Poland’s Senate has approved a controversial bill making it illegal to accuse the Polish nation or state of complicity in the Nazi Holocaust by a vote, with only two abstentions, of 57 to 23 for the bill.
The proposal requires approval by President Andrzej Duda, who supports it, to become law. “We have to send a clear signal to the world that we won’t allow for Poland to continue being insulted,” Patryk Jaki, a deputy justice minister, told reporters in parliament.
Poland has long objected to phrases that suggest shared responsibility for Nazi Germany’s actions. President Andrzej Duda says Poland has the right “to defend historical truth.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described it as an attempt to rewrite history and deny the Holocaust. It has outraged Israeli MPs, who are now seeking to strengthen their own Holocaust denial laws.
As a result, a diplomatic dispute and bitter recriminations have exposed painful historical baggage on both sides despite years of reconciliation efforts—anger by Poles who feel wrongly depicted as anti-Semites and by Israelis who fear Poland wants to whitewash the persecution that Jews suffered in Poland.
Poland’s Position: What Triggered the Law?
The country has long objected to the use of phrases like “Polish death camps,” which suggest the Polish state in some way shared responsibility for camps such as Auschwitz. The camps were built and operated by Nazi Germany after it invaded and occupied Poland in 1939.
Throughout years of Nazi occupation in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died between 1939 and 1945, a number of Polish underground movements resisted the Nazis. It is that chapter of history that the ruling Law and Justice Party wants to emphasize. But historians have long argued that it’s not the full story; some Poles, they say, were complicit in the Nazi crimes as well.
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party vowed to push through the bill soon after coming to power in 2015, depicting it as a way of protecting Poland’s good name. After an initial uproar, the issue seemed to have been dropped, only to reappear last week, when the lower house of parliament approved it on the eve of the January 27th International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Polish government officials argue the law is needed to fight expressions like “Polish death camps” for the camps Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during World War II. While “Polish” is almost always used as a geographic designator, Poles still object because they feel it defames Poland for the Nazi-run camps, where Poles made up the largest group of victims after Jews.
What does the bill make illegal in Poland? The legislation criminalizes any mention of Poles “being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.” The harshest penalties are reserved for those who refer to Nazi-era concentration camps such as Auschwitz as “Polish death camps.” Only scientific research into the war and artistic work are exempted.
The more contentious point raised by the bill is whether it will outlaw references to acts of individual complicity by Poles with the Nazis—something historians say there is clear evidence for.
Former President Barack Obama caused an uproar in Poland when he used the phrase “Polish death camp” while posthumously bestowing a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 to Jan Karski, a Polish World War II resistance fighter. Obama apologized for using the phrase after being denounced by current European Council President Donald Tusk, who was then the prime minister of Poland.
Three years later, then-FBI director James B. Comey also appeared to equate the country’s role in the Holocaust to that of Germany. Mr. Comey wrote: “In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do.”
Both remarks outraged Poland and sparked a diplomatic crisis; then-Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused Obama of “ignorance, lack of knowledge, [and] bad intentions.” Despite the outrage, Poland failed to pass a law to ban the term in 2013.
Israel’s Objections
The bill sparked outrage in Israel after it passed through Poland’s parliament on January 26. Israeli officials strongly object to the law and say the issue is not the language about “Polish death camps.” Instead, they see the law as part of a slippery slope that minimizes the role of Poles in the Holocaust as well as the painful Jewish history in the country.
“The legislation will not help further the exposure of historical truth and may harm freedom of research, as well as prevent discussion of the historical message and legacy of World War II,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Yisrael Katz, Israel’s intelligence minister, urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to recall Israel’s ambassador to Poland to protest the passage of the bill. Katz said the bill’s passage “constitutes a denial of responsibility of Poland’s role in the Jewish Holocaust.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu warned that Israel has “no tolerance for the distortion of the truth, and rewriting history or denying the Holocaust.” The prime ministers of Poland and Israel agreed after speaking by phone Sunday night to try to resolve differences over the legislation by convening a group of history experts.
