| GermanDeathCamps.info, a new educational website aimed at debunking misconceptions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust, has been launched by Polish Radio. The site explains the Holocaust and how Nazi Germans ran death camps to exterminate Jews and other victims of Adolf Hitler’s regime in World War II, Polish Radio’s Bartłomiej Makowski said. It has been launched in Polish, English, and German, in the wake of tensions between Warsaw and Israel over a planned new Polish law to penalise the use of the phrase “Polish death camps”.
The phrase has been used by international media numerous times in recent years. The Polish foreign ministry and other officials have been combatting its use, calling it a historic falsehood and saying it places blame on Poland.
Polish President Andrzej Duda has said there were no Polish concentration camps, but “such camps were built on the territory of the Polish state, which was non-existent at the time, by Germans, by Nazis”.
Under Poland’s planned new laws, anyone who publicly ascribes blame or joint blame to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by Nazi Germany or for war crimes or other crimes against humanity would face up to three years in prison or a fine.
Between one and 1.5 million people died at the largest of the Nazi German camps in Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau, near the southern city of Kraków, the vast majority of whom were Jews, and more than 1.5 million others died in other camps located in what is now Poland.
GermanDeathCamps.info also has a version for smartphones and will become available in Spanish in the future.
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