German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced that the Federal Foreign Office would create a special working group to prepare further returns of Polish cultural goods.
He confirmed the return of a precious medieval archive of 73 documents from the 13th to 15th centuries, as well as a carved head of Saint James the Greater, a fragment of a Gothic sculpture from around 1340, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk welcomed the move, calling it a very important gesture. He said he knew it had been the chancellor’s personal decision.
Tusk added that seeing the wax seals of medieval Polish rulers such as King Władysław Jagiełło and King Casimir the Great made his heart swell, because these documents are coming back to Poland after many years of efforts.
The documents form part of a key archive on relations between the Kingdom of Poland and the Teutonic Order, a powerful German Catholic military order that controlled large parts of what is now northern Poland and the Baltic region in the Middle Ages.
According to Polish officials, the papers include land grants, royal privileges and treaties, as well as papal and imperial letters that defined the political map of the region.
One example mentioned by Tusk is a document in which Pope Alexander IV calls on the Teutonic Knights to defend the region together with Poland and other neighbouring states against Tatar incursions.
He said this sounded surprisingly modern, given today’s security debates in Europe.
Poland’s Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska called it a historic day. She said Poland is regaining from Germany priceless Polish–Teutonic archives that were looted during World War II.
She added that the head of Saint James the Greater, a fragment of a 14th-century sculpture stolen after the war, is also coming home. In her words, this is a real breakthrough in talks on the return of looted works of art that have been under way since 1948.
The archive covers documents issued by popes, emperors and European monarchs for the Teutonic Order and Polish rulers.
It includes a 1215 papal protection for the Order, royal charters defining borders, and peace treaties such as a 1422 Polish–Teutonic agreement signed at Lake Mełno.
Many of these records shaped the long and often conflict-ridden relationship between Poland and the Teutonic Knights.
During the talks in Berlin, which took the form of Polish-German intergovernmental consultations, Cienkowska also handed the German side nine new restitution requests, covering 35 cultural objects lost from Polish collections.
Restitution in this context means the formal return of works of art and historical items that were taken illegally, usually during war or occupation.
The new Polish claims include a fragment of a medieval manuscript with the hymn Gaude Mater Polonia, once held by the seminary library in the city of Płock, as well as manuscripts and letters from the former Zamoyski family library.
Poland is also seeking the return of three handwritten diaries by the writer Stefan Żeromski, a 12th-century Limoges medallion from the Czartoryski collection at Gołuchów Castle, railway exhibits, and a 15th-century church bell.
Cienkowska said that the list of documents, antiquities and artworks still waiting to come back to Poland remains long. She stressed that the culture ministry has been working for years to document losses and prepare claims that can stand up in negotiations with foreign museums and archives.
Merz confirmed that a dedicated working group has already been set up and will prepare further returns of cultural goods. He said this was only the beginning of the process.
The culture ministry in Warsaw recalls that the Polish–Teutonic archive had been held for centuries in the royal and state archives of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Polish state.
After Nazi Germany occupied Warsaw in the autumn of 1939, German authorities targeted the most valuable items in the collections. The Teutonic archive was seized and moved through Königsberg and then on to Berlin.
For decades, the originals remained in German state archives while Poland held only paper slips noting what had been taken.
The carved head of Saint James the Greater comes from a Gothic sculpture that once stood on the south wall of the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary inside Malbork Castle, the former headquarters of the Teutonic Order in northern Poland.
The figures were shattered during Soviet shelling of the castle in February 1945. The detached head was smuggled out of Poland around 1957 and bought the following year by a museum in Nuremberg.
Experts in both countries have long known that the head matches a surviving torso held at the castle museum in Malbork. Its return will make it possible to reunite the fragments and display the restored figure inside the castle.
Merz also referred to a temporary monument to Polish victims of Nazism and the German occupation that was unveiled in Berlin in June. The provisional memorial consists of a large stone weighing almost 30 tonnes.
The chancellor said the latest decisions give a new impulse to create a permanent monument to Polish citizens who were victims of World War II and Nazi tyranny between 1939 and 1945.
He added that tenders for the permanent memorial would begin soon on the German side.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP