.pl Be Gone

Poland's culture minister Bogdan Zdrojewski asked museums at former Nazi death camps to drop their Polish .pl Internet suffix to help counter the false impression they were Polish-run.

He suggests the more neutral, pan-European .eu.

The three memorial museums, run and largely financed by the Polish state, are Auschwitz-Birkenau (www.auschwitz.org.pl), Majdanek (www.majdanek.pl) and Stutthof (www.stutthof.pl).

Many organizations scout the global media for descriptions of such camps as "Polish" because even if used as a geographical indicator it can give the impression that Poland bore responsibility for Nazi Germany's World War II genocide.

The majority of the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust were murdered in death camps set up and entirely controlled by Germany in occupied Poland.Poland was home to Europe's largest pre-war Jewish population, some 3.5 million people. Polish Jews represented around half the Nazis' victims.

Around three million non-Jewish Poles were also killed over the six years that followed the Nazis' 1939 invasion, many of them in death camps.