How the Germans want to make the Poles guilty of WWII
The Gargas interview with investigative reporter Gmyz
>>Hello Czarek, and congratulations on hearing that the German press mentions you as an influential reporter…
>> … and specifically, the Berliner Zeitung, in an article written by Tomasz Kurianowicz, a Pole who does not even have German citizenship, is the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung, a post-communist newspaper. It’s something like our old Życie Warszawy. The Berliner Zeitung played this role in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and then it was sold to various entities, including Berndt Montgomery. Later, a huge campaign was launched against foreign capital in the media, and as a result, Montgomery had to get rid of this business, and guess who owns the Berliner Zeitung today?
>> Well, tell me?
>> A former Stasi collaborator and graduate of the Dzerzhinsky School, which is a school for the Communist German secret police, i.e. for the German Stasi, a man who still attends receptions at the Russian Embassy at Unter den Linden in Berlin and has not stopped attending since Russia invaded Ukraine but continues to be welcomed with open arms in this very temple of Russia.
>>This is actually nothing unusual in the landscape of German politics or the German media.
>> No, indeed, nothing unusual. Although, of course, Stasi activities are met with a certain amount of condemnation.
>> In Germany, however, former Stasi officers or collaborators, the so-called IM, unofficial collaborators, equivalent to our TW, play a fairly significant role in the life of the Federal Republic. Not only that, but they also determine who is and who is not a fascist. Imagine that. And there is a foundation called the Amadeo Stiftung, also run by a former Stasi collaborator, which is generously funded by the German budget, whether it be state (Land) budgets or the federal budget. And they decide who is a fascist and what behaviors are fascist, for example. They have published, imagine, a handbook for kindergarten teachers on how to recognize whether a child who comes to school has fascist parents. Do you know what is an indicator of fascism?
>> Well, no.
>> If girls’ hair is all too often combed in two braids, and the girls come to school in skirts, there is a suspicion that their parents may be fascist/nationalists. And that’s one of the indicators of fascism, i.e., skirts and pigtails as a sign of fascism, which teachers should pay attention to. And there are really a whole lot of absurdities like this.
Yes, in these textbooks, which are published in Germany, especially for slightly older children, we probably won’t find information about how soap was made from the fat of concentration camp victims, or how lampshades were made from their skin. And we probably won’t find any other information that testifies to German crimes.
>> Ladies and gentlemen, we will now move on to the attempt by a German auction house to sell items belonging to concentration camp victims, to victims of German crimes. But before we do that, I want to ask you, Czarek, as an investigative journalist, what do you think about Włodzimierz Czarzasty becoming the Speaker of the Sejm, a man who, after all, was part of the ‘ruling group’ just 20 years ago. What did that mean, and how do you feel about this choice?
>> You know, as an old anti-communist, I am horrified that more than 35 years after the fall of communism, the second most powerful person in the country can be a man who was an integral part of the communist system and a man who was deeply involved in that system. Yes, he is a little younger than Aleksander Kwaśniewski. Yes, we have also had post-communist marshals in the past. But it would seem that after 35 years, these people should have been long tucked away, and yet they have been dug up, dusted off, by none other than Donald Tusk.
It was he who gave a second life, I remind you, to Leszek Miller, Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz, and Dariusz Rosati. I could also mention those communists, like Danuta Huebner, who found their safe haven in the Civic Platform. People who were also involved in some way in, for example, the Rywin affair. It would seem that Cimoszewicz, after the ‘affair’ with Jarucka, withdrew from the presidential election, which was also an action of the secret services.
There are many indications that Cimoszewicz, Miller, and these people will disappear from the political scene. I remember Miller’s famous meeting with the NZS in the canteen, and at the time it seemed to me that I would simply see Leszek Miller on his political deathbed, so to speak, but in the meantime, these are people who are still active today and are regaining their influence like the new Marshal of the Sejm who just made Marek Siwiec his chief of staff, a man who mocked John Paul II and who, if we recall was registered as informant ‘Jerzy’.
Unfortunately, their files have disappeared and have either been privatized or destroyed. As we know, files from the communist secret services were recently found in the possession of an officer, a former border guard officer.
>> For more information on this topic, ladies and gentlemen, you can find a statement by the spokesperson for the Institute of National Remembrance on our channel. We always invite you to visit our channel, but this shows that the past is never completely gone, that we live in conditions where the ghosts of the past, the nightmares of the past, return.
