In historical discussions of World War II, "Polish death camp" and "Polish concentration camp" are ambiguous expressions which, while accurately describing the location of the camps in Poland, are misconstruable as indicating that these Nazi concentration and extermination camps—established by Nazi Germany in German-occupied Poland during World War II—were established or operated by Poles or by Poland.
Some Poles, including politicians, have viewed use of the expressions "Polish death camp" and "Polish concentration camp", by careless speakers, as having been deliberately intended to disinform.
Poland's subsequent 2018 Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance prompted objections within and outside Poland. The law criminalized public statements ascribing, to the Polish nation, responsibility in Holocaust-related crimes, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, or war crimes, or which "grossly reduce the responsibility of the actual perpetrators". It was generally understood that the law criminalized use of the expressions "Polish death camp" and "Polish concentration camp".
The amendment also prohibited use of the expression "Polish concentration camp" in reference to camps operated by the Polish government after World War II on sites of former Nazi camps. In a January 2018 trial, Newsweek.pl was sentenced for referring to the Zgoda camp, operated by Polish authorities between February and November 1945, as a "Polish concentration camp".
In 2019 Poland's Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the portions of the amendment relating to the expressions "Ukrainian nationalists" and "Eastern Lesser Poland" were null and void.
Historical context
During World War II, three million Polish Jews (90% of the prewar Polish-Jewish population) were killed due to Nazi German genocidal action. At least 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish civilians and soldiers perished. One million non-Polish Jews were also forcibly transported by the Nazis and killed in German-occupied Poland. At least half of 140,000 ethnic Poles deported died in the Auschwitz camp alone.
After the German invasion, Poland, in contrast to cases such as Vichy France, experienced direct German administration rather than an indigenous puppet government.
The western part of prewar Poland was annexed outright by Germany. Some Poles were expelled from the annexed lands to make room for German settlers. Parts of eastern Poland became part of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and Reichskommissariat Ostland. The rest of German-occupied Poland, dubbed by Germany the General Government, was administered by Germany as occupied territory. The General Government received no international recognition. It is estimated that the Germans killed more than 2 million non-Jewish Polish civilians. Nazi German planners called for "the complete destruction" of all Poles, and their fate, as well as that of many other Slavs, was outlined in a genocidal Generalplan Ost (General Plan East).
Historians have generally stated that relatively few Poles collaborated with Nazi Germany, in comparison with the situations in other German-occupied countries. The Polish Underground judicially condemned and executed collaborators, and the Polish Government-in-Exile coordinated resistance to the German occupation, including help for Poland's Jews.
Some Poles were complicit in, or indifferent to, the rounding up of Jews. There are reports of neighbors turning Jews over to the Germans or blackmailing them (see "szmalcownik"). In some cases, Poles themselves killed their Jewish fellow citizens, the most notorious examples being the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom and the 1946 Kielce pogrom, the latter taking place after the German occupation had ended.
However, many Poles risked their lives to hide and assist Jews. Poles were sometimes exposed by Jews they were helping, if the Jews were found by the Germans—resulting in the murder of entire Polish rescue networks. German military police in Grzegorzówka (p. 153) and in Hadle Szklarskie (p.154) extracted from two Jewish women the names of Poles who had been helping Jews, and 11 Polish men were murdered. In Korniaktów Forest, Łańcut County, a Jewish woman, discovered in an underground shelter, revealed the whereabouts of the Polish family who had been feeding her, and the whole family were murdered (p. 167). In Jeziorko, Łowicz County, a Jewish man betrayed all the Polish rescuers known to him, and 13 Poles were murdered by the German military police (p. 160). In Lipowiec Duży (Biłgoraj County), a captured Jew led the Germans to his saviors, and 5 Poles were murdered, including a 6-year-old child, and their farm was burned (p. 174). On a train to Kraków, the Żegota woman courier who was smuggling four Jewish women to safety was shot dead when one of the Jewish women lost her nerve (p. 170). Possibly a million Poles aided Jews; some estimates run as high as three million helpers.Richard C. Lukas, 1989. Poles have the world's highest count of individuals who have been recognized by Israel's Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations — non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from extermination during the Holocaust.
Analysis of the expression Supporting rationale Defenders argue that the expression "Polish death camps" refers strictly to the location of the Nazi death camps and does not indicate involvement by the Polish government in France or, later, in the United Kingdom. Some international politicians and news agencies have apologized for using the term, notably Barack Obama in 2012. CTV Television Network News President Robert Hurst defended CTV's usage (see ) as it "merely denoted geographic location", but the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ruled against it, declaring CTV's use of the term to be unethical. Others have not apologized, saying that it is a fact that Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Chełmno, Bełżec, and Sobibór were situated in German-occupied Poland.
