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WARSAW - Poland's foreign minister has expressed alarm about property claims lodged by German post-war refugees with the European Court of Human Rights, saying they could harm Polish-German relations.
A group of 23 German refugees or their relatives have filed the claims through a pressure group called the Preussische Treuhand, or Prussian Trust, citing articles of the European Convention of Human Rights concerning property rights and discrimination.
They say they were unlawfully deprived of their property when they or their relations were forcibly evicted from Poland after World War Two ended in 1945.
Some 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Poland and the former Czechoslovakia after the war as international boundaries were redrawn and the frontiers of Poland, in particular, were moved west.
Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga said the reports, if true, would amount to an attempt to "reverse the moral responsibility for the results of World War Two (which) began with the Third Reich's aggression against Poland".
"I have received the reports with the greatest alarm," she said in a statement published by the Polish news agency PAP.
"The complaint against Poland may adversely affect Polish-German dialogue and, in the long run, could disrupt Polish-German relations."
Many of the refugees ended up in southern Germany, where they represent a significant political lobby. But the German government has made clear it does not support the claims, and this was welcomed by other Polish politicians on Saturday.
"The German government immediately disassociated itself from the complaint, and that is a good sign," Pawel Zalewski, the head of the Polish parliament's foreign affairs committee, told a news conference on Saturday.
He said the situation was being monitored closely but added:
"At present, it is a marginal one in terms of Polish-German relations ... so the matter must be viewed in the proper proportions."
- REUTERS
