Yad Vashem regrets videos at World Holocaust Forum
Footage omitted mention of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and obfuscated USSR’s occupation of Poland in 1939
Yad Vashem has apologized for videos shown at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum it hosted last month, parts of which were historically inaccurate and omitted mention of the Soviet Union’s occupation of large swathes of Polish territory and the three Baltic states in 1939 and its non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.
Recent comments made by Russian President Vladimir Putin whitewashing the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and accusing Poland of partial responsibility for World War II cast a shadow over the forum and ended with the Polish president declining an invitation to attend the event.
In a statement to the press, Prof. Dan Michman, Yad Vashem’s head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, insisted that the institution was “opposed to efforts at obfuscation and distortion by the political discourse in various countries.”
The video in question, “created by the World Holocaust Forum Foundation in cooperation with Yad Vashem,” was entitled The Holocaust and liberation, and was shown during the course of the event at Yad Vashem two weeks ago.
The video, which can still be seen on the website of the World Holocaust Forum Foundation, contains several major inaccuracies.
The principle issue with the video is that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939, eights days before the German attack on Poland and the outbreak of the war, is missing from the narrative of the video.
The non-aggression pact
gave Nazi Germany confidence that it would be free to invade Western Europe without the Soviet Union intervening on behalf of Britain and France.
It also included a secret protocol that agreed the Soviet Union could invade and annex Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Finland, with Poland partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
As well as not mentioning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the video also uses a highly problematic map. The sequence of events demonstrated in the map, which portrays the ever-expanding boundaries of Nazi Germany as it invaded the countries of Europe, starts in 1942 and shows Poland as still being free at that time.
In reality, Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1 from the west while the Soviet Red Army invaded from the east two weeks later, dividing the country between the two dictatorships.
The map also shows the Soviet republic of Belarus clearly demarcated, apparently as an independent state, when in reality part of the territory the map defines as Belarus was Polish territory occupied by the Soviet Union under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentr Pact.
Although Belarus is ostensibly shown as an independent state, the Soviet republic of Ukraine is not shown at all, even though it had the same status as a republic within the Soviet Union.
Notwithstanding that the video omits the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, it highlighted the role of the Red Army in pushing back the Wehrmacht from eastern Europe.
The annexation of the Baltic countries by the Soviet Union and its control of Poland and other states behind the Iron Curtain after the war constitutes an ongoing grievance of those countries towards post-Soviet Russia, recently highlighted by the Russia-Poland spat over the history of the World War II.
As a function of the timeline distortions in the video and its maps, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other countries are shown as still being free in 1942, despite the fact that they were overrun and occupied by Nazi Germany by 1940.
Finally, the video’s maps erroneously label the forced-labor, concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau and Theresienstadt as death camps.
In a statement to the press on Monday, Prof. Michman wrote that the videos “included a number of inaccuracies that resulted in a partial and unbalanced presentation of the historical facts.”
His statement pointed out the failure of the videos to mention the partition of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, and said that the maps show incorrect borders between Poland and its neighbors.
The statement also noted the mistake regarding the mislabeling of the concentration camps in Germany. Yad Vashem said that the videos “do not reflect the complexity of the Holocaust and the war, to which Yad Vashem dedicates its ongoing research, with a critical eye, without bias, and open to new findings.”
Continued Michman, “We apologize for the unfortunate errors in these short films, which do not represent Yad Vashem’s approach to the historical issues portrayed,” and reiterated Yad Vashem’s “ongoing commitment to historical truth, and to research that stands opposed to efforts at obfuscation and distortion by the political discourse in various countries.”
Yad Vashem did not state how the inaccuracies in the video were not caught before.
The World Holocaust Forum Foundation did not respond to a request for comment by The Jerusalem Post regarding the video’s inaccuracies. •