Poland criminalizes the term 'Polish death camp' and Israel loses its mind.
The Polish parliament voted yesterday for a law which will criminalize the term “Polish death camps”. Under the new law anyone who publicly says that German death camps in Poland were “Polish death camps” or ascribes blame or joint blame to the Polish nation for crimes committed by Germans and Nazi Germany during WW2, would be liable to penalties. The Israeli government led by Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli media responded to this law by blaming Poland and its government that they are “denying the holocaust”.
Some background on the term “Polish death camps”. The term Polish death camps was coined by no other than German ex Nazis who worked for the western German government after WW2. In 1956 The West German intelligence, which was headed by Alfred Benzinger (a former Nazi officer), launched a coordinated action to move the blame away from the war criminals under various investigations to their victims. Benzinger adopted the deliberately misleading "Polish death camps" in the mid 1960s in order to suggest that Poles, not Germans, were responsible for the mass genocide during World War II. It is shocking to see to what extent their operation was successful seeing how people in Israel, including its media, politicians and the prime minister believe support and defend what is essentially Nazi propaganda. Here's an Israeli reporter from the "Jerusalem post" tweeting on this issue:
By the way, this is not the first time that prime minister Netanyhau has been caught rewriting the history of the holocaust. Three years ago he declared that it was the Palestinians that were responsible for the holocaust. In fact Israeli politicians like Netanyahu regularly twist and distort the memory of the holocaust to suit their, and Israel's, current political agendas and needs. Here's one of Israel's most popular politicians addressing the issue of "Polish death camps":
Some historical facts and context - It was the Polish underground in WW2 (The“Armia Krajowa”) which first alerted the world to the Holocaust, notably with the reports of officer Witold Pilecki and courier Jan Karski. The Polish government-in-exile and the Polish Secret State pleaded for American and British help to stop the Holocaust, to no avail. Historians (Richard Lukas, Norman Davies, Hans G. Furth, Gunnar S. Paulsson) estimate put the number of Poles involved in rescue of Jews during WW2 at up to 3 million, and credit Poles with saving up to around 450,000 Jews from certain death. In contrast estimates regarding documented cases where Poles collaborated with the Germans and turned in Jews do not exceed 10,000. Furthermore, the Polish underground, under orders from the Polish government in exile, hunted down these Polish collaborators and executed many of them.
However, as is rarely mentioned, many Jews in Poland, at least several thousands if not more, collaborated with the German Nazis in Poland (“Judenrat” and the “Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst”) and helped them carry out their crimes. During the war the Germans killed almost 6 million Polish people. Three million of them were Polish Jews, but the rest were Catholic Poles. The truth is that the Poles were victims of German barbarity during WW2 as were the Jews. So blaming the victims of German crimes in Poland for those German crimes, is not just ludicrous, it is insane. To suggest that criminalizing the term “Polish death camps” is somehow denying history because there were some Polish collaborates, is as insane and far fetched as to suggest that there were “Jewish waffen-SS” units in Poland because some Jews collaborated with the Germans during WW2.
