German Order Police and Blue Police at Kraków in 1941. Wikicommons/ Bundesarchiv, Bild. Some rights reserved.
In January 2018, the right-wing Law and Justice government in Poland passed an amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance. The law prohibits any attribution of responsibility for Nazi atrocities, including the Holocaust, to either ‘the Polish state or the Polish nation’. Violators can face up to three years’ imprisonment for offenders, though following changes adopted in the lower house of the Polish Parliament in June, the criminal element might be removed in favour of merely civil proceedings and remedies.
The prohibition is most commonly justified as a step to protect Poland’s reputation from misplaced blame for the Nazi extermination camps and to preserve the memory of the many non-Jewish Poles killed in the Holocaust. Within Poland, one often hears these justifications as part of an outcry against ‘Polish death camps’, a phrase used in, for example, a 2012 speech by Barack Obama, which many Poles take as reflecting a wider perception that Poland was responsible for the Holocaust.
