German-Swiss media giant suing Polish MP for Nazi comparisons

The Swiss-German owner of several media outlets in Poland has announced that it is taking legal action against an MP from the Polish ruling party in response to his tweets comparing their actions to executions carried out by the Nazis in World War Two.

The company, Ringier Axel Springer Polska (RASP), also intends to take a council member of Poland’s state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) to court after he described a popular news website in which it has a majority share, Onet, as a “tube for gassing Poles”.

The contentious comments followed last week’s protest by most leading private media companies in Poland. They blacked out their TV channels and internet sites and took radio stations off the air to express opposition to a proposed tax on advertising that they say threatens media freedom and pluralism.

Some of the outlets involved – such as Fakt, Poland’s leading tabloid, and Newsweek Polska, as well as Onet – belong to RASP, which is jointly owned by Swiss firm Ringier AG and the German publisher Axel Springer SE (whose biggest shareholder is American investment group KKR).

Conservatives in Poland have long criticised the foreign – and particularly German – ownership of some leading Polish media outlets, which tend to be favourable towards centrist and liberal parties. The ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party has long pledged to “repolonise” the media.

On Friday last week, Marek Suski, a long-serving PiS MP who is deputy head of the party’s parliamentary caucus, wrote two tweets comparing Onet to Poland’s former German-Nazi occupiers.

The first, which was quickly deleted, read: “The Germans are a model of care for the rule of law in Poland and have a long tradition of it. Once executions, today ONET!”

In the second , which remained online, Suski wrote about public hangings of Polish weapons factory workers carried out by the Germans in Radom in 1942. He drew a parallel to articles recently published by Onet criticising alleged defects in guns produced for the Polish army at a factory in the same city.

“Now ONET is mounting a smear campaign against the weapons factory in Radom. I wonder what they would have written if they’d existed in the 1930s,” the MP wrote, illustrating his tweet with a graphic image of gallows and the details of the people hanged on them.

“We will be taking legal steps regarding the spreading of hate speech and defamation by MP Marek Suski,” said RASP’s communications director, Karolina Sznajder.

Suski, however, defended his tweets in an interview with Polish state radio this morning, saying that “we had confirmed information that [Onet’s] publisher is giving instructions how to attack the Polish government”. He added that “it is necessary to defend the Polish interest and recall the historical truth”.

“Mr Marek Suski of course has no confirmed information and is a liar. See you in court,” responded Onet’s editor-in-chief Bartosz Węglarczyk.

Ringier Axel Springer also confirmed at the weekend that it would be suing Krzysztof Wyszkowski, a former activist in the anti-communist opposition in the 1970s and 1980s and now a member of the council of the IPN, a state remembrance institution, after he also tweeted wartime comparisons about Onet.

The news website is “an electronic version of the Ribbentrop-Molotov gas pipeline, that is a Polish-language tube for gassing Poles!” Wyszkowski wrote.

“The rag’s entire message is the dirty water left by Der Sturmer,” he added, referring to Julius Streicher’s Nazi propaganda newspaper which called for the extermination of the Jewish race.  “As before, aggressive anti-Polonism, this time performed by the Polish hirelings of an anti-Polish owner.”

In response to the threat of legal action, Wyszkowski said he would not apologise to the media company, reports TVP Info.

Jerzy Kwaśniewski, the president of Ordo Iuris, an ultraconservative legal group, promised that his organisation would defend Wyszkowski against the “German portal’s legal attack”. He warned that “historical allusions in criticism of German companies must not be banned”.

Wyszkowski is also known for a long-running legal dispute with Poland’s former president Lech Wałęsa, whom he accused of collaborating with the communist secret police, and who in return called him “an ape with a razor” and “a sick moron”.

Since 2016, he has been a member of the council of IPN, whose stated aim is “to research and popularise the modern history of Poland and to investigate crimes committed from…1917, throughout the Second World War and the communist period”.

The IPN itself became embroiled in controversy last week, after it emerged that a former far-right activist – who has been pictured giving straight-armed salutes – was appointed to lead one of the institute’s local branches. The IPN defended its decision, saying the candidate has apologised for his “mistakes”.

Last month, Suski became the latest in a series of government figures to claim to have had his social media accounts hacked, after tweets accusing a female local politician of “vulgar behaviour” and containing intimate images of her were published under his name on Twitter.

He responded by speculating that he was the victim of an attack in a “hybrid war” by “a special unit to attack Poland” in “a neighbouring country”.

Main image credit: Živojin Al Amudi/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ben Koschalka

Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.