El Pais uses "Polish" instead of "German" death camp. Removes it after embassy protest
The Polish Embassy in Madid intervened after the Spanish El Pais daily in its online edition used the word "Polish" instead of "German" in reference to Auschwitz death camp. El Pais subsequently removed the false phrase.
The misnomer was used in a piece on the death of Auschwitz's former guard Reinhold Hanning.
The publisher has assured the embassy that the wrong expression will not appear in the paper version of the daily.
"The editors have expressed regret and promised that such untrue expressions will not be published in the future", Monika Domanska-Szymczak of the Polish Embassy in Madrid told PAP.
On Thursday afternoon El Pais corrected the text, replacing the word "Polish" in the sentence describing the camp with "German (camp) in occupied Poland".
El Pais recalled that Hanning was sentenced in 2016 to five years in prison for his participation in the crimes committed by the German Nazi regime at Auschwitz. Hanning, 95, died on Tuesday. (PAP)
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NOTE: The notorious misnomer "P.... death camps" suggests that the death camps in German-occupied Poland during World War II were built in the name of the Polish people rather than by the Nazis for their own purposes.
Poland has launched an international campaign against the use of the false term notoriously employed by international mass media. One of the projects aimed to reach this goal was a "Death Camps Were Nazi German" mobile billboard campaign reminding the European public that World War Two death camps on German-occupied territory of Poland were Nazi-German and had nothing to do with "Polish".
In December 2016, the appellate court in Krakow (southern Poland) decided that Germany's ZDF was to make an apology on its website to former Auschwitz prisoner Karol Tendera who had sued the broadcaster over describing death camps Majdanek and Auschwitz as "Polish" in its 2013 online material.
As ZDF's online apology was considered too roundabout, and thus insufficient, upon the initiative of The Foundation for the Traditions of Town and Country a trailer-mounted billboard reading "Death Camps Were Nazi German" and "ZDF Apologize!" (showing an image of the main gate of the notorious Nazi-German death camp Auschwitz inscribed in the Adolf Hitler's face contour - PAP) toured Europe, stopping in Berlin, Wiesbaden ZDF broadcaster seat, Brussels EU institutions, London's BBC headquarters, Birmingham, Cambridge's student campus, Manchester and Southampton, among other locations.
Not a long time ago a Bavarian daily, Mittelbayerische Zeitung, used the erroneous expression attributing German-Nazi death camps to Poland on its website.
In March the expression was found on the German SWR television's web portal in a piece describing the first deportation of Jews from Mainz. The television has since corrected the mistake and apologised.
The expression was also used by radio station B5 aktuell on its website in an article about a book on the Holocaust. After protests by the Polish consulate general, the expression was replaced with "German National-Socialist extermination camps (...) in then occupied Poland".
In January 2017, just a week prior to the anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, also BBC posted to their official website an article pointing at Polish railway workers as accomplices in genocide. Later BBC amended the article and removed the untrue statements.
On 21 April the Polish embassy in Madrid made an official protest after two regional newspapers in the Basque Country, an autonomous community in northern Spain, instead of calling Auschwitz a "Nazi German concentration camp" called it "Polish".
On 18 May the Polish consulate in Munich was forced to protest after a German history textbook appeared to misidentify Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland as "Polish".
In May 2012, also then-US President Barack Obama referred to a "Polish" instead of a "German death camp" when honouring a Polish war hero and and one of Polish Holocaust whistleblowers, Jan Karski. The White House later said Obama "misspoke" and expressed "regret."
Earlier this year, the Polish Embassy in Washington put online the "Words Matter" video that stresses the use of the right terminology with reference to "Nazi German concentration and exterminations camps".
In one minute and forty-three seconds, the animated educational video presents a thorough account of Nazi German occupation of Poland during WWII, showing who the true perpetrators in the Holocaust were.
In a deep, stern baritone, the narrator reminds that "words matter". "Using misleading language obscures the tragedy of millions of Holocaust victims. It's not just semantics, it's a matter of historical integrity and accuracy. Remember to use correct words: GERMAN NAZI CAMPS", it adds emphatically.
The video is available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDpTcXQ8Na0&feature=youtu.be (PAP)