>> Unfortunately, they return in Poland, Germany, and other countries. These people associated with totalitarian systems really play a big role, and this is evident in Germany. In Germany, one of the biggest secrets in the biographies of politicians is their ancestry. Really, if you read that, as far as I remember, almost three-quarters of Germans believe that their ancestors did not commit crimes during World War II, you are also aware of the almost 100% involvement of German society in the Nazi system between 1933 and 1945. Well, of course, that cannot be true.
But the average German is convinced that their grandfather was a cook at most, if he was in the Wehrmacht, and their grandmother was perhaps a librarian. Well, that’s not true. Most Germans have ancestors who were involved in Nazi crimes. The first example is not a direct ancestor, but the ancestor of her husband. Ursula Van der Leyen, the current head of the European Commission, was the head of the German Ministry of Defense. Her husband comes from the famous Van der Leyen family from Krefeld. The family was involved in silk production, among other things.
But if you read who was the so-called Kreisleiter, or district administrator in Lviv at the time of the murder of Lviv professors during WW2, and most likely also the Lviv pogrom, the man’s name was Joachim Van der Leyen, and this is not a coincidence; he is a member of that family.
There are more such cases. One of the few politicians who admitted that his father was a Nazi was the former head of German diplomacy, Sigmar Gabriel, who said outright that his father was a Nazi until the end of his days and that he was in conflict with his father because of this, but such is the pedigree of Friedrich Merz, the current chancellor, his grandfather was also a representative of the pre-war elite, he was the mayor of one of the German towns. Immediately after Hitler came to power, he joined the NSDAP and began to fight the Jews. I could only mention the things we know about, but there are really a lot of them. And it is not surprising that in this situation, the Germans are trying to share the responsibility for their crimes with others.
The problem is that they are trying to share this responsibility primarily with Poles, and unfortunately, through people who also have Polish roots, such as Rossoliński-Liebe, who has published an absolutely scandalous book about Polish mayors during World War II, mainly mayors from the General Government. And this is simply a book that I am currently reading. I am halfway through it, and every page makes my hair stand on end because of the number of manipulations by this man, who was born in Zabrze, but is a German historian, not in Hindenburg, as Zabrze was called during the German occupation, but born in Zabrze, and a man who cannot be unaware of what the reality of the occupation in Poland was like. This is a man who deliberately distorts facts and manipulates them to turn Polish heroes into accomplices of the Holocaust. This is something absolutely unprecedented.
We are currently in the district of Mokotów, about a kilometer from Julian Kulski Street, named after the mayor of Warsaw who, after Starzyński’s death, with the consent of the Polish government in exile, and then also the Polish underground state, served as mayor of Warsaw, although it was not an independent function, and who did absolutely heroic things in the Warsaw administration, employing Jews on false papers, thus saving their lives.
This is a man who was truly recognized; even Władysław Bartoszewski himself considered him a heroic man who did a great deal to limit the scale of Nazi murders. What’s more, when a Warsaw mob was incited to carry out a pogrom against Jews, a kind of pogrom that took place in front of the Hala Mirowska building, Kulski went to his German superior, because these Kreisleiters were his superiors, demanding that they intervene in some way, so that the Jews would simply not be beaten.
That is, if this is to be considered complicity in the Holocaust, and if Rossoliński-Liebe argues that complicity in the Holocaust means that someone held a certain position, but what they did in that position is less important. What’s more, in this book, he introduces into public circulation, I think about 80 times, I quote the term, the previously unknown Krakow government. Do you know what the Krakow government is?
>> I don’t know, but you’re about to tell me.
>> Well, roughly speaking, I didn’t know until now that there was any Krakow government. So, a simple suggestion that during World War II, during the occupation, Poland had some kind of sovereign authority and that there was some kind of Polish Krakow government, which was, of course, jointly responsible for the crimes committed against Jews. It was simply the administration of the General Government, headed by the criminal Hans Frank, a man tried in Nuremberg.
>> But in a moment, Frank will be gone, and there will be some kind of Krakow government.
>> As if it were, so to speak, equivalent to, I don’t know, Quisling’s government, the Vichy government, and so on, right? There was no such thing in Poland, so you have to make it up, to put it bluntly.
