Washington’s Weekly Standard falsely accuses Polish elites of sending Jews to death camps in 1930s!
The Washington-based weekly newspaper “Weekly Standard” indulges in FAKE HISTORY. Please read our response.
Dear Editorial,
There is a sentence in this Editorial that demonstrates a worrying lack of factual knowledge.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/trump-cracks-down-on-russiaagain/article/2012210
“Elsewhere in Europe, populist movements court the old prejudice. In Poland, a new law makes it illegal to suggest publicly that “the Polish Nation” was in any way complicit in Nazi crimes: this although Polish Jews were rounded up and sent to death camps in the 1930s with the help of a sizeable number of Polish elites.”
No, they were not! No such help was provided. The Polish elites had either been executed or were incarcerated in German concentration camps.
There were no [German] death camps in the 1930s. The mistake reveals your casual attitude to facts. Perhaps you meant the 1940s? The death camps were built by Nazi Germany. Poland was invaded and brutally occupied by Nazi Germany (& the Soviet Union) in 1939. One of the first things the German invaders did was put the “Polish elites” in German concentration camps such as Auschwitz. The first prisoners in many of these camps were Poles. The Germans put Jews in ghettos first. The German death camps appeared late Dec. 1941 just before Germany contrived “Endlösung”. However, a few months earlier and after Operation Barbarossa, Germany had (German) killing squads looking for Jews.
Don’t take my word for it, here’s the USHMM:
“The German occupation of Poland was exceptionally brutal.”
“The Nazis sought to destroy Polish culture by eliminating the Polish political, religious, and intellectual leadership.”
“In May 1940, the German occupation authorities launched AB-Aktion, a plan to eliminate the Polish intelligentsia and leadership class.”
“Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were deported to German territory for forced labor. Hundreds of thousands were also imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps.
It is estimated that the Germans killed at least 1.9 [2.9] million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War II. In addition, the Germans murdered at least 3 million Jewish citizens of Poland.”
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005473
The Polish nation was destroyed by the invasion from the two most murderous totalitarian regimes in human history. No country other than Poland FOUGHT Nazi Germany for longer; suffered more loss of life (6 million citizens; half of whom were Jewish) or a greater destruction. Despite this Poland did not surrender nor collaborate with the German Nazis. Therefore, as a statement of factual accuracy Poland, as a nation, was not in any way complicit for the rounding up of Jews or the Holocaust.
To (ignorantly) suggest Poland was responsible for the death camps would be considered Holocaust Denial and Distortion under this internationally agreed definition.
“Attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups.”
https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-holocaust-denial-and-distortion
I would further advise that Poland has the most RIGHTEOUS people acknowledged by Yad Vashem despite the fact that in no other German-occupied country was there a death penalty for any person and their family (ie Poles) discovered providing help to Jews.
If the press stopped making an offensive mistake such as “Polish death camp” then perhaps the Polish government may not have considered it necessary to formulate the new law. It is those sort of offensive inaccuracies the [impolitic] law was supposed to tackle. (I would also bet you didn’t read what that law actually stated).
As your mistakes appeared in an Editorial it would be appropriate to correct and apologize using same.