Arkadiusz Mularczyk said he would raise the issue with the German government during his upcoming visit to Berlin, the tvp.info website reported on Monday.
The Polish deputy foreign minister added: “The matter should be clarified. There should be no discrimination against anyone who wants to commemorate Polish people killed in Ravensbrück, and we are expecting an official statement on the matter.”
The controversy erupted on Sunday, during a ceremony to mark the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German concentration camp of Ravensbrück.
A group of Polish mourners from the National Armed Forces Association, based in the southwestern city of Szczecin, was barred from entering the site of the former Nazi German internment facility north of Berlin, according to news reports.
German police refused to allow them onto the premises, tvp.info reported.
Grzegorz Kozak, who leads the National Armed Forces Association, told regional broadcaster Radio Szczecin: “We came to Ravensbrück as the association of National Armed Forces soldiers to pay our respects to Polish female prisoners who were imprisoned and tortured here. We have a white-and-red wreath. Police are simply refusing to let us into the premises.”
“To call it an outrage would be an understatement,” he added.
Ravensbrück concentration camp
Set up in 1939, the Ravensbrück concentration camp was designed as an internment centre for women, but by 1942 it also housed male prisoners, as well as young girls, tvp.info reported.
In addition, over 40 satellite camps were attached to Ravensbrück, using inmates as slave labour, according to historians.
An estimated 130,000 women and children, and some 20,000 men, went through the concentration camp, and about 30,000 prisoners were killed by the Germans, tvp.info reported.
Polish women were the largest group among the camp’s female prisoners, and many of them were subjected to pseudo-medical experiments by doctors from the Nazi Party corps, the SS, the website added.
Meanwhile, the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which was also liberated 78 years ago, housed over 200,000 people between 1936 and 1945, according to historians.
Tens of thousands of prisoners died there, due to hunger, disease, slave labour, medical experiments and maltreatment, or became victims of Germany’s policy of systematic extermination, tvp.info reported.
The number of Polish victims of Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen is estimated at 40,000, according to officials.
(pm/gs)
Source: tvp.info, polskieradio24.pl