Does Germany owe the Czech Republic for unpaid war reparations? No, the Czech Republic and Germany agreed to close the issue of WWII reparations in 1997, when both countries agreed not to burden their relationship with political and legal issues from the past.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) where it was published by TikTok on September 8 with captions in Czech, translated into English by Lead Stories staff, reading:
Germans owe us 14 billion
Reparations to Power Industry
The claim stated that Germany could settle war reparations by handing over nuclear power plants it plans to stop operating in the future.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Sep 12 07:44:58 2023 UTC)
The Czech Republic considers the issue of war reparations from Germany officially closed and thus Germany does not owe the country any form of compensation, according to the Czech Foreign Ministry. The war reparations issue was settled when the two countries signed the Czech-German declaration in 1997, Foreign Ministry spokesman Daniel Drake told Lead Stories in an email.
The declaration text says that both sides agreed that "injustice inflicted in the past, belongs in the past". It continues, saying Germany and the Czech Republic "will not burden" their relationship with political and legal issues, which stem from the past.
German war reparations were awarded to Allied governments during the Potsdam Conference after Germany surrendered in 1945. Czechoslovakia also began the forced expulsion and property confiscations of millions of mainly ethnic Germans, from the country´s border regions, or the Sudetenlands, right after the war ended.
The amounts to be paid by Germany for reparations to individual countries were later determined in Paris in 1946 in an agreement signed by 18 Allied governments. According to the Foreign Ministry website, Czechoslovakia's share of reparations amounted to 306 billion Czechoslovak Crowns, a currency no longer in use following the split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. The website says the country received 230 million Czechoslovak crowns from Germany and that further reparations could not be made due to "objective international-political realities" of post-war Europe. It also cited the fact that West Germany and Czechoslovakia did not establish diplomatic relations until 1973 as one of the obstacles to proceeding with reparations.