>> And it is a fact that during the occupation, the Germans did not have enough people in the administration to govern the occupied country. Only they were not collaborators, such as the Vichy or Quisling governments, but in fact people who were largely forced into it. So it wasn’t that these were people who were freely chosen by the Poles. They came, and the Germans ordered them to show up for work because they were mostly people who had already been mayors before the war and took on administrative tasks. However, these were absolutely not people who had any freedom in performing these functions of mayor, as their superiors were Germans. This means that they were German collaborators!
And this is all the more astonishing because, for example, there is a description of Stanisław Zdanowski, a man who may not be known to the wider public but in the city of Siedlce, for example, there is a square next to the train station called Stanisław Zdanowski Square, because he was the pre-war mayor of Siedlce and a man who also administered the city during the occupation. He was an absolute hero, a man who, among other things, saved children being transported from the Zamość region, who organized a demonstrative funeral at the cemetery for some of the children who died in Siedlce, but who also ensured that those who survived and who managed to escape from the train wagons being transported for Germanization to the Reich were saved. For this, he was sent to the Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.
>> And in this man’s book, it is mentioned that he was sent to these camps, but the most amazing thing is that he managed to survive. He died in 1966, I believe. However, the communists did not allow him to return to Siedlce after WW2 and take up the position of authority that he had held before the war. And we read an absolutely incredible sentence in Rossoliński-Liebe’s book. And it says there, roughly, if I quote from memory, that because Zdanowski was mayor during the war, he tried to establish his credibility after the war, and certificates were issued to him, among others, by the Jewish committee, that he was a decent man, because otherwise he would have faced a prison sentence.
What’s more, today’s article contains an accusation, not explicitly stated, that Zdanowski is responsible for crimes against Jews, but at the time when he was mayor of Siedlce, it was the Germans who deported Jews to Treblinka. Zdanowski did not participate in this action. It was an operation carried out entirely by the Germans and Ukrainian collaborators, and now he is made a de facto accomplice.
What is more, his pre-war biography is described, and the accusation against Zdanowski from before the war is that, after Piłsudski’s death in 1935, he gave a speech in Siedlce at the Piłsudski monument. Under the Piłsudski monument, the word “leader” was written, but for a German to know what ‘leader’ means in German, it is “Führer.” So Piłsudski was the equivalent of a Führer. And when a German reads this, it is clear to him. Well, the Poles had a Führer in the form of Józef Piłsudski. This is absolutely unbelievable, and when I looked at it, I couldn’t believe it, and in fact, it is on every page. These are incredible manipulations.
>> So, let’s emphasize that heroes who risked their lives and those of their families are being turned into criminals, accomplices to German crimes, or perhaps more vaguely, Nazis. Yes. But what can we do about it? Well, there is the Polish National Foundation, which would probably have taken up the case and could have brought a lawsuit, but I think the families can bring a lawsuit.
>> Julian Kulski’s family protested. They are grouped together in the Kulski Foundation. They have already written two statements pointing out the scandalous things in the book. Rossoliński-Liebe’s response was that he would take the Kulski family’s comments into account in the next edition and correct these errors. He was caught out on his mistakes, and there are a whole lot of them. What’s more, in yesterday’s or the latest interview with Rossoliński-Liebe, the Berliner Zeitung makes an absolutely incredible statement that among the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the direct perpetrators of the Holocaust, Germans accounted for only 10%, and other nations for 90%.
This is simply a historical lie. The direct perpetrators of the Holocaust were primarily Germans, with a certain number of Ukrainian and Lithuanian collaborators, the so-called Szaulis, but the proportions are exactly the opposite. When it comes to those people who directly participated in the murders of Jews, I think it was more than 90%. And Rossoliński-Liebe maintains that it was exactly the opposite. And don’t write: “Sir, where did you get these figures from? It’s the same as Grabowski, who says that Poles murdered more Jews than they saved.”
>> Well, but why look far? There is Ms. Engelking, who appears in Berlin in a house called…?
>> The Polish-German House. It doesn’t exist yet. Let’s add right away that this house does not exist; it is only an idea/organization for now. For now, yes. There is supposed to be a promotion of Rossoliński-Liebe’s book in a place called the Topography of Terror, one of the most prestigious places in terms of memory politics in all of Germany. Thanks to the protest of the Polish ambassador, or rather the head of the
Berlin office, Jan Tombiński, the promotion of this scandalous book has not taken place yet. I must pay tribute to Mr. Tombiński for actually responding to this matter. However, this book will most likely be promoted at this venue in February.
