The announcement coincided with ceremonies marking the 67th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and with a dispute between Berlin and Warsaw over historical truth.
The new nationalist Polish government, headed by twin brothers Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski, prime minister and president, are suspicious of Germany. They are outraged about an exhibition in Berlin on the plight of the millions of ethnic Germans expelled from eastern Europe, and alarmed at Russo-German energy pacts to bypass Poland and leave it vulnerable to Russian pressure.
"We are sitting in a city that was 80% destroyed by the Germans," Adam Lipinski, an aide to the prime minister, said of the Nazi razing of Warsaw in 1944. "How can we not have anything against the Germans? There's a huge amount of resentment among Poles. The Germans need to take into account that the Poles are very sensitive to what they say about the past."
The Stalinists who took over Poland at the end of the war calculated in 1947 that 6,028,000 Poles lost their lives in the war. Some 5 million were civilians. Half were Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
The project will take years to complete but could then be augmented by an even bigger undertaking to catalogue depredations inflicted by the Soviet Union.
There is widespread sentiment in Poland that the outside world still fails to appreciate what Hitler and Stalin did to their country.