#GermanDeathCamps

a reply to: CriticalStinker

Yeah. Looks like the government wants the holocaust to be associated with Germans, not Polacks. The prime minister belongs to the nationalist Law & Justice party. The holocaust is problematic for European nationalists, especially in Poland and Germany, and obviously it's something the left likes to bring up. So it makes sense for this party to try and shift that negativity away from Polish nationalists. I don't know how the public service company Polskie Radio is ran right now but looks like the government can just tell them to do this. It's interesting because usually the public service broadcasters in Europe are pretty leftist, and independent. But I think in 2016 the conservative government executed a sort of purge of their public service media. A lot of famous reporters and news anchors where fired or quit, for being to far on the left. So the government has their own picks in place for now, running their agenda.

I'm not saying the old PR was better necessarily, I have no idea, but it is now under tighter control for sure.

Obviously they don't like Merkel's immigration policies either, so it's a bonus to remind people of Germany's Nazi past. I don't think that helps though, the more Germans are guilted for Nazism the more immigrants they're willing to receive.

a reply to: SprocketUK

Well that is just the thing...

though I remember some of the old guys in my granddad's pub who always talked about "Natsees" rather than Germans.

Even when you consider all the air raids, and the fear that the Nazi war machine instilled in people in the UK, and the losses our lads suffered fighting against it, the fear in Britain was as nothing to the immediate threat that people on the continent were often exposed to, especially if they were not only resident in occupied lands, but resisting the Nazis at the time.

They would have a totally different experience of the conflict than either our troops, or our citizens, especially in Poland, which suffered, and I mean SUFFERED under the Nazis. For your grandfathers pub to contain people talking in distinctive terms, rather than general ones, is not uncommon here, because our nation was removed from the actual immersion in war that continental was literally bathed in at the time. But on the continent? Too much pain involved perhaps, to make people feel like making that mental effort.

a reply to: TrueBrit

I should have clarified, old Polish guys, there were 3, two paras and a hurricane pilot.
They didn't go back after the war cos of the Russians.

One used to babysit me now and then while my mum was working and taught me pidgin German he learned from his time as a POW

a reply to: SprocketUK
It's more about Israel being outraged at the proposed ‘No Polish blame for Nazi crimes’ law. It may have started way back when Obama made a diplomatic boo-boo and called Auschwitz a Polish Death Camp. Maybe it's more than a PR problem for Poland, it will always be a sore spot for future generations not only for Poland but for everyone involved.

Maybe Israel is hinting reparations?
Germany increases reparations for Holocaust survivors
Germany to Pay 772 Million Euros to Survivors

History should be looked at at all perspectives and try to answer all the painful questions, otherwise we won't learn anything from it. One cannot change history, in a sense it is correct but whose narrative should we subscribe to? It cut both ways or a lot of different ways.

a reply to: ignorant_ape

but - any sort of neo-nazism and historical revisionism - goes down like a lead balloon with the poles

Or as Keith Moon once put it they could go down like a Lead Zeppelin...

I feel this is one of just many times scenarios like this play out. Time goes on and people are either afraid, ashamed, or just ignorant about their history. Whether that history is cultural, social, or governmental it will be changed or modified or hidden to suit those who sit in power in the present.

As an example, I give you slavery in the United States. I am not going to get into it, but history has been changed, rewritten, and examined a tremendous amount and sometimes it takes generations for either a whisper passed down on deathbeds or governments to declassify materials for certain things to come to light.

Even then who do you believe? How deeply ingrained in your hatred for another people? How willing is the population to move on, or accuse others?

Just remember history is written by the winners, and sometimes not even them but just an observer.

I think this has more to do with recent Polish right wing politics and it's growth, and being able to distance itself from any mention of Polish collaboration with Auschwitz or Nazi death camps to make there polices more appealing to a broader demographic.

originally posted by: CalibratedZeus
I feel this is one of just many times scenarios like this play out. Time goes on and people are either afraid, ashamed, or just ignorant about their history. Whether that history is cultural, social, or governmental it will be changed or modified or hidden to suit those who sit in power in the present.

As an example, I give you slavery in the United States. I am not going to get into it, but history has been changed, rewritten, and examined a tremendous amount and sometimes it takes generations for either a whisper passed down on deathbeds or governments to declassify materials for certain things to come to light.

Time moves on and people 'hopefully' learn. When the rebellious children of

today become parents their perspective changes and they invairably discover

their parents werent so wrong after all? ...."Because I said so" still haunts me


In a much bigger way the same goes for countries and nations,

Many countries who had monarchies, no longer do so, and if they still have

Rulers they are only figure heads.

Remember the Kings and Queens of France and Germany? and the Tsars of

Russia? and how much power they wielded? they have been white washed

out of history.

