The Polish Minister of Education Barbara Nowacka is in hot water after she claimed “Polish Nazis” built concentration camps during World War II during an international conference organized in Krakow to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
During her speech, she claimed that the “Polish Nazis built camps in the territory occupied by Germany.” After coming under fire, she says that she misspoke.
The aim of the conference entitled “We are the memory. Teaching history is learning to talk” was to honor the memory of the victims and “exchange experiences and ideas on teaching about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and fascism in schools.”
Nowacka apologizes for the slip of the tongue
“Nurturing historical memory is an important signal for the modern world, reminding us of what hatred, indifference and lack of empathy lead to. The Holocaust began with hate speech and tacit consent to the exclusion, humiliation and dehumanization of others,” said the minister of education during her speech. At one point, she stated that “in the territory occupied by Germany, Polish Nazis built camps that were labor camps, and then they became mass extermination camps.”
Her claim about “Polish Nazis” caused huge outrage on social media.
“It is obvious that the camps were built by the Germans, and there were no Polish Nazis. And this is a historical truth. I also spoke about this many times during my speech at the conference in Krakow. I apologize for the obvious slip of the tongue,” Barbara Nowacka wrote on the X platform on Tuesday morning.
Earlier, the Ministry of National Education issued a statement on the matter, explaining that Nowacka “clearly misspoke.”
The target statement based on the prepared fragment of the speech was to read: “In the territory of Poland occupied by Germany, the Nazis built camps that were labor camps, and then they became mass extermination camps,” it was reported.
The first prisoners of Auschwitz were Poles
The Germans murdered around 1.1 million people in Auschwitz, mostly Poles, Jews and Roma, as well as Soviet prisoners of war. The camp operated from 1940 to 1945. It was established on the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were Poles.
Today, Auschwitz is a symbol of the Holocaust and the atrocities of World War II. In 2005, the United Nations declared Jan. 27 – the day Allied forces entered the German camp – International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
