Poland plans to seek $1.3T in reparations from Germany for WWII

Poland was reshaped without having anything to say and without asking for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference#Eastern_Bloc

And also lost whole lot of land in the process.

They said is, not was

if that's what you're waiting on, then you're selling yourself short. at this point, you should be able to capitalize on any income/wealth that that mule and 40acres could have generated in the time between the agreement and the agreement not being fulfilled.

Incredibly, this isn't actually true, though it's tempting to think so from looking at the shapes on the map.

The border actually follows the Lusatian Neisse, and then the Oder river, except in the vicinity of the port city of Szczecin; this is the border set by the Allies at the Potsdam Conference after the end of World War 2.

The mine on the eastern side of the river became Poland, but it was still supplying a power plant on the west side of the river in East Germany [1]. Later, in 1962, Poland built its own power plant [2].

The Soviets and the Polish wanted to push this border as far west as possible, while the western allies wanted to set it was far northeast as possible to more closely approximate the German-Polish ethnic divide at the time. Various compromise options were proposed, following various rivers, but in the end the western allies agreed to the Soviet proposal. Germans in these territories gained by Poland were expelled. (Meanwhile, the Soviets took the eastern half of previous Poland and made it [3] part of the Soviet Union, specifically the constituent republics of Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania... it was a messy time.)

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Hirschfelde [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tur%C3%B3w_Power_Station [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kresy

> Remember when France paid even more in 1815 and 1871

The reason for anything big and complicated like a war could probably occupy thousands of pages of discussion. But I'd like to jot down what I see as one major difference here between Germany's experience to close out WWI and France's and most other countries' experience in past wars.

Unlike many large-scale past wars in Europe, the sequence of events in WWI wasn't exactly "Some country's leaders get angry for one stupid reason or another, those countries fight and one side ends up winning, and then both sides come to the negotiating table and come up with a relatively even-handed peace-deal based on the actual events of the war that felt like a fairly won or lost outcome that almost anybody could come to accept".

You had legitimate peace overtures from the Central powers midway through WWI that were blocked because the Allies were behind the scenes agitating to get the Americans involved on their side. And then at the end, because the inclusion of American resources so totally flipped the outcome of the war (what would have likely been a modest Allied victory with reasonable peace negotiations changed into a big win and the Allies having the power to demand whatever they wanted), the Allies could exact revenge and gain incredible wealth + continental power over their biggest economic rivals.

Do your history books go into the German Revolution of 1918–1919? And the real poverty and unseemliness of the Weimar Republic? All of these events and the fallout is arguably tied into this major difference with WWI being flipped by an outsider. And it's easy to see how this difference contributed to some really bad times later on. Hell, I shouldn't even say WWI and WWII, IMO this time period was really one big war with a long intermission.