Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by taway_1212 3336 days ago
Yep I totally agree. The reparations wouldn't need to excessive - let's say Germany would pay 2-4% of their GDP every year to the victims until all damage they caused was repaired. That would probably take hundreds of years, but would be very bearable for the Germany and also pretty fair.
1 comments
darklajid 3336 days ago
How would you even define these damages? I understand property damages, those are easy enough to calculate.

But you're talking about money/financial compensation for - in my world - invaluable things (grief, trauma, loss of life).

Judges have a hard time coming up with these on a much smaller scale and expectations for compensation vary wildly (my impression is that you can get a loooot of money in the US while the amounts would be a magnitude or two lower in Europe).

I'm not saying that we should forget about everything that happened (and people around me don't as far as I know), but I feel that your suggestion isn't easily done.

I'm from Germany, in case that matters.

link
taway_1212 3336 days ago
As for material/financial compensations, I think it would be calculatable. We could take into account:

- damaged/destroyed infrastructure/housing/factories

- resources robbed during occupation (Poland was heavily deforested for example).

- value of slave labor

- predicted lifetime economic output of people who were killed during the war (this prediciton could be tricky)

There should also be individual payments for people who suffered hardships during the war, such as:

- malnutrition (Germany's central planning had entire Polish population on 700 kcal per day, which wasn't much more than Auschwitz's daily ratio. Luckily, Germans didn't manage to totally control the Polish agrarian economy so, thanks to the black market, we didn't quite starve as quickly as the plan assumed).

- slave labor

- torture

- loss of health

- loss of family members

For the above section, I'd argue for amounts proportional to the standard of living in Poland back in 1939, which wasn't very high (i.e. I wouldn't want modern US-style $10m per head settlements).

The hardest part to estimate are the reparations for murder of political, economical, scientific, social and artistic leaders/talents. I'm really at loss here.

link