Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

TV Station Ordered To Apologize for Calling Nazi Camps ‘Polish’

(JTA) — A German public broadcasting station must apologize to a survivor of Auschwitz for calling the Nazi death camps “Polish death camps.”

An appeals court in Krakow, Poland, announced the ruling on Thursday.

Ninety-five year old Polish Holocaust survivor Karol Tendera filed the lawsuit against the ZDF broadcaster over a 2013 promotional trailer for a documentary about the liberation of Auschwitz and Majdanek, which described them as Polish death camps, though Nazi Germany set up and ran the camps.

“Every Pole won’t necessarily be offended but the plaintiff was. He went from being a victim to the culprit” because of the erroneous wording, the judge wrote in his ruling, the AFP French news agency reported.

A lower court had dismissed the case, citing two explanatory letters written to Tendera by the broadcaster.

The appeals court ordered the broadcaster to publish its apology for a month on its website.

 

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.