In day to day life things tick along and you dont see differences ..... as you get

older and look back things strike your memories and you cant believe how much

things change in nearly a century.

so my question is:

Which country does this make the holocaust denier? Changing the narrative is a PC no-no

(gold star if you get the US/JPN reference here)

a reply to: SprocketUK

Uh, I have a Polish friend and several Ukrainian friends and can report that anti-German sentiment in Poland is nothing new and it is definitely increasing, especially in Poland as, oddly enough, it has become more right-wing nationalistic, the Poles are disgusted with Merkel and her immigration of refugees policies.

a reply to: MaxTamesSiva

That's interesting and goes some way to explaining things.







a reply to: TonyS As does that.
I asked one of the lads at work I know and part of it is indeed that they are fed up with the Germans trying to make everyone else out to be the bad guys for not loving every single mad thing Merkel does.


Seems just as the EU starts thinking about life without us annoying Brits, someone else steps up to the plate

a reply to: SprocketUK

The whole campaign of German Death Camps was after some journalist and officials used term 'polish death camps' which is false. It was response. The current situation is linked to the amendment to the law. It creates even bigger chaos in domestic politic than ever. Opposition parties and their politicians claims that we shoul confess that we did holocaust. Its insane. In country where we died for Jews. Witold Pilecki was the first man who report German crimes in KL Aushwitz-Birkenau -> W Reports.

On 6 February 2018 an Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance was signed into law by Polish President Andrzej Duda. It criminalizes public statements that falsely ascribe, to the Polish nation, collective complicity in Holocaust-related or other war crimes or which "grossly reduce the responsibility of the actual [German] perpetrators"; scholarly studies, discussions of history, and artistic activities are exempt from such strictures. It is generally understood that the law will criminalize use of the expressions "Polish death camp" and "Polish concentration camp".

a reply to: dashen

originally posted by: dashen
a reply to: SprocketUK

poland is trying to pretend their role in the holocaust didnt happen.
this is just a part of their absurd re-writing of history.

Totally opposite. We even want to Our role in fighting with Germans be promoted and known in whole world.
Poles never formed collaborative power structures (government, military structures, or Polish Waffen-SS units), which was an exception among European countries occupied by the Third Reich.

Unlike in most European countries occupied by Nazi Germany—where the Germans sought such collaborators among the locals—in occupied Poland there was no official collaboration either at the political or at the economic level.[71][72] Poland also never officially surrendered to the Germans.[73] Under German occupation, the Polish army continued to fight underground, as Armia Krajowa and forest partisans – Leśni. The Polish resistance movement in World War II in German-occupied Poland was the largest resistance movement in all of occupied Europe.[74] As a result, Polish citizens were unlikely to be given positions of any significant authority.[71][72] The vast majority of the pre-war citizenry collaborating with the Nazis was the German minority in Poland which was offered one of several possible grades of German citizenship.[75] In 1939, before the German invasion of Poland, 800,000 people declared themselves as members of the German minority in Poland mostly in Pomerania and Western Silesia. During the war there were about 3 million former Polish citizens of German origin who signed the official list of Volksdeutsche.[72] People who became Volksdeutsche were treated by Poles with special contempt, and the fact of them having signed the Volksliste constituted high treason according to the Polish underground law.

Collaboration_with_the_Axis_Powers_during_World_War_I I#Poland

The Polish resistance movement in World War II, with the Polish Home Army at its forefront, was the largest underground resistances in all of Nazi-occupied Europe,[a] covering both German and Soviet zones of occupation. The Polish defence against the Nazi occupation was an important part of the European anti-fascist resistance movement. The Polish resistance is most notable for disrupting German supply lines to the Eastern Front, providing military intelligence to the British, and for saving more Jewish lives in the Holocaust than any other Western Allied organization or government.[2] It was a part of the Polish Underground State.

Polish_resistance_movement_in_World_War_II

"Żegota", also known as the "Konrad Żegota Committee",[1][2] was a codename for the Polish Council to Aid Jews (Polish: Rada Pomocy Żydom), an underground organization of Polish resistance in German-occupied Poland active from 1942 to 1945. The Council to Aid Jews, Żegota, was the continuation of an earlier secret organization set up for the purpose of rescuing Jews in German-occupied Poland, the Provisional Committee to Aid Jews (Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy Żydom). The Provisional Committee was founded on September 27, 1942 by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz ("Alinka"). It was made up of mostly of Polish Catholic activists. Within a short time, the original Committee had 180 persons under its care, but was dissolved for political and financial reasons. Żegota was created to supersede it on December 4, 1942.[2]

Zegota

Righteous Among the Nations is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis.

Righteous_Among_the_Nations


Poles who were murdering Jews were traitors. Polish underground Court sentenced them to death.

