Conservative (PiS) MEP. He had celebrated the fact that the Republicans in the US criticised the AfD for its criticism of US President Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Germany over Greenland.
“Germany today got a slap in the face from Republican forces,” wrote Tarczyński.
Gottschalk hit back stating: “€1.3 billion should suffice for the complicity in the Nord Stream bombing. My first official act as finance minister will be to assert these claims against Poland. He who laughs last laughs the loudest.”
His reference to Nord Stream concerns the 2022 operation in which explosives were used to damage pipelines in the Baltic Sea that brought Russian gas to Germany, rendering them unusable.
Gottschalk’s claim of Polish “complicity” in the destruction is based on the fact that a Polish court rejected the extradition of a Ukrainian man whom German prosecutors charged with involvement in the sabotage operation.
AfD politicians accused the Polish state of “being an accomplice to terrorists”, with AfD’s co-leader Tino Chrupalla claiming it was as much a threat to Germany as Russia since it was not willing to extradite “terrorists” to face justice in Germany.
Gottschalk’s reference to “reparations” alludes to the $1.3 trillion (€1.1 trillion) claim made by the previous PiS government against Germany for damages sustained during the Second World War. Germany sees that as invalid because the reparations issue was settled between it and the Soviet Union in the 1950s with the then-Communist Polish authorities’ consent.
In November last year, a local AfD activist Fabian Keubel, commenting on reparations, prompted widespread anger in Poland by calling Poles “the African-Americans of Europe” because they “see themselves as the great, pitiable, perennial victim of European history”.
Poland had from the outset criticised the construction of the pipelines. Radosław Sikorski, then Polish defence minister and now the foreign affairs minister, called the project “a repetition of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact”, the pact between Germany and Russia that saw them carve up Poland at the start of the Second World War.
The Poles regarded the Nord Stream project as hostile to their country’s energy interests because it cut both it and Ukraine out of the transmission of Russian natural gas to western Europe.
Poland consistently argued that the project was beneficial to Russia by making western Europe dependent on its gas, an argument taken up by US President Donald Trump during his first term in office (2017-2021).
