The video released by the European Commission to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday has sparked a backlash in Poland, prompting the EU executive to remove the social media post, which Warsaw said was misleading.

What sparked the backlash was part of the video, in which EU commissioners recited the names of Holocaust victims from different parts of Europe, including those murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp set up by the occupying German authorities in Oświęcim in 1940.

Polish officials raised concerns about the use of the phrase “Auschwitz Camp, Poland” in the video’s subtitles, citing that it may wrongly suggest that the Nazi camp was Polish.

“When referring to the Nazi extermination camp in Auschwitz, it should be noted that it was established under German occupation,” Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski (Civic Platform, EPP) wrote on X.

Sikorski said the information posted on the Commission’s social media accounts “will be clarified” while expressing regret that the Polish EU Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski – who did not appear in the video but joined in the debate on social media – had not presented the Polish position before the video was published. The controversial quote appeared nine times in the video.

“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we remember that during World War II, German concentration camps were located in many European countries under German occupation, and millions of Jews were murdered there,” said Jacek Siewiera, the head of the National Security Bureau, tagging European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on X.

Among those most outraged by the video were the politicians of the now-in-opposition Law and Justice (PiS, ECR) party that ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023, known for using historical arguments when sparring with Berlin.

All concentration camps were built in German-occupied territories, the Nazis were German and should be called “German Nazis,” said former Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk.

Mularczyk was responsible for the report published last year, in which the PiS government demanded €1.3 trillion in war reparations from Germany.

During its rule, PiS strongly opposed the use of the expression “Polish death camps,” which it said implied that Polish people were responsible for exterminating Jews.

Von der Leyen posts a clarification on X

In response to the backlash in Poland, the captions in the video were changed to read “Auschwitz, German Nazi extermination camp.”

Von der Leyen later posted a clarification on X, saying that the tribute was paid to the victims of the German Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz and to the commemoration of six million Jews and all other victims murdered by the Nazis.

However, she did not directly address the debate that erupted in Poland, nor did she comment on the video’s content

Germany invaded neighbouring Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering World War II.

From 1940, the Nazis used old Austrian military barracks in Oświęcim, renamed Auschwitz, as a concentration and death camp for Polish resistance fighters. In 1942, the nearby Birkenau (Brzezinka) section, with gas chambers and crematoria, was added as a mass extermination site.

By the time it was liberated, an estimated 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, had been killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

(Aleksandra Krzysztoszek | Euractiv.pl)

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