>> But people like Ms. Engelking are present in Germany and do nothing but spit on the Poles.
>> I have a huge problem with Ms. Engelking because she wrote a great book together with Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City. The only problem is that after writing this book, which I really recommend to everyone because it is a brilliantly written book that also describes everyday life in the ghetto, a very good source.
The only problem is that, suddenly, after writing this book, largely contrary to what she wrote in it, she began to claim that Poles were in fact also accomplices in the Holocaust. This is an even greater accusation because you cannot say that Ms. Engelking does not know. On the contrary, she really did a lot of research and knows what the occupation was like and what the occupation life was actually like in Poland, especially in Warsaw; she knows what the Warsaw ghetto was like; she knows the scale of aid to the ghetto from the Polish underground. The problem is that, despite having this knowledge, she draws conclusions that are inconsistent with it, and it is difficult to talk about some kind of coincidence here.
Returning to Rossoliński himself, it is important to remember who financed his work. There is a book about mayors, over 1,000 pages long, which was financed by two German foundations, the Thyssen Foundation and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Let’s take a look at these foundations. Who was Fritz Thyssen? Fritz Thyssen, alongside Krupp, was the main supplier of weapons to the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, a man who had already made his fortune during the First World War, but who achieved true wealth after the First World War and the exponential growth of the Thyssen family’s fortune. During World War II, he was a declared Nazi, a man who was, incidentally, briefly imprisoned after the war for complicity in crimes against humanity, primarily for employing slave labor, including Polish slave laborers, who worked in the Thyssen and Krupp factories.
And this also shows how superficial denazification was in Germany. Because this man should have spent the rest of his days in prison, but instead his family set up a foundation, and the foundation started saying that maybe the Germans were criminals, but they weren’t the only ones, and it finances this type of project. If you look at Henkel, we associate Henkel with Persil washing powder, right? What could be wrong with Persil washing powder? Right.
The problem is that during World War II, Henkel was labeled a model Nazi company. Hugo Henkel, the then CEO of Henkel, joined the NSDAP immediately after Hitler came to power. Henkel used forced laborers on a massive scale during World War II, including Poles. What’s more, it should be remembered that Henkel was a shareholder in two other companies, in which he had significant stakes. One of these companies, in turn, had a subsidiary that produced Zyklon B death gas. The other of Henkel’s companies, in which he had shares, had as its core business, its primary activity during World War II, the melting down of gold teeth knocked out, ladies and gentlemen, pulled out of the corpses of Jews, Poles, and representatives of other nations gassed in concentration camps. Today, this company, this company’s foundation, finances Rossoliński-Liebe, who says that Poles are accomplices to the Holocaust. This is something absolutely unheard of. What’s more, books of this type are usually very expensive, and I don’t know if you know, but this is a new publication. This book, which costs €120, if I remember correctly, can be downloaded in its entirety as a PDF file completely free of charge, with the publisher’s permission. What does this mean? Well, it is actually a promotion of Poles as accomplices to the Holocaust. And in my opinion, this is something that is absolutely unheard of.
And I was thinking about it, both of these companies, Henkel and Thyssen, are also present in Poland. And it is my deepest conviction that we should introduce a law that companies that used slave labor during World War II, that were involved in the Holocaust and in the murder of Poles, must, if they want to operate in Poland, pay Poles money from their once dirty profits, for example, for the politics of Polish historic memory. Do you want to do business in Poland? You are the heir to Nazi criminals. Maybe you are not committing these crimes today, but you should pay for them.
>> A very good idea! Let’s give them a round of applause, ladies and gentlemen. Maybe someone from Donald Tusk’s team or President Karol Nawrocki’s team will take up the idea, and if not, we hope that with the change in government, this idea will be implemented. But coming back to this unprecedented, shameful auction, at which items belonging to victims, German victims, of crimes were to be sold. How do you feel about this, and what are the results of your trip to Germany, since you have just returned, probably to investigate this matter closely?
>>I have just returned from Neuss, where the auction house is located. Unfortunately, my visit there was not a success, because when we arrived at the company, it turned out that the company could not be found, and we were at Burkstrasse 18 in Neuss, where the company is located. So, we ended up in an industrial area, a fairly new red brick office building. However, when I went inside, no one knew where the company was located. It was only in the parking lot that I discovered signs with the name Felzmann, which is the name of the auction house, but I simply couldn’t find anyone there. Perhaps this was because the company was previously located in Düsseldorf and seems to be in the process of moving at the moment.
