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AUSCHWITZ

‘Rewrites history’: Netflix to fix Holocaust documentary following complaints

Netflix on Thursday said it would add information to a Holocaust documentary on Nazi German death camps that Poland said "rewrites history" because it features an "incorrect" map.

Published: 15 November 2019 09:46 CET
'Rewrites history': Netflix to fix Holocaust documentary following complaints
The entrance to Auschwitz. Photo: DPA

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki earlier this week called on the popular
US streaming and production website to correct the “terrible mistake” that he
believed had been “committed unintentionally”.

A map featured in “The Devil Next Door” documentary wrongly shows death camps built by Nazi Germany during World War II inside the borders of modern-day Poland that were established only after the end of the war.

In reality, Nazi Germany set up the camps inside territory it occupied following its September 1939 invasion and takeover of Poland.

READ ALSO: 'I weighed 32 kilos': Auschwitz survivors remember a living hell

“In order to provide more information to our members about the important issues raised in this documentary and to avoid any misunderstanding… we will be adding text to some of the maps featured in the series,” Netflix said in a statement published on its Polish Twitter site.

“This will make it clearer that the extermination and concentration camps in Poland were built and operated by the German Nazi regime who invaded the country and occupied it from 1939-1945,” the statement said.

The Auschwitz memorial museum also tweeted that historical and geographical
information in the Netflix documentary about the locations of Nazi death camps
was “simply wrong”.

“Not only is the map incorrect, but it deceives viewers into believing that Poland was responsible for establishing and maintaining the camps, and for committing crimes therein,” Morawiecki said in the letter to Netflix boss Reed Hastings posted on his official Facebook page on Monday.

“As my country did not even exist at that time as an independent state, and millions of Poles were murdered at these sites, this element of 'The Devil
Next Door' is nothing short of rewriting history,” he said.

The map in question appears in a documentary focused on retired US autoworker John Demjanjuk, convicted in a landmark 2011 German court ruling for serving as a guard the Nazi German Sobibor camp in occupied Poland.

Poland suffered some of the worst horrors of World War II: nearly six million Poles died in the conflict that killed more than 50 million people overall.

That figure includes the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, half of them Polish.

READ ALSO: Record numbers visit Auschwitz in 2018

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NAZIS

Germany closes case against deported ex-Nazi guard, 95

German prosecutors said Wednesday they have closed their case due to lack of evidence against a 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard recently deported by the United States.

Published: 31 March 2021 11:50 CEST
Germany closes case against deported ex-Nazi guard, 95
Graves for unidentified victims at the Neuengamme camp. Photo: DPA

Friedrich Karl Berger arrived in Frankfurt on February 20th, “possibly the last” such expulsion by Washington of a former Nazi, a US official had said then.

Prosecutors in the city of Celle, who had previously halted their probe of the man, had reopened investigations over suspicion of complicity in murders on his return, as Berger had said he was willing to be questioned.

But “after exhausting all evidence, prosecutors at Celle have once again closed the investigation because of a lack of sufficient suspicion,” they said in a statement.

Berger, who had retained German citizenship, was deported for taking part in “Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution” while serving as an armed guard at the Neuengamme concentration camp system in 1945, the US Justice Department said.

He had been living in the US since 1959, and was stationed as a young man from January 28th, 1945 to April 4th, 1945, at a subcamp of Neuengamme, near Meppen, Germany.

German investigators had been examining whether during his time there, and in particular when “monitoring a march evacuating the sub-camp, he had contributed to the death of many detainees”.

More than 40,000 prisoners died in the Neuengamme system, records show.

Germany has been hunting down former Nazi staff since the 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk on the basis he served as part of the Nazi killing machine set a legal precedent.

READ ALSO: Germany’s Nazi hunters in final straight of race against time

Since then, courts have handed down several guilty verdicts on those grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the individual accused.

Among those who were brought to late justice were Oskar Gröning, an accountant at Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, an SS guard at the same camp.

Both were convicted of complicity in mass murder at the age of 94 but died before they could be imprisoned.

In February, German prosecutors charged a 95-year-old who had been secretary at the Stutthof camp with complicity in the murders of 10,000 people, in the first such case in recent years against a woman.

Days later, a 100-year-old former guard at the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin, was charged with complicity in 3,518 murders.

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