Germans Sham-WOW

Der Spiegel's article accusing Poles and other nations of collaborating with Nazis during Word War II, has caused a storm of protest in Poland.

The influential German weekly wrote that Polish farmers, together with Ukrainian gendarmes, French mayors and others were accomplices of the Nazis and were partly responsible for the Holocaust.

The article has caused outrage in Poland. Yesterday, former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the Law and Justice party (PiS), strongly criticized Der Spiegel, accusing Germans of trying to free themselves from responsibility for the Holocaust. "If we allow Germans go in for this sort of practice, in the future we will have to pay damages to German soldiers who died during the Warsaw Uprising," said Kaczynski.

Marian Pilka, deputy head of the Polish Right (Prawica Rzeczpospolitej) party condemned the article by Der Spiegel on Polish Radio this morning as an attempt to put the blame for the Holocaust on others. He reminded that the mass murder of Jews during World War II was masterminded by the Third Reich. In Pilka's opinion, the article tries to change Germans' consciousness about the past and relieve their guilt.

Government ministers are also concerned. "Soon it will turn out that Poles were responsible for the outbreak of World War II and Germans were the main victims of the war, because they were expelled [from Poland and elsewhere] after it had finished," said Aleksander Szczyglo, Poland's Defence Minister, commenting on the Der Spiegel's article.