But they were no longer in Düsseldorf either. However, the current owner or manager of this company has another company that also trades in numismatic items, and it turns out that there was already an event in 2018 or 2019 where such artifacts and objects were traded, and when I opened the catalog of this auction and browsed through the items, I could smell blood.
Because when you see a letter sent from Auschwitz, with a watercolor painting by Bronisław Czech next to Marusażówna or Konopacka and Kusociński, the most famous pre-war athlete, an Olympian, a man who was also a courier in the Tatra Mountains after the outbreak of World War II, who was deported in one of the first transports to Auschwitz, he had a very low number, I think 324, but I’m not sure. He managed to survive for quite a long time, considering the conditions in Auschwitz, because he was a member of Pilecki’s network, which is also important to remember, but he was also popular even before the war, which gave him a certain advantage among his fellow prisoners, thanks to which he ended up in what was referred to there as a museum. He was simply involved in the conservation of various objects, because he also had great artistic and manual talent. And he died in prison, officially of a heart attack.
Ksawery Dunikowski, who was a fellow prisoner, witnessed his death. He recalls that he simply collapsed as he was standing, and at the moment when the gypsy orchestra, which was playing some cheerful tune on the parade ground in the concentration camp, found out that Bronisław Czech had just died, they began to play Chopin’s funeral march, and this man, I’m telling you, this man was a Polish hero. Probably Rossoliński-Liebe, because he spent time in Auschwitz, would have made him a collaborator.
Never mind. But really, every item I opened there, the list from Ravensbrück, is something that should not be sold, and yet it has been so for years. Just yesterday, for example, I checked eBay and saw that souvenirs from Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück are still being sold. I found letters, some documents from Auschwitz, and it looks like this collection was gradually bought up by someone using such auctions, which appear in various corners of the internet. The Felzmann company said that part of this collection was sold by the family. Fortunately, it turns out that it was not a Polish family, but people from the Czech Republic. About a quarter of the items in this collection. It concerns Czechs, and it seems that it could indeed have been collected by one person.
As for the rest, it would have to be someone who is very knowledgeable about concentration camps or places of execution such as ghettos, because we have Auschwitz, of course, we have Sachsenhausen, we have Ravensbrück, we have Stutthoff, and finally the Litzmannstadt ghetto, or Łódź, where there was another institution operating within the ghetto, namely a concentration camp for prisoners, for children and young people, and there is a work card of a boy, most likely of Jewish origin, because his name is Yitzhak (Icek), but it must be remembered that this was a place where the children of members of the Polish resistance movement ended up. When someone was sent to Pawiak prison or another place of torture, another German torture chamber, their children were taken away from them. The children were sent to Litzmannstadt, where the mortality rate was enormous, and the methods used by the Germans, especially when we consider that we are dealing with children, were something like keeping them in the cold, pouring cold water on them, and other such forms of “German entertainment.”
>> Who did these items mainly belong to? To people from which country?
>> Three-quarters of them are items related to Poles. Poles in the broad sense, because let’s remember one thing. Very often, Polish citizens of Jewish nationality are excluded from our nation, right? They are also Poles, and anyone who had pre-war Polish citizenship qualifies, even if they were of Jewish origin or even if they were a believing and active member of the Jewish community – they are our fellow citizens.
>> I am asking about this because the German foreign minister, speaking at a press conference, referring to this auction, said that he had spoken with his Polish counterpart, Radek, as he put it, Sikorski, and that Radek Sikorski had told him that these were items belonging to victims of the Shoah. Isn’t this narrowing down history to just one category of people?
