Auschwitz-Birkenau: wikipedia
Karold Tendera, the 92-year-old secretary of Poland's Club of Former Prisoners of German Concentration Camps, is demanding an apology from ZDF, as well as 50,000 zloty (11,900 euro) to be paid towards charitable causes.
Tendera's complaint relates to the promotion of a documentary by ZDF's TV Arte channel about the liberation of Majdanek and Auschwitz, WWII German Nazi death camps on the territory of occupied Poland.
In the promotional material, the channel used the expression “Polish death camps” (Die Entdeckung der polnischen Vernichtungslager Majdanek und Auschwitz).
“If after so many complaints and protests they are still calling them Polish death camps, it must be deliberate,” Tendera told Polish Radio.
“This is painful and offensive for us,” he added.
Speaking with the Polish Press Agency (PAP), Tendera reflected that “the younger generation does not know much about history, so the wording creates and perpetuates a false picture.”
America's Kosciuszko Foundation, together with the Polish Foreign Ministry, has been engaged in a long-running campaign to stamp out references to “Polish death camps” in the international press.
The campaign has had some success, with papers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The San Francisco Times outlawing such references. The Associated Press has adopted a similar resolution.
In 2012, President Barack Obama was obliged to apologise to President Bronislaw Komorowski, after using the expression “Polish death camp” while bestowing a posthumous medal on Jan Karski, a Polish underground courier who brought intelligence to the West about the Holocaust.
It is estimated that about 150,000 ethnic Poles died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. The principal victims were Polish and European Jews (over 1 million). At Majdanek, about 79,000 inmates died, mainly Jews. (nh)