Polish prosecutors probe far-right lawmaker who called Auschwitz gas chambers ‘fake’

WARSAW, Poland — Polish prosecutors launched a preliminary investigation after a far-right lawmaker described the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp as a “fake.”

Grzegorz Braun, a member of the European Parliament, has previously been accused of antisemitism, and extinguished Hanukkah candles in parliament with a fire extinguisher in 2023.

He was a presidential candidate who won more than 6% of the votes in the first round of the election earlier this year.

Speaking to Poland’s Wnet radio on Thursday, Braun said that “ritual murder is a fact, and such a thing as Auschwitz with its gas chambers is unfortunately a fake,” news agency PAP reported. The reporter then ended the interview.

The ritual murder claim referred to the fact that some Christians in medieval Europe believed that Jews murdered Christians to use their blood for ritual purposes, something which historians say has no basis in Jewish religious law or historical fact and instead reflected anti-Jewish hostility in Christian Europe.

A spokesperson for the Warsaw district prosecutor’s office, Piotr Antoni Skiba, said prosecutors were conducting a preliminary investigation into Braun’s potential denial of Nazi crimes.

The director of the Auschwitz museum, Piotr Cywinski, said he would file a separate complaint with prosecutors. He said that “denying the fact that gas chambers existed is not only a manifestation of antisemitism and an ideology of hatred; in Poland, it is also a crime.”

Some 1.1 million people were murdered at the Auschwitz camp in southern Poland during World War II. Most of them were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk described Braun’s words as “a disgrace.” He said that “we must do everything so that no one in the world associates Poland with such people, such faces and such actions.”

On Thursday, Braun was in the northeastern town of Jedwabne on the anniversary of a 1941 massacre in which hundreds of Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbors.

He was among a group of people who tried to block the departure of cars carrying people who participated in a ceremony marking the anniversary, including Poland’s chief rabbi, PAP reported.

Police intervened and they were able to leave.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, on Thursday condemned as a “desecration of historical truth” new plaques near the Polish monument to the wartime Jedwabne massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbors.

The plaques question the official findings and claim that “the crime was committed by a German pacification unit” instead of local Poles.

Thursday marked the 84th anniversary of the massacre, which saw Polish peasants in the northeastern village of Jedwabne lock hundreds of their Jewish neighbors in a barn and burn them alive.

The victims included women and children.