>> Yes, exactly. We must remember that in the historical consciousness of Germans, Poland does not exist as a victim. If we look at German history textbooks, there is indeed a mention of the invasion of Poland in 1939, because it is difficult to ignore the fact that this is how World War II began, but in fact, Polish martyrdom does not exist in the German consciousness. The Holocaust is very much present, however. What’s more, Polish victims are Judaized. When I was in Berlin, there was a festival or review of films related to the Shoah, and there is a very prestigious arthouse cinema in Berlin called ‘Babylon’, and there was a giant photo of Czesia Kwoka shown there. Well, I just wanted to say that this is a classic example, who simply portrayed her as a Jewish girl. And despite protests pointing out that Czesia Foka, the most famous photo of a child from Auschwitz, was Polish, nothing was done about it. And Czesia Kwoka, if you showed the photo, which is very well known in Germany, to any German and asked who this girl is, they would answer a Jew. Of course, the role of the Shoah or the Holocaust should not be downplayed. It is a terrible crime, but it is untrue to reduce German crimes solely to the murder of Jews. And the problem is that, broadly speaking, there are only three victims of Nazism in German historical consciousness. The first are, of course, the Jews, the second are the Russians, but not the Ukrainians or Belarusians. No, that is not in their consciousness. Russians are considered only as victims of World War II. And the third category, which is currently being heavily promoted by the LGBT community, is the Ravensbrück camp, where not a single person was convicted of homosexuality, because it was primarily a women’s camp, where there was also a men’s subcamp, but not a single woman in the women’s camp was convicted of homosexuality. Why? Because in Germany, only male homosexuality was punishable.
Yes, there were lesbians or people who exhibited lesbian or bisexual behavior. The most famous bisexual was Irma Grese. She was not a prisoner; she was a supervisor who sexually abused female prisoners—simply a sexual predator. And if we read the memoirs of Wanda Półtawska (Lanckorońska), or other Ravensbrück prisoners, we know that people who exhibited homosexual behavior, women, came primarily from one category of prisoners. This is the category of asocials, i.e., antisocials, which mainly consisted of prostitutes, thieves, and so on and so forth.
And at the moment, there is a struggle going on because for years this category of concentration camp prisoners was not recognized as victims of the Nazi regime. And now there is a struggle to have the antisocial prisoners recognized as equal to political prisoners, and 95% of the Polish women imprisoned in Palmiry were political prisoners, female soldiers, members of the Polish underground, the Home Army, or the National Army. And today, when you come to Ravensbrück, you see a ball erected as a monument to lesbian victims, while these women were largely sexual predators. There were romantic loves there, but most lesbians in the camp had a very bad reputation. Wanda Półtawska describes them as Manny, meaning they were women who played the role of men in such relationships and, well, you have to call it what it is, they committed something like rape on young girls.
When I wrote about this in Germany while still a correspondent, an investigation was launched on the grounds that I was inciting national strife, as if homosexual orientation were a nationality, which is nonsense. I was writing the truth, based on information from historical sources from that time and memoirs. For three months, the German police, following a report from homosexual circles, investigated whether I had committed the crime of slandering homosexuals. As a result, however, we found so many historical sources that the proceedings were quietly discontinued without any charges being brought against me, but this shows how strong the influence of this community is. Because everyone else, well, hiring a lawyer cost me a total of several thousand euros for the whole case. Not everyone can afford that. I am not a wealthy man either, and it hit my pocketbook hard, but most people who know that this is the historical truth would probably think twice before writing something like that, so as not to expose themselves to accusations of homophobia.
>> And coming back to this shameful auction, how did it come to be cancelled? Because certain people are taking credit for it, right?
>> No, I was the one who was primarily behind the cancellation. I have to beat my breast here, figuratively speaking, of course. On Saturday evening, I was the first on Polish ‘X’ to quote a fragment of an article from Der Spiegel, which, incidentally, was not on the main page. I browse the German media every day for information about Poland. I came across an article in Der Spiegel that wasn’t very long. But it mentioned the name of the auction house, so I started looking at the items. And as I looked at them, as I told you, I smelled blood and posted more items on ‘X’, showing what was there, and it had a snowball effect. My post quickly gained over a million views, which forced the Polish authorities to take action, because people were simply sharing Bronisław Czech’s watercolors and letters from Auschwitz, and it was something that could be described as viral.
>> Incidentally, it’s interesting that the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs doesn’t scan publications about Poland in this way, right? It has to be done, it has to be done by a journalist, right?
>> The Ministry of Foreign Affairs embassy prepares a press review for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I just have the feeling that they work on weekends during the week.
>> Exactly. That’s on Saturday, although on Sunday, there is a diplomat on duty at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, but it wasn’t the diplomat on duty who prompted Radek Sikorski to take action. I say this with full responsibility. Radek Sikorski wrote that Ambassador Tombiński had been active in Westphalia a few days earlier. Incidentally, Neuss is located in the Rhineland. Not in Westphalia, although it is in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, but Westphalia is also in the Rhineland. Yes, Ambassador Tombiński took action here, and praise be to him for that. I must admit that, for a man who was appointed by Radek Sikorski, I don’t know if it will harm him, but he is doing very well as Poland’s representative in Germany.
