The Managing Director of RTÉ News, Jon Williams, has said there is “nothing to correct” after the Polish Embassy complained that a “repeated mistake” on the part of RTÉ had caused “great distress” to the Polish community.
RTÉ, the Embassy said, repeatedly referred to the Stutthof concentration camp, in which more than 60,000 people died, as a “Polish concentration camp” and a “concentration camp in Poland.”
The Polish Ambassador, Anna Sochańska, wrote to Williams saying that “this is absolutely false information, as the death camps were Nazi German concentration camps in occupied Poland.” Ambassador Sochańska said this “repeated mistake” was causing “huge distress to the Polish community in Ireland, as well as my compatriots in Poland.” Poland, the Ambassador said, “was ravaged by World War II and almost everyone had lost a loved one in the war…indeed many of them perished in Nazi German death camps.”
The Ambassador asked that RTÉ issue a correction and “ensure that misused terminology doesn’t misinform your viewers.”
Williams said that he had apologised to the Polish Ambassador Sochańska for any distress caused, but that, “in context used, meaning clear and nothing to correct.”
Most reports @rtenews described Stuttof as German concentration camp. Six One called it Nazi death camp, & referencing its location, a ‘Polish concentration camp’. I’ve apologised to the Ambassador for any distress caused. But in context used, meaning clear & nothing to correct. https://t.co/bU9MUKRqpy
— Jon Williams (@WilliamsJon) October 2, 2021
Whilst it is correct to say the Stutthof camp is now located in Polish territory that was not the case until the end of World War II. The area which would house the camp feel, until 1939, under the control of the Free City of Danzig, a semi-autonomous city state which was created in 1919 following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the end of the first World War.
The Treaty of Versailles did give Poland “certain economic rights” in Danzig, mostly to allow them “free and safe access to the sea,” but the League of Nations was clear that Danzig “shall not pass under Polish rule, and shall not form part of the Polish State.” After the invasion of Poland by Germany the region became known as Danzig-West Prussia.
It was only in 1945, with the signing of the Potsdam Agreement, that the area containing the Stutthof camp became part of Poland.