Robert Bosch Academy’s research fellow whitewashes Nazi German war crimes

According to the Jewish scholar Szymon Datner, out of 200,000 Jews who managed to escape Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland, approximately 100,000 survived thanks to assistance provided by Polish residents, another 100,000 people were seized by Nazi authorities and murdered (Sz. Datner, Las sprawiedliwych (Forest of the Righteous), Warsaw 1968).

But Sławomir Sierakowski, a left-wing research fellow at the German Robert Bosch Academy, knows that he should never bite the hand that feeds him. In an opinion story for the Project Syndicate, reprinted by the Irish Examiner, he “dutifully” whitewashes Nazi German war crimes putting the blame for the death of 2/3 of fugitive Jews on Poles:

“According to the book’s tally of nine German-occupied Polish counties, two-thirds of the 250,000 Jews who escaped during the Nazis’ liquidation of Jewish ghettos in 1942 had been killed by 1945, most of them by Poles or with Polish participation.”

The quoted book (Night Without an End), authored among others by the controversial Polish-Canadian scholar Jan Grabowski from the Ottawa University, was widely criticized in Poland due to very selective quantitative research methods. But for Sierakowski, who is obviously deaf to critical voices condemning Grabowski’s misconduct, weak research methodology is not a problem.

He lashes out at the Polish government in exile by claiming that a mechanism of “systematic help and support to Jewish people by the Polish Underground State… is an invented story.” According to the fellow of Robert Bosch Academy, the Polish “Zegota”, the only organization in occupied Europe which systematically rescued Jews, is a fiction, the death sentence for Poles collaborating with Germans is an invention of the present Polish government, and the 6,863 Polish Righteous in Yad Vashem “is pure casuistry.”

We must ask, why does the Robert Bosch Academy promote this young left-wing propagandist and tweets his Project Syndicate slurs?

After passing a controversial law proscribing any mention of Polish complicity in crimes committed by the #Nazis in #WorldWar2, Poland’s populist government is now backpedaling. Slawomir Sierakowski via @ProSyn https://t.co/NzgSIDgYQm— Robert Bosch Academy (@BoschAcademy) 14. August 2018

The Academy belongs to the influential Robert Bosch Foundation. Foundation’s CEO Joachim Rogall, is a professor specializing in Eastern European history. How malicious must the Academy be, that they tweet the hateful story of Sierakowski, knowing that Nazi Germans murdered 6 million Polish citizens and that most of the fugitive Jews were killed by Germans and not by Poles? Has the Academy ever commemorated those Poles who risked their lives for helping Jews? Has it ever invited a scholar researching on the Nazi German genocide of Poles?

The behavior of the Academy is not an exception. It is just one of many examples of German institutions promoting Poles who falsify the WWII history, who spit on Polish Catholic Church or attack the present Polish government.

The propaganda war goes on, but sadly the Polish government does not enough to defend Poland’s good name, to promote honest foreign historians researching the WWII history and to expose obvious lies of people like Sierakowski.