The “Polish death camp syndrome” refers to a longstanding phenomenon, found primarily in the mainstream media, which consists of three interrelated symptoms or elements:

  • Referring to concentration and death camps established by Nazi Germany in occupied Polish territory during the Second World War as “Polish” camps or as “camps in Poland.”

  • Referring to these camps simply as “Nazi” camps, never as “German Nazi” or “German” camps, without identifying the national origin of the Nazis.

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  • Omitting Polish victims of these camps – often the first and largest group of prisoners, apart from Jews – from the enumerated categories of victims.

The justification for calling these camps “Polish” is attributed sometimes to oversight, other times to their geographical location. In response, in 2007 UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee approved Poland’s request to have Auschwitz-Birkenau officially designated as a “German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.” On June 29, 2017, the 31 member countries of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) unanimously adopted a statement expressing the organization’s opposition to the historically unsupportable use of the terms “Polish death camps” or “Polish camps” to refer to the camps and sites of persecution and murder established by Nazi Germany on invaded and occupied Polish soil.

It has also been argued that the lack of precision about the camps’ victims is due to insufficient knowledge, something that could be rectified by more Holocaust education. As the events in question occurred more than 80 years ago, with most of today’s population born since that time, the need for education about the Holocaust – and many other matters relating to the Second World War – is undoubtedly important. But that is not the reason why well-educated journalists display the “Polish death camp syndrome,” especially when the relevant information is readily available at their fingertips.

A case in point is the appearance, in Canada’s leading daily newspapers, of two lengthy articles regarding an Auschwitz exhibition at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. This is a major, informative and well-researched exhibition prepared in conjunction with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

In an article that appeared in the Globe and Mail (Jan. 10, 2025), after pointing out that “ninety per cent of the people murdered at Auschwitz were Jewish,” Kate Taylor, takes note of “various other groups murdered by the Nazis, the disabled and the Roma-Sinti, or those merely hounded, including the Afro-German children born of relationships between German women and French African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland after the First World War.” There is no mention of Polish prisoners.

In the Toronto Star article (Jan. 25, 2025), David Silverberg provided the following prisoner make-up for Auschwitz: “Jewish, homosexual, political French and political Russian.” In fact, Jews are mentioned several times in the article. Once again Poles are again entirely overlooked. Yet the author finds room for the persecution of persons of Black ancestry. In another article in that same newspaper (Mar. 29, 2024), Heather Mallick enumerated the victims of Auschwitz as “Jews, ‘gypsies,’ political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and lesbians.”

This kind of coverage is fairly representative of the Canadian and American media. While references to “Polish camps” are becoming less frequent and, after intervention, are generally “corrected” to “Nazi camps,” the national identity of these Nazis and the country they came from is rarely stated. And Polish victims are generally overlooked.

Lack of information is not the cause

What is clear from these examples is that the journalists’ oversight is not due to a lack of information. The Auschwitz exhibition couldn’t be any clearer. The camps were created by Nazi Germany. Poles were the second largest group of prisoners, some 150,000, half of whom perished. That’s more than all the other categories of prisoners combined. One can also find that information on the websites of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. But the message is not getting across.

So why are Polish victims being overlooked? Why does this occur with such alarming frequency? Since much smaller categories of victims are routinely mentioned along with Jews, what is the reason for this glaring omission? Arguably it is attributable – in part at least – to ideological factors and bias.

In recent years, for example, a new politically correct category of victims, LGBTQ, has emerged, one that did not exist at the time. Very few men were imprisoned in Auschwitz as homosexuals (perhaps several hundred at most). There is no evidence that anyone was sent there because they were a lesbian. Yet, in a recent address, King Charles III chose to include specifically the “LGBT community” among the victims, but not Poles.

Moreover, it is difficult to be seen as a victim if one is increasingly portrayed as a victimizer. Accusations that used to be muted have become full blown. A survey conducted in 2024 by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem revealed alarming findings. The vast majority of Israeli Jews hold the Poles, as a nation, co-responsible for the Holocaust. More than half of the respondents – 54 percent – believe that Polish responsibility is on par with (“exactly like”) that of the Germans, another 28 percent believe they were “only partly” responsible, and a mere 8 percent see Poles as victims of the war. Arab Israelis have also been poisoned against the Poles: 15 percent believe the Poles were just as guilty as the Germans, and 11 percent believe they were “only partly” responsible.

“Future of Jewish,” an Israeli-based website billed as the “the fastest-growing independent publication about Judaism and Israel,” published an article by Mallory Mosner (Feb. 25) proclaiming, “There were only 80,000 German SS members deployed to Poland during the war; the only reason this small number of Nazis succeeded in murdering that many Jews was because of Polish collaboration (at worst) and indifference to the suffering of Jews (at best).”

(The total number of German forces deployed in Poland was many times higher than stated by Mosner. As historian Michael Marus points, the German police presence in Poland was also significantly greater than elsewhere: “Unlike Poland, where there was always a heavy German police presence, there were few men to spare for France—only three battalions for the occupied zone, for example, or about three thousand men.” See Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, edited by Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1990), vol. 2, 509–513. Employing Mosner’s logic, the Poles could have also prevented the murder of two million ethnic Poles and expelled the Germans from their country.)

The Israeli political left is also complicit in this state of affairs. Yair Lapid, who served as prime minister of Israel in 2022, declared that “Poles cooperated in creating and running extermination camps.” On a personal note, he claimed that his (or his father’s) grandmother, who it turns out was arrested in Serbia and deported to Auschwitz, “was murdered in Poland by Germans and Poles.”

How to confront the problem?

After-the-fact interventions with media outlets are hardly an effective manner to curb these widespread abuses. “Corrections,” if made, gain little attention among the audience. The damage has been done. Moreover, journalists are not particularly receptive to receiving history lessons from representatives of a foreign government or from interested groups or persons with little clout. There is little, if anything, Poland or Poles can do on their own to change the dominant narrative. Their voices are virtually imperceptible.

So how can one get the message across? As part of its education mandate, one of the principal activities of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), of which Poland is a member, is to combat Holocaust denial and distortion. Since outright Holocaust denial is practically non-existent in the mainstream and punishable as a crime in more and more countries, the focus has shifted to Holocaust distortion.

One of five examples of Holocaust distortion identified by the IHRA is the following:

“Attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups.” (https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-holocaust-denial-distortion)

Although not explicitly stated, this example deals with the matter of alleged Polish responsibility for those camps, since no such charges have been levelled against any other nation.

While a small step in the right direction, this is clearly insufficient to tackle the systematic and egregious misrepresentations that are occurring. It is incumbent on Poland’s IHRA representatives to develop and advance a pro-active agenda not only relating to IHRA’s education mandate but also to target concrete manifestations of Holocaust distortion.

Clear guidelines must be put in place. Those who established and operated the camps must be clearly identified. Victims should be referred to appropriately, without unjustified omissions. Following IHRA’s practice, slanderous statements and offenders should be called out. IHRA member countries where Poland and the Poles are accused of having been on par with Nazi Germany must take steps to address this problem in their education systems and public media, and monitor their progress.

Paying lip service to platitudes is simply not enough. The harsh on-the-ground reality speaks for itself and must be confronted head on using all the tools available.

An Observer

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