@Potemkin, so it took you a few days Googling to come up with something I could have told you in the beginning.
The text you link confirms my argument on the topic we were discussing. You just quoted the wrong passage.
Since 2004, when Poland joined the European Union, the border that was once so contested has existed only on paper. 670,000 Polish nationals now live and work in Germany.
In the absence of a peace treaty, Germany always rejected the post-war partitioning of the country; however, Willy Brandt's
Ostpolitik led to the
de facto recognition of the GDR (and therefore the
Oder-Neisse border) in the 1970s. In the 80s people had given up on the idea of German reunification (rendering the issue of the
Oder-Neisse border mute), but when reunification did come unexpectedly, Kohl had to concentrate all his efforts to overcome British opposition to reunification. He certainly would not have pushed further to make any territorial claims on Poland.
History has proved that he was perfectly right to make the official recognition of the
Oder-Neisse border conditional on a post-war settlement to stop the Poles from demanding war reparations for all eternity. That doesn’t of course stop Polish nationalists from pulling the reparations demands out of the hat to stir nationalistic hatred ahead of elections.
And why should we have to wipe the ethnic cleansing of over 30 million ethnic Germans under the carpet at a time we keep on discussing the Armenian genocide that happened more than a century ago?
I can’t even blame you for your biased view of history because you have never known anything but the brainwashing from the British media which is profoundly imbued with anti-German and anti-EU propaganda.