Angry Response

From the BBC:

“Poland reacts angrily to Netflix Nazi death camp documentary”

Poland's prime minister has written to streaming company Netflix insisting on changes to The Devil Next Door, a documentary about the Nazi death camps.  Mateusz Morawiecki said a map shown in the series locates the death camps within modern-day Poland's borders. This misrepresents Poland as being responsible for the death camps, when it was actually occupied by Germany in World War Two, Mr Morawiecki said. Netflix told Reuters it was aware of concerns regarding the documentary. Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of the war. The Germans built concentration camps including at Auschwitz, killing millions of people, most of them Jews.  Mr Morawiecki said in his letter to Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, that it was important to "honour the memory and preserve the truth about World War II and the Holocaust".  He accused "certain works" on Netflix of being "hugely inaccurate" and "rewriting history". The prime minister attached a map of Europe in late 1942 to the letter, as well as an account by Witold Pilecki, who was voluntarily imprisoned in Auschwitz and wrote about his experiences after successfully escaping.  "I believe that this terrible mistake has been committed unintentionally," Mr Morawiecki added.  Last year, Poland introduced laws criminalising language implying Polish responsibility for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.  However, an international outcry prompted the government to remove the threat of three-year jail terms.  More than five million Poles were killed during World War Two, including up to three million Jews who were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. The death camps were planned and operated by occupying German SS units. There were, however, some Polish atrocities against Jews and other civilians during and after the war. In 1941, Polish villagers in Jedwabne, perhaps at the instigation of the Nazis, rounded up more than 300 of their Jewish villagers and killed them. 

^ While I understand that Poland does not want to be associated with the concentration and death camps that the Germans built in occupied Poland during World War 2 it is something that they have had to deal with for 75 years now and something that they will have to deal with for a long time to come. With all the territorial changes around Europe since 1945 it can be confusing for people to know where things happened (ie. I know some people think the Auschwitz Death Camp, built and run by the Germans, is located in Germany and not in present-day Poland.) I believe it’s important for people to know who created and ran the Death Camps, the Concentration Camps and the Ghettoes (the Germans) while at the same time it’s important for people to know where the Death Camps, the Concentration Camps and the Ghettoes are currently located (in Poland, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and the British Channel Islands.) Poland has received many visitors into their country in the past several decades with people coming to visit these Holocaust-related places (ie. Auschwitz, where the Warsaw Ghetto once stood, Oskar Schindler’s Factory, where the Krakow Ghetto once stood, where the Lodz Ghetto once stood, Treblinka, Sobibor, etc.) If you try to be too historically accurate all the time then you do more harm than good. An example is the Lodz Ghetto in Lodz, Poland. The Germans renamed Lodz to Litzmannstadt during World War 2 and so the Ghetto was officially called the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. People in 2019 wanting to visit the site where the Litzmannstadt/Lodz Ghetto once stood would think to look in Germany or Austria if they looked-up “Litzmannstadt” and not “Lodz” since it ends in the German word “stadt.” If they looked-up the word “Lodz” then they would know that it is in the current Polish city of Lodz and so would know where to go to visit and learn about the Litzmannstadt/Lodz Ghetto. People need to know where these places are currently located in so they can come and see and learn about the horrible things that happened there (which is also where they will learn that it was the Germans (not the Poles) who built and ran these places and murdered all the people. ^

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50380906