One country is the biggest spender as a percentage of GDP on defense in Europe. The other is spending big to catch up. The former is one of Europe’s fastest growing major economies. The latter is the continent’s traditional economic powerhouse. Both acutely recognize the dangers posed by Russia, their adversary to the east.

Poland and Germany, in other words, have the basis for a new special relationship at the heart of Central Europe and a new motor for deeper European integration. Yet relations between Poland and Germany have rarely been as fraught as they are now.

One country is the biggest spender as a percentage of GDP on defense in Europe. The other is spending big to catch up. The former is one of Europe’s fastest growing major economies. The latter is the continent’s traditional economic powerhouse. Both acutely recognize the dangers posed by Russia, their adversary to the east.

Poland and Germany, in other words, have the basis for a new special relationship at the heart of Central Europe and a new motor for deeper European integration. Yet relations between Poland and Germany have rarely been as fraught as they are now.

The two countries should be working hand in glove, particularly when it comes to protecting Europe from the East. Poland has suffered more hybrid attacks on its airspace from Russian drones, alongside disinformation and other malign interference than any other major European Union country. Germany is contributing a small contingent of forces and equipment to Poland’s East Shield project to strengthen its border with Belarus. Military cooperation is just one of several areas where cooperation does take place, but it is stuttering, and everyone suffers as a consequence.

Even if parts of the two governments would like to go further, the atmospherics often get in the way. The iciness is the consequence of the present and past. In deeply divided Poland, history is instrumentalized.

With parliamentary elections due next fall, there are few votes in being seen to be too friendly to the Germans. It has been more than half a century since German Chancellor Willy Brandt made his historic gesture of reconciliation in 1970, dropping to his knees in front of the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto to beg forgiveness for Germany’s World War II crimes. Ties gradually improved after that, particularly after German reunification in 1990 and the removal of communism in both Poland and what was then East Germany.

But in recent years, they have gone backward. The Polish-German Barometer, a survey conducted regularly since 2000 among the German and Polish populations, shows that Polish attitudes toward Germans have significantly worsened in the last few years. Turbocharging this trend has been the ascent of far-right populism across Europe, aided and abetted by the first and second Trump administrations.

In a bid to rally citizens around a unifying cause, the Polish far-right Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ran the government from 2015 to 2023, put reparations for damage caused by the Nazis’ occupation of Poland at the heart of foreign and European policy. Amid increasingly bellicose rhetoric, the then-government commissioned a report that in 2022 calculated the compensation owed at $1.3 trillion. Even though it was more than three times the size of Germany’s annual federal budget, PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski described it as a “conservative.”

The demand was passed overwhelming by the Polish parliament, the Sejm, with even the centrist Civic Platform party of Donald Tusk voting in favor. Even though he became prime minister the following year, ousting the ultranationalist PiS after eight years, Tusk has not shelved the demands—for fear of being seen as “siding” with the Germans. The German government, in advance of bilateral consultations in July 2024, reportedly was set to offer 200 million euros (about $214 million) to support surviving Polish victims of World War II. Warsaw, however, ultimately rejected the proposal.

The issue has continued to rumble, with successive governments in Berlin insisting that the matter has long been legally closed. Germany argues that Poland waived its right to war reparations in 1953, as part of an agreement in which its Eastern Bloc ally East Germany ceded territories beyond the Oder-Neisse border to Poland and Russia. The current Polish government argues that the waiver was agreed under pressure from the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Germany says any outstanding reparations issues were settled with the 2+4 agreement between Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States that sealed reunification in 1990.

In late 2025, the newly installed German ambassador to Warsaw, Miguel Berger, expressed his frustration. “Sometimes I have the impression that some people who talk about reparations do so because they perhaps do not want Polish-German relations to develop positively,” he told a Polish TV station. He went further on social media, declaring that these demands were stoking divisions that help only Russian President Vladimir Putin—to which PiS politicians expressed further fury, and the cycled continued.

In between, progress is made in small steps, such as the return of artifacts looted during the war. A much-awaited memorial to the Polish victims of Nazis in Berlin has yet to fully materialize, however; a temporary stone has been unveiled, but the ultimate monument appears a long way off.

The results of the Polish presidential election last May put paid to hopes of a thaw. Against the odds, the ultranationalist Karol Nawrocki defeated Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, the Civic Platform candidate.

The Polish Constitution, designed in the post-communist era of the early 1990s to prevent any leader from accumulating too much power, has instead produced deadlock over the past decade whenever the posts of president and prime minister have belonged to radically different parties.

Nawrocki has assembled a foreign-policy apparatus of his own. While Tusk has sought to bring Poland closer to the heart of European Union decision-making, Nawrocki has aligned himself firmly with MAGA, endorsing the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS). Indeed, Washington did everything it could to help Nawrocki get elected, inviting him to the White House in the middle of the campaign and receiving formal endorsement via Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump’s secretary of homeland security, when she visited Poland to attend a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

PiS politicians are warmly welcomed in Washington at CPAC events, while the official Polish ambassador—accountable to Tusk and his foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski—struggles to gain access. When Nawrocki went to see Trump for a second time within four months, this time as president, he broke with tradition and invited no one from the foreign ministry to the meeting.

The United States, which is hosting the next G-20 meeting in December in Florida, is reportedly toying with the idea of inviting Nawrocki rather than Tusk. The NSS makes clear the Trump administration’s intention to weaken the EU and to embrace right-wing nationalists in Europe, be they in power, as in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Italy; sharing power, as in Poland; or bidding for it, as in France and Germany.

Yet Poland’s bellicose approach toward Germany is not all dictated by Trump; much of it predates him. Kaczynski, the longtime PiS leader, framed the current nationalist rhetoric in the 2000s, seeing the EU as a den of liberal vice and Germany as pulling its strings. He has regularly declared Poland to be imperiled by these twin threats, talking of a “Fourth Reich” while describing Tusk as a “German agent,” a statement for which he received a rare parliamentary reprimand.

One historical moment is used against Tusk, time and again: the fact that his grandfather served in Nazi Germany’s armed forces during the war. This revelation was seen as one of the key factors behind Tusk’s defeat in the 2005 presidential election. Lost in the noise was that Jozef Tusk didn’t have a choice about being enlisted and later deserted to join the many Poles who fought against Adolf Hitler.

All of this presents a dilemma for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who kept his electoral promise to visit both Paris and Warsaw right after entering office last May, hailing a “new opening” in German-Polish relations. With strains in its relationship with France, Germany would dearly like closer cooperation with Poland, particularly in supporting Ukraine and pushing back against Russia. Those diplomatic efforts continue. The trilateral Weimar Triangle, constituting the governments in Paris, Berlin and Warsaw, has been revived. But overall, the strains show.

Germany’s unilateral decision last year to introduce immigration checks on its border with Poland infuriated Warsaw. When German police began turning back migrants and asylum-seekers, self-declared “citizen patrols” amassed on the Polish side of the border in a bid to stop them from being turned back. As pressure on Tusk grew, he was forced to exclaim that “Poland’s patience is running out.” His government introduced tit-for-tat checks on the Polish side of the border, and while they have since been pared back on both sides, it would not take much for tensions to be inflamed again.