The entrance to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau with the lettering 'Arbeit macht frei' ('Work makes you free'). (Joel Saget/AFP)
WARSAW, Poland — The Auschwitz museum on Tuesday launched a multi-lingual computer application that writers can use to avoid the mistake of referring to Nazi German death camps as being “Polish.”
Warsaw routinely requests corrections when global media or politicians describe as “Polish” former death camps like Auschwitz set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II.
The move comes after Poland’s new right-wing government proposed jail terms of up to five years for anyone who refers to Nazi death camps as Polish.
Even if the word “Polisf” is used as a geographical indicator, Poles insist the term can give the impression that they bore some responsibility for the Holocaust.
US President Barack Obama used the term in 2012 and later expressed “regret.”
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Dubbed “Remember,” the application is intended “to help avoid the use of the term ‘Polish concentration camps’ or ‘Polish death camps’ in 16 languages,” according to a statement issued by the Auschwitz state museum in Oswiecim, southern Poland on Tuesday.
A picture taken just after the liberation by the Soviet army in January 1945 shows a group of children wearing concentration camp uniforms behind barbed wire fencing in the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp. (AP Photo/File)
Poland was attacked and occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II and was among the hardest hit by the conflict, losing six million of its citizens between 1939 and 1945, including three million Jews in the Holocaust.
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