Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki condemned Netflix for inaccuracies in a documentary it debuted about World War II, Poland’s national press agency reported on Monday.
Mateusz sent a letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings accusing the film The Devil Next Door of “obfuscating historical facts,” including showcasing maps that “falsely places several German Nazi concentration camps within modern-day Poland’s borders,” according to the Polish Press Agency:
The PM said that the documentary about John Demjanjuk, a sadistic guard at the Treblinka German Nazi death camp also failed to make it clear that the camps were set up and operated by Germans.
In the letter the PM wrote: “Not only is this map incorrect but it decides viewers into believing that Poland was responsible for establishing and maintaining these camps, and for committing the crimes therein.”
He added: “As my country did not even exist at that time as an independent state, and millions of Poles were murdered at these sites, this element of The Devil Next Door is nothing short of rewriting history. I believe that this terrible mistake has been committed unintentionally … and I am hoping that you will be able to correct it as soon as possible.”
The Holocaust Encyclopedia, run by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, provides details about the “killing center:”
Operation Reinhard (also known as Aktion Reinhard) authorities chose the site for the Treblinka killing center in a sparsely populated area near the villages of Treblinka and Malkinia. Malkinia was located on the main Warsaw-Bialystok rail line, about 50 miles northeast of Warsaw, in the Generalgouvernement (that part of German-occupied Poland not directly annexed to Germany, attached to German East Prussia, or incorporated into the German-occupied Soviet Union).
In November 1941, under the auspices of the SS and Police Leader for District Warsaw in the General government, SS and police authorities established a forced-labor camp for Jews, known as Treblinka, later as Treblinka I. The camp also served the SS and police authorities as a so-called Labor Education Camp for non-Jewish Poles whom the Germans perceived to have violated labor discipline. Both Polish and Jewish inmates, imprisoned in separate compounds of the labor camp, were deployed at forced labor. The majority of the forced laborers worked in a nearby gravel pit.
“It is estimated that nearly 900,000 Europeans of Jewish descent were murdered there,” the Polish Press Agency reported. “The vast majority, about 760,000 were Polish citizens.”
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