Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki gives a speech during the Munich Security Conference on February 17, 2018 in Munich, Germany. Image by THOMAS KIENZLE/AFP/Getty Images

(JTA) — In defending a controversial law limiting rhetoric on the Holocaust, Poland’s prime minister again angered Israeli politicians by saying that the genocide had ”Jewish perpetrators.”

Mateusz Morawiecki said this Saturday at the Munich Security Conference during an interview with Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist, in which he spoke about the law passed earlier this month. It criminalizes claims that the Polish nation or state are responsible for Nazi crimes.

Israel protested the law, as did many Jewish groups that warned it would limit debate about the Holocaust and serve to obscure the actions of Poles who betrayed Jews to the Germans or killed them.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

“Of course it’s not going to be punishable, [it’s] not going to be seen as criminal to say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian; not only German perpetrators,” Morawiecki told Bergman.

The leader of the Zionist Union party in Israel, Avi Gabbai, wrote on Twitter: “Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki talks like the last of the Holocaust deniers. The blood of millions of Jews cries out from the ground in Poland over the distortion of history and escape from blame.”

Dozens of Jews are known to have collaborated with the Nazis in Germany alone, helping the Nazis track down other Jews in hiding, often in the hope of escaping the Nazi death machine. Hundreds of Jews served as Kapos, internal Jewish police officers, and administrators in the service of the Nazis. Some of them tortured and murdered other Jews.

Thousands of Poles are believed to have collaborated with the Nazis, resulting in the death of many thousands of victims, according to Efraim Zuroff, Eastern Europe director for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Thousands of non-Jewish Poles also rescued thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. The Nazis killed three million Polish Jews and another three million non-Jewish ones.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount