White House Shrugs off Polish Apology Demands

Daily News Article   —   Posted on May 31, 2012

(from YahooNews.com) AgenceFrance-Presse (AFP) – The White House on Wednesday shrugged off Polish demands to express more than mere ‘regret’ after President Barack Obama mistakenly referred to a Nazi Holocaust site as a “Polish death camp.”

“We regret the misstatement, but that is what it was,” said Obama spokesman Jay Carney, reiterating that the president “misspoke” during a ceremony awarding the highest U.S. civilian honor to late Holocaust hero Jan Karski.

“He was referring to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland.”

Poland had earlier insisted that Washington must do more than simply express the “regret” offered by another White House spokesman late on Tuesday, hours after Obama’s use of words deemed offensive by Warsaw.

Jan Karski

Obama’s verbal slip overshadowed his posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Karski, a Polish underground officer who provided the Allies with early eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide against European Jews. “Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale, and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself,” Obama said.

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Obama’s words had hurt all Poles and he expected more from Washington than just regret.  “I am convinced that our American friends can today allow themselves a stronger reaction than a simple expression of regret from the White House spokesman — a reaction more inclined to eliminate once and for all these kinds of errors,” Tusk told reporters in Warsaw.  “Today, this is a problem for the reputation of the United States,” the prime minister said.

[Prime Minister Donald Tusk also said: “We can’t accept such words in Poland, even if they are spoken by a leader of an allied country. Saying Polish concentration camps is as if there was no German responsibility, no Hitler.”  The Polish government vigorously watches the global media for descriptions of former concentration camps as “Polish” because it says the term — even if used simply as a geographical indicator — can give the impression that Poland bore responsibility for Nazi Germany’s World War II genocide.]

Members of Poland’s Jewish community — including the country’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich — said in a statement that: “We expect President Barack Obama to personally correct his words.”

Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski said meanwhile he had sent a letter to Obama “counting on (…) cooperation in correcting this unfortunate error” which “I am certain in no way reflects the thoughts or views of our American friend.”

US officials reiterated Wednesday that Obama had visited the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial during his visit to Poland last year and had repeatedly paid tribute to the bravery of Poles during World War II.

Between 1939 and 1945, nearly six million Polish citizens perished under Nazi Germany’s brutal World War II occupation of their country.

More than half of Poland’s victims were of Jewish origin and they, in turn, accounted for half of the six million European Jews who perished during the Holocaust.

Many were killed in death camps set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland — including the most notorious, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Karski, who was a clandestine officer of the Polish government-in-exile in London, witnessed scenes of starvation and death after infiltrating Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto and visiting a Nazi transit camp sending Jews to death chambers.

Karski took his eye witness testimony to wartime US president Franklin Roosevelt. He later became a professor of history at Georgetown University and died in Washington aged 86 in 2000.

Copyright ©2012 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. Visit news.yahoo.com/obama-nazi-death-camp-gaffe-hurt-poles-pm-110505006.html for the original post.

Background

The occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War (1939–1945) began with invasion of Poland in September 1939, and formally concluded with the defeat of Nazism by the Allies in May 1945.

What do you know about the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland?

• The German camps in occupied Poland during World War II were built by Nazi Germany in the course of its Occupation of Poland (1939–1945) both in areas annexed [taken over] by Germany and in General Government.
• A system of camps of various kinds was established across the entire country, including extermination camps, concentration camps, labor, and POW camps.
• German occupied Poland was a prison-like territory. It contained more than 430 camp complexes. Some of the major ones, such as Stutthof and Auschwitz consisted of dozens of subsidiary camps scattered over a broad area. The number of subcamps under Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz) was forty-eight (48). Their detailed description is provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
• The camp system was one of the fundamental institutions of the Nazi regime, and with the invasion of Poland became the backbone of German war economy and the state organized terror.
• The racist policies of the Third Reich against Slavs and other "undesirables" filled the labor and concentration camps from the first days of occupation.
• The deliberate maltreatment, starvation, overwork and executions of prisoners amounted to ethnic cleansing.  Between 1941–1942, the concerted effort to destroy the Polish Jews including those of other European nationalities led to the creation of death camps, constructed for the sole purpose of extermination.
• It was only after the majority of Jews from all Polish ghettos were annihilated that the gas chambers and crematoria were blown up in a systematic attempt to hide the evidence of the crimes. The Nazi Germans turned Auschwitz Konzentrationslager into a major death camp by expanding its extermination facilities. The ovens working around the clock till November 25, 1944; were blown up by the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler himself. (from wikipedia)

The Holocaust in Poland:

• The Holocaust was a genocide officially sanctioned and executed by the Third Reich during World War II. It took the lives of three million Polish Jews, destroying an entire civilization. Only a small percentage survived or managed to escape beyond the reach of the Nazis.
• The Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland involved the implementation of German policy of systematic and mostly successful destruction of indigenous Polish-Jewish population. The official Nazi term for the extermination of Jews during their occupation of Poland was the euphemistic phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question").
• Every arm of the sophisticated German bureaucracy was involved in the killing process, from the Interior Ministry and the Finance Ministry; to German firms and state-run trains for deportation to the camps. German companies bid for the contracts to build the crematoria in concentration camps run by Nazi Germany in the General Government and other parts of occupied Poland.
• Throughout the German occupation, many Poles - at great risk to themselves and their families - engaged in rescuing Jews from the Nazis. Grouped by nationality, Poles represent the biggest number of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. To date, 6,135 Poles have been awarded the title of Righteous among the Nations by the State of Israel - more than any other nation. (from wikipedia)