Szmalcownik, in English also spelt shmaltsovnik, is a pejorative Polish slang word used during World War II that meant a person blackmailing Jews who were hiding, or blackmailing Poles who protected Jews during the Nazi occupation.[1]The Polish Secret State considered szmalcownictwo an act of collaboration with the German occupiers. The Armia Krajowa (Home Army) punished it with the death sentence as a criminal act of treason.[2] Blackmailers had been sentenced to death by the Special Courts of the Polish Underground for crimes against Polish citizens. The Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Polish Committee of National Liberation) by its decree of 31 August 1944 also condemned this act as collaboration with Nazi Germany. This decree is still a valid law in Poland, and any person who committed an act of szmalcownictwo during the war faces life imprisonment.

I am sure of the role of Poles fighting Germans and defending Jews and You will never tell me different.
Just make sure that You are not shmaltsovnik.

a reply to: TonyS

'Poles don't want immigrants. They don't understand them, don't like them'

Poland accepts few refugees and has been little affected by the crisis in Europe, yet its views on immigration are among the most pungent on the continent

“We don’t want terrorists here,” the Polish pensioner says, when asked about EU plans to resettle refugees more broadly across the continent. “Have you seen what they’re doing in the west?”

It’s a popular view here, if a baffling one. Poland is little affected by the refugee crisis in Europe, and accepts vanishingly small numbers of migrants. And yet the country has some of the most pungent views on immigration on the continent. A recent survey for the television station TVN found that two-thirds of Poles share the same hostility towards immigrants expressed by the Warsaw grandmother cited above.

According to a study in 2013 by the Centre for Research on Prejudice – a professional academic centre at the University of Warsaw – as many as 69% of Poles do not want non-white people living in their country.
A vast majority believe that immigrants take work away from Poles and that their presence is detrimental for the economy. It’s a view shared more broadly in eastern Europe, despite insignificant migrant flows in all of Poland’s eastern neighbours.

Politicians are in a fix. On the one hand, the EU has asked Poland to do more to resettle foreigners in the name of European solidarity. Some of Poland’s partners note that it has done very well out of EU membership. Now is the time to give back.

On the other, the ruling Civic Platform faces a tough challenge to be re-elected in autumn elections. It is not the only government finding it hard to stay on the right side of both the electorate and the eurocrats.

“People just don’t want immigrants here,” one senior Civic Platform politician says. “They don’t understand them, they don’t like them, and believe that their maintenance is too expensive.”
As a result, the government has consistently protested against EU allocations for refugee quotas, which suggest that next year Poland should take about 1,000.

In the spring, Civic Platform found itself under pressure from NGOs that appealed for the admission of 300 Syrian Christian families threatened with death by Islamists (but it was stressed that they were Christians, and therefore less culturally alien).
According to the UN high commissioner for refugees, Poland has pledged to accept just 100 Syrian refugees between 2016 and 2020.

Rumblings of another EU member?

a reply to: eletheia

Don't forget that there is war in Ukraine and Poland accept more than 1 million Ukrainians.
Arent they refugees?

originally posted by: residentofearth

Don't forget that there is war in Ukraine and Poland accept more than 1 million Ukrainians.
Arent they refugees?

It doesn't appear that they are all that happy with that situation either,

and use that as a reason for not taking anymore from the middle east

Africa and Egypt. The ones Angela Merkle is trying to spread around the

other EU countries too.

However, fearing its most radical voters, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość does not want to appear enthusiastic towards Ukraine or Ukrainian workers. The anti-Ukrainian fraction in the party is also growing stronger. The situation is slightly similar to that in Hungary, where the ruling right-populist party Fidesz was forced to adopt the agenda of the far-right Jobbik party in order to prevent the strengthening of the opposition from the right.

Poland’s ruling PiS party doesn’t inflame anti-Ukrainian sentiments itself, but turns a blind eye to xenophobic attacks. This creates conditions for hatred to thrive.

Or possibly Poland is feeling pressured like they were before the blitz in '39, Poland along with a few other Eastern European countries have become more vocal about not taking refugees, and the EU has made a couple thinly veiled threats, coupled that with Russia adventures in the Ukraine.

So rather than wait for the new and improved blitz they started a Propaganda campaign to whip their side into a frenzy and make certain that the movers and shakers in Brussels and Moscow are aware they will not role over to them.

Or maybe I have had to much whiskey tonight... nonsense no such thing as to much usquebaugh.

a reply to: residentofearth


that was a great reply, thanks.

So is there a narrative that is recent which has caused the Polish gov. to come up with this campaign then? And if so where is it coming from?

a reply to: residentofearth

Good for clarifying, this is exactly how I read the news initially. It's not all these other tangents the thread was going off into, interesting how that works with most articles.