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The Scroll

Poles Want Auschwitz Moved, on the Internet

But it’s so heavy!

By Liel Leibovitz|February 2, 2011 4:00 PM|17comments
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Muslim clergymen visiting Auschwitz yesterday.(JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

Where’s Auschwitz? It may soon no longer be in Poland, at least according to the Internet: Bogdan Zdrojewski, Poland’s culture minister, has asked the directors of the Auschwitz-Burkenau museum—as well as their counterparts at the Majdanek and Stutthof concentration camps—to drop the .pl suffix from the museum’s Website.

“I’ve asked them to be consistent in using the appropriate German names of the camps and this applies also to the Internet,” Zdrojewski said. “At the moment the .pl is misleading and might make people associate the camps with Poland.” Luckily, we now have the Internet to help us correct such faulty notions as a history of murderous Polish anti-Semitism.

Poland Wants Auschwitz Website To Drop .pl Suffix [The Telegraph]
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  • Garry

    Without discussing Polish Anti-Semitism, Germany was the party who gave the world Auschwitz, Majdanek and all the other extermination camps. The words over the entrance to Auschwitz are in German. And the city of Auschwitaz was annexed into Germany, so during the years 1939-1945, it wasn’t in Poland at all, but in Germany. It is historically incorrect to blame Poland for the presence of Nazi extermination camps in their country-which disappeared from the map after Germany and Russia divided it in Sep. 1939.

  • William

    Generally, I like reading Liel Leibovitz, but my goodness– you saw a belt and you chose to hit below it. Whatever Poland’s history of anti-Semitism was and is, the German death camps are not part of that story. Even if one accepts (and I do) Israel Gutman and Jan Gross’s historical research on the terrible number of Jews murdered by Poles in the immediate postwar years, one should never conflate this with the single greatest crime carried out by mankind. It was initiated, conceived, implemented and carried out by the government of Germany and every ministry in it. If a few Poles, Ukrainians and others joined in, that is, of course, despicable. But the Holocaust should stay focused on the land that carried it out. These days, tens of thousands of teenagers march through Auschwitz thinking the Poles were the evil ones, the Nazis were some nebulous group, and the Germans were the good guys since they have nice relations with Israel now. Making it Auschwitz.de is definitely not a bad branding move. It would, in fact, be the right one.

  • R.E. Prindle

    Define greatest single crime. Mao far exceeded whatever happened at Auschwitz.

  • Neveragain

    I had a German prof once. He excused the Nazis by saying that Stalin was much worse. Mr. Prindle, be ashamed.

  • Pat Silver

    The facts have not changed. Poland had no problem with the camps being in that country.
    The Poles helped round up the Jews for extermination and tried to eliminate those who limped back to their homes after the war. They leave Jews out of any memorials they have to the victims of WW II. The Poles have still not come to terms with their antisemitism. They are happy to have Jewish tourists visit what is surely the graveyard of European Jewry but only for the tourist dollar which they crave.

  • Gaboo

    The “greatest single crime” really isn’t a contest. Any mass extinction (Holocaust, Stalin, Lon Nol, and sadly on and on) is too horrible to contemplate and qualifies for that distinction.

  • Barbara Steinfeld

    In my holocaust studies I learned that the reason the death camps were in Poland was because of the complicity of the Poles. It was the easiest place to put death camps as opposed to labor camps. Polish anti-semitism was so entrenched it was a natural fit. To try to erase that by saying it was technically Germany for a few interim years is a very weak argument compared to the damage the Poles did.

  • JHSibal

    A friend just e-mailed me this site so this is my first viewing. I must say that I find all of this like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It seems more in line with Byzantine theology than aiding access to a web site.

    As for the “single greatest crime” in history; the race to be history’s victim is a sad one. With solid historical records, we know the Europeans imported ten million Africans into the New World and that for everyone who made it, 3 or 4 did not. That gives us up to 40 millions–if you want to sell real estate. Or that population of the Americas prior to European diseases was a certain figure and up to 90% of the Indians died. Untold millions. And please, please, let’s not leave out the Mongol hoards who sacked Baghdad and turned Persia and Mesopotamia into a waste land. The fact that one group should jockey for this role in history is disappointing. What does it mean?

    What should be learned from this period is that cultures can become psychotic, e.g., Rwanda/Cambodia. And many other than Jews died in Auschwitz.

  • Garry

    “Technically Germany for a few interim years” Barbara, what did you learn in Holocaust studies? If not for the Nazis and Germany, the holocaust would never have happened. It just so happens that the German plans were to exterminate the Jews of Europe in what they thought would be the territory of the Soviet Union. The changing situation of the war led to its being performed in Polish territory. Yes, Poles and most other Europeans were and are anti-Jewish-but the responsibnlity for the Shoah lies with one nation and one nation only-and that’s Germany.

  • Bennett Muraskin

    The reason Germany built Auschwitz and other such camps in Poland was that Germany occuppied Poland early in the war and over 3 million Jews lived there.

    It had nothing to do with Polish anti-Semitism.

  • http://www.evcomics.com EV

    Barbara — Can you please share with us where this class was taught?

  • http://lghaber.wordpress.com/ Larry

    If memory serves me correctly, the Poles not only helped the Nazi’s in the camps, the also assisted in rounding us up and helping to discover the hiding places. It is far to easy to deny culpability 65 years after the fact when the witnesses are almost all gone.

  • David

    hitler, stalin and mao…..all were socialists; nationalist, internationalist. The Bible says “Every man will have his own vine and fig tree. And no one will make them afraid. That’s what the LORD who rules over all has promised.” Micah 4:4. From this verse, I would say GOD is a capitalist who believes in private ownership and endeavour.

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Poles Want Auschwitz Moved, on the Internet

But it’s so heavy!