Over 64,000 sign petition demanding education minister be fired for saying “Polish Nazis” built camps

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Over 64,000 people have signed a petition calling for Poland’s education minister, Barbara Nowacka, to be fired over remarks she made last week in which she falsely said that “Polish Nazis” were responsible for building concentration and death camps during World War Two.

Nowacka has apologised for the remarks, which she said were a “slip of the tongue”. She has been defended by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who says he has no plans to fire her. But the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party has argued that such a serious error makes her position untentable.

The comments in question were made on 27 January, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the liberation in 1945 of Auschwitz, a concentration camp built and run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War Two.

Speaking at a conference in Kraków on teaching about the Holocaust, antisemitism and fascism, Nowacka said that “in the territory occupied by Germany, Polish Nazis built camps that were labour camps, and then they became mass extermination camps”.

Poles were, in fact, not responsible for the camps and were actually among the main victims of them. At Auschwitz, for example, around 70,000 ethnic Poles died as prisoners, making them the second-largest group of victims behind Jews, around one million of whom were killed there.

During the war, Poland, unlike many other parts of Europe under German control, had no local fascist collaborationist government. Around six million of its citizens died during the occupation, representing 17% of the prewar population. That was a greater relative loss than any other country.

Nowacka’s error was particularly embarrassing because for years Poland has been trying to prevent international media from using the term “Polish” to describe German Nazi camps in occupied Poland because it perpetuates the false impression that Poles were responsible for them.

After the mistake, Nowacka’s ministry issued a statement saying that she “clearly misspoke” and that in her pre-prepared speech she had meant to say: “In the territory of Poland occupied by Germany, the Nazis built camps that were labour camps, and then they became mass extermination camps.”

In a statement on social media, the minister herself said she “apologises for the obvious slip of the tongue”. She added that “the camps were built by the Germans and there were no Polish Nazis. This is a historical truth. I also spoke about this many times during my speech at the conference in Kraków”.

That apology and clarification, however, did not satisfy the national-conservative PiS, which called for the minister’s resignation.

“Nowacka’s statement is disgraceful and no twisted explanations will change that. Resign!” wrote former PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

Mariusz Błaszczak, the head of PiS’s parliamentary caucus, said that if Tusk did not fire Nowacka or she did not choose to resign herself, the opposition would submit a motion to parliament for her to be dismissed.

Meanwhile, Ordo Iuris, a prominent conservative legal NGO, launched a petition calling for Nowacka to be fired for her “scandalous” remarks. It argued that the comments should be viewed in the context of the minister also reducing teaching in schools about the history of Poles under German occupation.

According to Ordo Iuris’s website, almost 65,000 people had signed the petition as of Monday morning, a week after the education minister’s comments.

Meanwhile, on Friday, far-right politician Grzegorz Braun announced that he had filed a notification accusing Nowacka of committing the offence of publicly denying Nazi crimes, which can result in a prison sentence of up to three years.

Last week, Braun was himself ejected from the European Parliament for disrupting a minute’s silence honouring Holocaust victims by shouting “let’s pray for the victims of the Jewish genocide in Gaza”.

However, Nowacka has so far received backing from Tusk. “I will not draw any dramatic consequences because of a slip of the tongue,” said the prime minister last week. “If politicians were to put their heads on the line because they slipped up, I don’t know whether they would ever be willing to hold any office.”

“We all in Poland know that they were German Nazi concentration camps,” added Tusk, who noted that “both of my grandfathers were prisoners of German concentration camps”.

Nowacka has also recently faced strong criticism from conservatives over her policies to cut the amount of teaching of Catholic catechism in public schools and plans to introduce a new subject that contains elements of sex education.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.