Brooklyn, N.Y. Don’t be surprised if TIME Magazine ever says Adolf Hitler was a Frenchman. Or a Dutchman. Or maybe an Italian.
Why? Because TIME showed an inclination to follow in the path of other media giants like Associated Press, N.Y. Times and The Wall St. Journal in a strange and misleading way of reporting on Holocaust history.
On their pages, some of Hitler’s victims are made to look like the perpetrators.
In its 11-29 issue (Brief History) TIME made reference to the Sobibor death camp as “Poland’s death camp.” But, in fact, it was Germany’s camp, not Poland’s.
The Germans established and operated the camp during their occupation of Poland in World War II. Jews were the primary victims the Germans murdered there but Poles and others also died alongside the Jews.
“Nowhere else is Holocaust history as distorted and as misrepresented as it is about Poland,” said Michael Preisler, co-chair of the Holocaust Documentation Committee of the Polish American Congress.
“TIME just gave us a clear example how such misrepresentations are done and how the Polish people get blamed for the atrocities the Germans committed,” he said.
For many years, Preisler and his committee have been protesting what he calls “the ugly travesty” of the media’s efforts to avoid using the word “German” in their stories about the concentration camps the Germans operated in Poland.
As a Polish Catholic who survived more than three years as a prisoner of the Germans in Auschwitz, it appears he has good reason to become upset when a Polish label is put on a German crime.
The explanation Preisler and his committee usually get after they send their protest to an offending newspaper or magazine is that the writer said the camp was “Polish” instead of “German” because the camp was geographically located in Poland.
The Polish American Congress considers this type of answer nothing more than a “lame excuse.” Why would the location of the camp be more important information than being told who operated the camp and did the killing inside it?
“There were German concentration camps in Germany. There were German concentration camps in Poland. A German concentration camp in Poland was still a German concentration camp and Sobibor was Germany’s not Poland’s,” the report stated.
“When we see such convoluted reasoning in the media, then TIME Magazine might as well say Hitler became a Frenchman when he left Germany and went to Paris to congratulate his generals for their victory over France in 1940.”