Opposition MP Tzipi Livni of the Zionist Union party—usually a staunch critic of Mr. Netanyahu—said, “They have spat in Israel’s face twice, firstly as the state of the Jewish people that is trying to prevent a second Holocaust, and secondly in the face of an Israeli prime minister who had reached an agreement with his Polish counterpart, and had it ignored.”
Israel’s parliament members are also reportedly considering retaliatory measures, making the denial of the Holocaust, or of those who aided the Nazis, punishable by a jail term. Israeli MPs are backing a bill that would expand Israel’s existing Holocaust denial laws to include a five-year jail sentence for anyone denying or minimizing the role of Nazi collaborators, including Poles, in crimes committed in the Holocaust. Now, the amended law would also give legal aid to any Holocaust survivor telling their story who is prosecuted in a foreign country.
Israeli media have been filled with interviews in recent days of Holocaust survivors talking about mistreatment at the hands of Polish neighbors and others. Emmanuel Nahshon, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a recent tweet: “Dear Polish followers — the issue is NOT the death camps. Of course, they were not Polish. Those were German death camps. The issue is the legitimate and essential freedom to talk about the involvement of Poles in the murder of Jews without fear or threat of penalization. Simple.”
US Warnings
In a statement following the approval of the bill, the US State Department called on Poland to reevaluate the legislation, warning of divisions that could affect Warsaw’s strategic interests and relationships. The United States firmly warned Poland that to go forward with the law could hurt its strategic interests and “our ability to be effective partners.”
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the US understands that phrases like “Polish death camps” are “inaccurate, misleading, and hurtful,” but voiced concern the legislation could undermine free speech and academic discourse.
“We are also concerned about the repercussions this draft legislation, if enacted, could have on Poland’s strategic interests and relationships—including with the United States and Israel,” she said. “The resulting divisions that may arise among our allies benefit only our rivals.”
Geopolitical and Historical Repercussions
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish coalition has found some common ground with conservative governments, like the one in Poland, over issues like combating the threats of Islamic militancy. But the dispute with Poland exposes how delicate those relations can be.
The Poland-Israel dispute has elicited bitter recriminations on both sides. Some Israelis have accused the mostly Catholic Poles of being driven by anti-Semitism and trying to deny the Holocaust. Poles believe they are being defamed by being linked to German crimes of which they were one of the largest groups of victims.
The prevailing view in Israel and among Holocaust scholars everywhere is that Poland has a long history of anti-Semitism, and that many Poles were willing to at least look the other way, if not actively collaborate, with the Nazis.
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, agreed that the term “Polish death camps” was a historical misrepresentation. “However, restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people’s direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion.”
Before the outbreak of World War II, Jews had lived in Poland for centuries, thriving in some eras and even becoming the world’s largest Jewish population at one point. But anti-Semitism in the decades before the war had grown virulent, driving many Polish Jews to emigrate, some becoming Israel’s founders and settlers.
According to historical evidence, there were over one million people, the majority of them Polish Jews, who died in the Nazi Germany-controlled Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, located south of modern-day Poland. Millions more Polish Jews and other non-Jewish Polish civilians were murdered across the country.
Poland’s right-wing government, while acknowledging that some Poles blackmailed Jews in hiding to enrich themselves, is keen to promote the history of Poland as a victim of not just the Nazis, but also the Soviets. Polish politicians who are supporting the bill have insisted that Germany should be blamed solely for the Holocaust.
The government is rightly proud that more Poles are honored in Israel for saving Jews during the war than citizens of any other nation in occupied Europe. But Polish-Jewish relations during the war were complex—they were neither black nor white.
A historian and well-known “Nazi hunter” at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, told the Times of Israel, the “number of collaborators runs into many thousands. The Polish state was not complicit in the Holocaust, but many Poles were.”
The Holocaust Memorial Museum in the US said many Polish citizens “were complicit in the crimes against Jews,” even as it acknowledged that thousands of Poles also risked their lives to save their Jewish neighbors.
Holocaust historians and other scholars, in Poland and abroad, have come out firmly against the law, with many saying it will lead to self-censorship. The government denies the bill was intended to limit free expression or rewrite history, but critics say otherwise.
