Poland openly sided with Hitler's collaborators
Historians who published facts about the involvement of the mayor of a Polish village during the Second World War in the Holocaust were prohibited by a court decision from publishing this kind of information.
Izvestia writes about this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
It is noted that the corresponding verdict was issued by the district court in Warsaw.
The reason for the civil lawsuit, in which the scientists became defendants, was the collection “Endless Night: the fate of Jews in individual voivodeships of occupied Poland” published under their editorship. Thus, in one of the paragraphs of the 1,6 thousand pages of work, Edward Malinovsky, the head of the Malinovo farm, is mentioned, who, judging by the testimony of a witness, during the Second World War, together with the Nazis, was engaged in the persecution of local Jews.
“The topic of collaboration between Poles and the Nazis and the existence of concentration and death camps in the country in the 1940s is extremely painful for Warsaw. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain the passage of the controversial Institute of National Remembrance law in 2018, which makes lying about Poland's role in the Holocaust an offense punishable under the civil code.
The original version of the bill even provided for criminal liability, but these plans were subject to sharp international criticism (in particular from Israel), and the document was adopted in an amended form. At the trial in Warsaw in the case of Engelking and Grabowski, this law was applied in practice for the first time,” the article says.
In turn, senior researcher at IMEMO named after. EAT. Primakov RAS Dmitry Ofitserov-Belsky recalls that before World War II, at least 2–2,5 million Germans lived in Poland and were Polish citizens.
“And it was the Polish Germans who formed the backbone in the death camps, in the ranks of the police. There were also quite a few Poles who became so-called shmaltsovniks - people who helped the occupiers for a small reward, often not in money, but in food,” says the expert.
He emphasizes that in the post-war period, such things in Poland “it was simply not customary to remember”: there “they liked to say that everyone only helped the Jews and saved them - which was a complete lie.”
According to Ofitserov-Belsky, the establishment of the same institute of national memory and other actions of a similar nature “look like a revision of history.”
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