Fox News gets a crash course in Nazi history from the Polish Embassy

It may not be as clear-cut as mixing up Patti LaBelle with Aretha Franklin, but the Polish Embassy in Washington did have a problem with how Fox News reported the Trump administration’s deportation of a former Nazi guard to Germany.

Here’s the tweet:

This isn’t all on Fox News, however.

Poland, which has itself been accused under its current government of rewriting wartime history, has been fighting this battle for a while now. Earlier this year, Polish President Andrzej Duda approved a controversial law making it illegal to accuse the country of taking part in the atrocities of the Holocaust. The law initially targeted the use of the phrasing “Polish death camp.”

So, when Fox aired a chryon including that very shorthand, it came as little surprise that the Polish embassy took swift exception, noting that the camp was, in fact, a Nazi camp in German-occupied Poland.

But there’s more to it than that.

Scholars Volha Charnysh and Evgeny Finkel wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post earlier this year in which they explained how Poland has had “an uneasy relationship” with the Holocaust for years and that the law represents “Poland’s most elaborate and conspicuous” effort to scrub the history books — against a backdrop, as detailed in a recent New Yorker story, of Poland’s only having begun in the decades since the demise of the Warsaw Pact to come to terms with the role of Poles in wartime mass murders and other atrocities.

“It’s true that the German Nazi regime planned, organized, and oversaw the murder of 6 million Jews. But that effort would have failed without local collaboration,” Charnysh and Finkel wrote. “Most Poles neither harmed nor helped their Jewish fellow citizens,” even if “some ... heroically rescued Jews.”

As for Jakiw Palij, the camp guard born 95 years ago in present-day Ukraine, he had been living in Queens, New York, for years after lying to U.S. immigration officials about his role in World War II. His U.S. citizenship was revoked in 2003, and he was ordered deported the following year, but Germany, and other countries, refused to take him.

“Palij’s removal sends a strong message,” said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. “The United States will not tolerate those who facilitated Nazi crimes and other human-rights violations, and they will not find a safe haven on American soil.”