A FAR-RIGHT rally against the restitution of Jewish property confiscated during the second world war drew thousands of people onto the streets of the Polish capital Warsaw at the weekend.

Organisers claimed that the march from Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s office to the US embassy simply expressed the view that, as a victim of German invasion, the country should not have to offer compensation to the invasion’s victims and that Poland itself had never received reparations.

In fact, Poland received reparations from East Germany until waiving them in 1954. Victims of nazi slave labour camps received further payments from reunified Germany and Austria in the 1990s. Polish citizens in many areas participated in the mass murders of Jews that followed German invasion.

Demonstrators claimed that the US was subordinating Poland to “Jewish interests” and many carried placards reading: “Poland has no obligations” and “Holocaust hyenas.”

Others chanted: “This is Poland, not Polin” (the Hebrew word for Poland). T-shirts seen among the crowd vowed: “Death to the enemies of the fatherland” and “I will not apologise for Jedwabne” (a pogrom that took place on July 10 1941, in which at least 340 Jews were murdered by Poles in the presence of German police, 300 by being locked in a barn and burnt alive).

Some marchers bore US Confederate flags, in a nod to the white supremacist movement across the Atlantic.

Rafal Pankowski of Polish anti-racist campaign Never Again said the march was “probably the biggest openly anti-Jewish street demonstration in Europe in recent years.”