Poland: Violent debate about World War II exhibition in Gdansk

A World War II exhibition on forced recruited soldiers from Gdansk in the Nazi-Wehrmacht has triggered violent reactions in politics in Poland.

The national conservative President Andrzej Duda called the photo exhibition entitled “Our boys” a “moral provocation”. Historical facts would be twisted. Defense Minister Vladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz from the center-left government also stated that such a representation does not serve Polish memory policy.

The City Museum and the World War II Museum of Gdansk (Polish: Gdansk) want to point out an unknown chapter of local history in World War II with the photo exhibition: According to the annexation of Danzig by Hitler-Germany in 1939, tens of thousands of men were recruited from the city and the surrounding area in the Wehrmacht. The exhibition “important questions about remembering – and forgetting – this phenomenon after 1945,” explain the organizers.

“To present soldiers of the Third Reich as ‘our’ is not just a historical falsehood, but a moral provocation,” President Duda wrote in the network X. “The Poles as nation were victims of the German occupation and German terror, not perpetrators or involved.” Especially in Gdansk, where the Second World War started in 1939, the responsibility of the perpetrators should not be watered down.

The Ministry of Culture in Warsaw in turn threw itself into the breach for the exhibition. The accusation of falsification of historical history “the trust in institutions, the basic task of which is to preserve historical truth,” said a comment on X.

Many of the Gdansk Poland have been deserted and have joined the Polish armed forces in the West, said the director of the city museum, Waldemar Ossowski, the Pap. In the communist post -war policy, many affected people had kept their past in the Wehrmacht.