In an article published on Wednesday on the polskieradio24.pl website, public broadcaster Polish Radio highlighted a Netflix documentary entitled The Accountant of Auschwitz.
The documentary depicted WWII-era Poland on a map showing the country’s modern borders, rather than the borders which existed at the time, Polish Radio reported.
It added that the makers of the documentary did not display any of the death camps located in Germany.
According to the article on polskieradio24.pl, The Accountant of Auschwitz documentary also failed to mention that during World War II Poland did not exist as a state and that death camps were set up and controlled by the Germans who occupied Poland at the time.
The Polish Radio report comes after the country’s prime minister urged Netflix to make changes to a map shown in its new documentary series The Devil Next Door, saying the image was historically inaccurate and misled viewers about Poland’s role in World War II.
In a tweet on Sunday, the country’s foreign ministry urged Netflix to “stay true to historical facts.”
Meanwhile, Agreement, a Polish conservative party led by Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Gowin, has said that “the lack of appropriate commentary sends a message to viewers who are unaware of the history of our part of Europe that Poles set up death camps in their own country during World War II.”
“People should not be silent. They should not be indifferent to claims and ambiguities which suggest the existence of ‘Polish death camps’ … We demand that the broadcasting of the series on the Netflix platform be stopped until the makers [of the series] introduce essential corrections.”
In a letter sent to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Monday, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the map depicted in The Devil Next Door series, which tells the story of a Nazi death camp guard, “falsely placed several German Nazi concentration camps within modern-day Poland’s borders.”
“There is no comment or any explanation whatsoever that these sites were German-operated,” Morawiecki said in his letter.
He added: “Not only is the map incorrect, but it deceives viewers into believing that Poland was responsible for establishing and maintaining these camps, and for committing the crimes therein.”
Morawiecki also said: “As my country did not even exist at that time as an independent state, and millions of Poles were murdered at these sites, this element of The Devil Next Door is nothing short of rewriting history.”
He asked Netflix to correct the mistake. “I believe that this terrible mistake has been committed unintentionally - and I am hoping that you will be able to correct it as soon as possible,” he said.
The Washington Post has quoted a Netflix spokesman as saying in an emailed statement: “We are aware of the concerns regarding The Devil Next Door and are urgently looking into the matter.”
The Devil Next Door tells the story of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who died in Germany in 2012 at the age of 91, after decades-long efforts by prosecutors in multiple countries to prove that he was involved in Nazi crimes as a sadistic death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”
The use of historically inaccurate terms by some international media and organisations has sparked numerous complaints from Poland in recent years, prompting some news agencies to change their style guidelines and eliminate misnomers such as "Polish" death camps.
Public broadcaster Polish Radio last year launched a special educational website aimed at debunking misconceptions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust, at GermanDeathCamps.info.
(jh/pk)
Source: polskieradio24.pl