Commenting upon the 2018 bill criminalizing such expressions (see ), Israeli politician (and later Prime Minister) Yair Lapid justified the expression "Polish death camps" with the argument that "hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier". In response, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum released a statement calling Lapid's claims a "conscious lie" and accusing him of "using Holocaust as a political game", and likening his allegation to the claims made by Holocaust deniers.
Criticism of the expression Opponents of the use of these expressions argue that they are inaccurate, as they may suggest that the camps were a responsibility of the Poles, when in fact they were designed, constructed, and operated by the Germans and were used to exterminate both non-Jewish Poles and Polish Jews, as well as Jews transported to the camps by the Germans from across Europe. Historian Geneviève Zubrzycki and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have called the expression a misnomer. It has also been described as "misleading" by The Washington Post editorial board, The New York Times, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, and Nazi hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff. Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem described it as a "historical misrepresentation", and White House spokesman Tommy Vietor referred to its use a "misstatement".
Abraham Foxman of the ADL described the strict geographical defence of the terms as "sloppiness of language", and "dead wrong, highly unfair to Poland". Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Adam Daniel Rotfeld said in 2005 that "Under the pretext that 'it's only a geographic reference', attempts are made to distort history".
Public use of the expression As early as 1944, the expression "Polish death camp" appeared as the title of a Collier's magazine article, entitled "Polish Death Camp". This was an excerpt from the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski's 1944 memoir, Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State (reprinted in 2010 as Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World). Karski himself, in both the book and the article, had used the expression "Jewish death camp", not "Polish death camp". As shown in 2019, the Collier's editor changed the title of Karski's article typescript, "In the Belzec Death Camp", to "Polish Death Camp".
Other early-postwar, 1945 uses of the expression "Polish death camp" occurred in the periodicals Contemporary Jewish Record,Contemporary Jewish Record (American Jewish Committee), 1945, vol. 8, p. 69. Quote: "Most of the 27,000 Jews of Thrace ... were deported to Polish death camps." The Jewish Veteran,Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America 1945, vol. 14, no. 12. Quote: "2,000 Greek Jews repatriated from Polish death camps." and The Palestine Yearbook and Israeli Annual,The Palestine Yearbook and Israeli Annual (Zionist Organization of America) 1945, p. 337. Quote: "3,000,000 were foreign Jews brought to Polish death camps." as well as in a 1947 book, Beyond the Last Path, by Hungarian-born Jew and Belgian resistance fighter Eugene Weinstock and in Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska's 1947 book, Medallions.
A 2016 article by Matt Lebovic stated that West Germany's Agency 114, which during the Cold War recruited former Nazis to West Germany's intelligence service, worked to popularize the term "Polish death camps" in order to minimize German responsibility for, and implicate Poles in, the atrocities.
Mass media On 30 April 2004 a Canadian Television (CTV) Network News report referred to "the Polish camp in Treblinka". The Polish embassy in Canada lodged a complaint with CTV. Robert Hurst of CTV, however, argued that the term "Polish" was used throughout North America in a geographical sense, and declined to issue a correction. The Polish Ambassador to Ottawa then complained to the National Specialty Services Panel of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. The Council rejected Hurst's argument, ruling that the word "'Polish'—similarly to such adjectives as 'English', 'French' and 'German'—had connotations that clearly extended beyond geographic context. Its use with reference to Nazi extermination camps was misleading and improper."
In November 2008, the German newspaper Die Welt called Majdanek concentration camp a "former Polish concentration camp" in an article; it immediately apologized when this was pointed out. In 2009, Zbigniew Osewski, grandson of a Stutthof concentration camp prisoner, sued Axel Springer AG. The case started in 2012; in 2015, the case was dismissed by Warsaw district court.
In the 16 November 2009 edition of Maclean's magazine, the journalist Kathie Engelhart in an article about John Demjanjuk called him a man who had been mistaken for "a notorious sadist at Poland's Treblinka death camp", spoke about "Poland's Treblinka death camp", and stated that Demjanjuk had "served at three Polish camps" as a guard. Engelhart's article led to a formal complaint from Piotr Ogrodziński, the Polish ambassador in Ottawa, who stated: "It's absolutely false that Poles had anything to do with concentration camps, with the exception that they were the first prisoners".
On 23 December 2009, historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian: "Watching a German television news report on the trial of John Demjanjuk a few weeks ago, I was amazed to hear the announcer describe him as a guard in 'the Polish extermination camp Sobibor'. What times are these, when one of the main German TV channels thinks it can describe Nazi camps as 'Polish'? In my experience, the automatic equation of Poland with Catholicism, nationalism and antisemitism – and thence a slide to guilt by association with the Holocaust – is still widespread. This collective stereotyping does no justice to the historical record."
In 2010 the Polish-American Kosciuszko Foundation launched a petition demanding that four major U.S. news organizations endorse use of the expression "German concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland".