OSWIECIM, Poland — When the Nazis looked to build Auschwitz, the most notorious death camp of the Holocaust, they chose this out-of the-way village that had been home to a Polish Army barracks.
Unlike in France or Norway, there was no collaborationist government in Poland. The Nazis wanted to destroy their state and enslave the Poles. By the end of World War II, six million Poles had been murdered, including three million Jews — nearly half of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust.
That shared pain has at times been a source of understanding. But it became a source of anger on Tuesday, when Poland’s president — over furious objections from historians, the Israeli government and others — signed legislation making it a crime to suggest that Poland bore any responsibility for atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.
The law has two parts. One outlaws the phrase “Polish death camps,” a term that scholars agree is misleading since the camps were erected and controlled by Nazi Germany.
More troubling, historians say, is the second part of the law, which makes it a crime — punishable by a fine or up to three years in prison — to accuse “the Polish nation” of complicity in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. They say that the nationalist government is trying to whitewash the role of Poles in one of history’s bloodiest chapters.