>> The manager, let’s say he is the manager, is the Charge d’Affaire, the manager of the facility, but I would seriously consider making him a full-fledged ambassador, because my friends in Berlin say that he really cares about Polish historic memory, and this is not the first time he has reacted very positively. However, it was not the case that this was an action taken before my post on ‘X’, and in fact, the thing that started the avalanche was Rafał Laśkiewicz’s reference to it on behalf of Karol Nawrocki, who asked for an explanation.
And when the Citizens’ Platform saw that Nawrocki himself had taken an interest in it, they finally began to act, and at the same time Bartosz Lewandowski, on behalf of Radosław Tadejewski, a businessman from Wrocław, began to write letters to Felzmann’s representatives, and as a result, Felzmann’s auction house sent out a press release stating that it was withdrawing. That is, around 12:00 noon, all the items disappeared from the website, and in the evening or the next morning, a statement was issued saying, let’s be honest, if anyone felt offended, we are sorry. It’s a formulaic way of saying – sorry.
>> Well, I wanted to ask you one more thing at the end, Czarek, something a little off topic. How do you view what is happening with regard to the actions of some German elites who are trying to break, and I think they have succeeded, the good relations between Poland and Ukraine? I am referring, among others, to the head, the current head of the German intelligence service BND, and the former German ambassador to Ukraine. How do you view this?
>> I view it with great sadness. Of course, we also have our own blood feud with Ukraine to settle. I’m not saying that we should stop the Ukrainian bloodshed at this point, just to be clear. However, there is a noticeable increase in anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland. And despite all my criticism of Zelensky, I still consider at least those people I know who were at war with the Russians to be people who also contributed to the increase in Polish security by halting Russia’s march westward. And yes, I would like Ukrainians to beat their breasts for Bandera, for Shukhevych, and for the Volhynia massacre. And I hope that someday this will happen. However, the fact that Russian special services use representatives of other nations has long been called a false flag operation. And this is something that is a method very often used first by the Soviets and now by the Russians.
And anyway, this would also apply to Belarusians. A large part of the community, a large, well, a certain part of the Belarusian community in Poland. I am convinced that these are Russian agents who work on behalf of the Kremlin, sometimes pretending to be oppositionists. The problem is that we can see how “strong” our counterintelligence is, based on the bombing of the railway line between Warsaw and Lublin. In the vicinity of Dęblin, our special services are busy fighting the Polish political opposition, not the opposition, not strengthening the opposition to Vladimir Putin or Alexander Lukashenko. And that is a really huge problem. To a large extent, Germany also has an interest in this, of course, because…
>> But what interest does Germany have in causing discord between Warsaw and Kyiv at a time when there is a war going on?
>> What mistake? A fundamental one. I mean, Germany considers all of Central and Eastern Europe to be its sphere of influence, in a sense. I once spoke with the former president of the Adenauer Foundation in Kyiv, who couldn’t get over it. He said, “You know, I’m here in Kyiv, and I feel really great here. I can’t get over why they treat me so well, when I remember the crimes we committed in Ukraine during World War II. Well, we are not aware that a large proportion of the victims of World War II from the Soviet Union were primarily ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians. Russians are probably in third place here. It’s hard to count, because no one kept such accurate nationality statistics. But we know that a large part of Russia proper and Germany were not occupied during World War II, while the crimes they committed in Ukraine and Belarus are very good reasons, which also apply to Poland, of course.
The German occupation of Belarus was absolutely genocidal in nature, and it affected not only Belarusians but also those Poles who had not been killed by the Soviets. And the problem is that the Germans largely acted in Ukraine according to the principle of divide and rule. I said that the Ukrainians had made several mistakes in their historical life by betting on Germany. First of all, there was the Hetmanate, the period of the Hetmanate, but also the attempt to establish a Ukrainian state and to ally with Germany during World War II. It ended disastrously for the Ukrainians themselves, but despite everything, Germany is still trying to play a role in Ukraine, if only to pacify Ukraine, to calm down certain anti-Russian sentiments in Ukraine, and to influence the Ukrainian elite, and they are doing so effectively. I have observed this in the activities of German foundations in Ukraine. This also means that Ukraine is considered a zone of German influence.
> Thank you very much for this interview.
Translation from Polish: Jan Czarniecki.
The original interview in Polish can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlj1c8S61sU&t=2s
