Punishing Phrase

From Yahoo:
"Poland wants punishments for use of 'Polish death camp' phrase"

Poland is drawing up new regulations to punish use of the phrase "Polish death camps" when referring to wartime Nazi concentration camps on Polish soil, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said on Saturday. Poland has long sought to eliminate the misleading phrase from historical and newspaper accounts since it suggests the country, which was occupied by Nazi Germany during World War Two, was responsible for Holocaust-era camps on its territory. The Nazis operated their most infamous death camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor and Treblinka complexes, mostly in occupied Poland rather than in Germany. "This will be a project that meets the expectations of Poles, who are blasphemed in the world, in Europe, even in Germany, that they are the Holocaust perpetrators, that in Poland there were Polish concentration camps, Polish gas chambers," Ziobro told private radio RMF. "Enough with this lie. There has to be responsibility," he said.  The phrase "Polish death camps" is usually found only in foreign publications, almost never in Poland itself.  Ziobro said he had presented the project to Prime Minister Beata Szydlo and she reacted positively.

 

^ The Germans were the ones who built and maintained the death camps during World War 2. That is a fact. One reason the Germans built all of the death camps in Poland and no-where else in Nazi-occupied Europe is because of the inherent anti-Semitism that flourished in Poland long before the Nazis marched-in. Poland had their own ghettos. Poland had strict quotas on Jews entering any  profession. They had so-called "ghetto benches" that limited the number of Jews in universities. While some individual Poles did try to help the Jews once the Nazis occupied Poland the majority did not. The Poles sat-by and watched as the Jews fought for their freedom in 1943 during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Then those same Poles were shocked that the Soviets sat-by and watched as the Poles fought for their freedom in 1944 during the Warsaw Uprising. Both Uprisings failed. Had the Poles helped the Jews they may have had a chance. Instead anti-Semitism stopped them. The anti-Semitism didn't stop when the war ended and the Germans left. New pogroms were carried out by the Poles themselves against the few remaining Jews who survived the Holocaust. That feeling became official in the 1960s. So while the Poles did not run the death camps during World War 2 they weren't sympathetic to the Jews even when the Germans were exterminating both Poles and Jews. There's a saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" but the anti-Semitism ran so deep in Poland for so long that that saying didn't run true. I am saying this as a person with Catholic Polish roots. ^ 

http://news.yahoo.com/poland-wants-punishments-polish-death-camp-phrase-170745253.html