Germany: Prussian Claims Trust intends to bring lawsuit to European Court of Human Rights, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
Rudi Pawelka is Poland's worst nightmare. The 66-year-old German head of the "Prussian Claims Trust" has caused huge upset in German-Polish relations in the last two years, but the worst is yet to come.
Mr Pawelka says his private organisation is in the final stages of preparing a class-action lawsuit against the Polish government in the European Court of Human Rights, demanding compensation from Warsaw for what Mr Pawelka calls "our victims".
By that he means up to 14 million Germans forced to flee westward with whatever they could carry after the Allies redrew the postwar borders of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic in 1945. Those who were expelled left behind homes and businesses and up to two million people died during the march, from hunger and disease and at the hands of Nazi victims out for vengeance.
From a Polish perspective, Germans demanding compensation from Poland is an attempt to turn history on its head and an affront to the six million Poles who died at Nazi hands.
Mr Pawelka fled westward with his family on the last train to leave Breslau, today Wroclaw, in February 1945 as the Soviet army approached from the east. His family held out hope of one day being able to return to Breslau, until the expulsion of millions of Germans in the months and years that followed made it clear that there was no going home. "I am a victim," he says. "I didn't do anything to anyone, neither did my family, but we lost everything."
He is driven by a "strong sense of justice" that the expelled Germans suffered a collective punishment that breaches international human rights and, as such, entitles them to compensation.
As compensation, the Prussian Claims Trust is demanding a return of lost property in what is now western Poland. If the property is currently occupied, they are prepared to accept compensation from the Polish government or an alternative property. "We don't want to drive old ladies from their homes," he says. "We want to establish a legal basis that what happened was unjust, then we talk [with Warsaw]."
The claim has faced numerous delays, mostly because a succession of lawyers took on the case and promptly dropped it again. One of those was Berlin lawyer Matthias Druba, who has fought high-profile compensation claims for Jewish families who lost property in the flight from Nazi Germany.
Mr Druba suggests that the Prussian Claims Trust approached him because of this compensation experience and "to give the impression that they're not unteachable warmongers or old Nazis".
That's the impression Mr Pawelka gives when discussing the compensation claim. It is clear that, behind his remorseful platitudes, he has absolutely no empathy with Polish victims of Nazi aggression.
Asked how a German can demand compensation for a lost home from a Pole who perhaps lost their home and entire family to the Nazis, Mr Pawelka responds with a mock sympathetic expression that becomes an unpleasant smile.
Ask why he's smiling, and he replies: "Because I've heard these old arguments before." Mr Pawelka demands justice and dignity for German "victims" yet views the millions of Polish victims of Nazism as tired arguments.
"What about a 15-year-old German girl raped and sent to Siberia?" he counters.
Mr Pawelka claims not to want to relativise the horror Germany unleashed on Europe, yet does exactly that in the same breath. He pulls from history examples of Polish aggression against Germans or ethnic Germans living in Poland, and talks himself into a lather like a truculent neo-Nazi.
"We want that the people who carried out these crimes cannot profit from them," he says, suggesting that he is referring to the Poles as perpetrators.
This is the kind of talk that confirms the widely held Polish suspicion that the recent, belated discussion in Germany about the expulsion is just a step in a long-term plan to blur the distinction between perpetrator and victim.
Germans view this concern as just another emotional, irrational Polish fear, a fear they cannot or do not want to understand.
Officially, Berlin "distances" itself from these claims, but it stops short of condemning the efforts of the Prussian Claims Trust for fear of being sued itself.
Berlin hopes that this awkward lawsuit will run into the sand. But Mr Pawelka is determined to confront "Polish ignorance towards other victims", even if this causes huge upset in Poland.
The German expulsion is only now, six decades on, being discussed in Germany as part of a wider discussion on the victims of the war.
It would be another tragedy if, in breaking this last taboo of the Nazi era, Berlin was unable to prevent a self-described German "victim" wagging a moral finger at Polish "perpetrators" in a European court.