A Polish court has upheld a ruling ordering German broadcaster ZDF to apologise for portraying Polish World War Two resistance fighters as antisemites in its drama series Generation War (Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter).
Though the series won acclaim when it aired in 2013, it also faced criticism in both Poland and Germany for its depiction of history, including the negative portrayal of the Polish Home Army. It was also accused of downplaying German responsibility for wartime crimes.
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On Tuesday, the appellate court in Kraków ruled that UFA, which produced the miniseries, and ZDF, which broadcast it, must apologise to Polish war veterans for violating their personal rights.
The ruling upheld an earlier judgement passed down in December 2018. The appellate court found that the series had wrongly “suggested that this military organisation had an antisemitic character” by identifying a fictional Polish partisan unit as a branch of the Home Army.
The apology, which is to be aired on both Polish and German television, will be given to veterans of Poland’s Home Army, the dominant military resistance movement in German-occupied Poland, which was loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in London.
The three-part series Generation War (“Nasze matki, nasi ojcowie” in Polish) tells the fictional story of five young Germans between 1941 and 1945. One of the characters with Jewish origin escapes a transport to Auschwitz and joins the Polish Home Army.
Despite his military contributions, the openly antisemitic unit he is serving in seeks to oust him once they find out that he is Jewish.
After the show was broadcast in Poland in June 2013, it drew criticism for seeking to downplay German wartime crimes, and prompted the Polish embassies in Germany, Austria, the United States and the United Kingdom to criticise its portrayal of history.
Prosecutors in Warsaw refused to initiate proceedings against the show for the crime of insulting the Polish nation, which is punishable with up to three years in prison.
However, in 2016 a civil case was brought by then 92-year-old Home Army veteran Zbigniew Radłowski, who helped save Jews during the war and was one of the first prisoners to be taken to Auschwitz concentration camp.
Following the 2018 ruling against it, ZDF appealed, saying that “the portrayal of the Polish characters in no way constituted a minimisation of historical fact nor of Germany’s responsibility”.
That appeal has now failed, with the court ruling that a public apology must be made to the World Union of Home Army Soldiers. The text of the apology says that the series made the “illegitimate suggestion that this Polish military organisation was antisemitic in nature”.
“This [apology] is what we most cared about,” Monika Brzozowska-Pasieka, who represented Radłowski and the veterans’ organisation in the trial, told TVP Info.
The apology is meant to be published both on Poland’s main public television channel, TVP1, and on German channels that aired the series – ZDF, ZDFneo and Sat3 – as well as on the ZDF and UFA websites for three months.
Main image credit: Generation War
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
