Dozens of Polish nationalists gathered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland on Sunday to protest at the same time as officials and survivors marked the 74th anniversary of the camp's liberation in an annual ceremony.
The two parties gathered in different parts of the camp, now an open-air museum, and did not encounter each other. It was the first time the far Right has held a protest at Auschwitz at the annual event, which is also International Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day.
At the official ceremony on Sunday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and other government officials were joined in prayer by some of the last remaining survivors of the death camp.
In another location at the site, far-right protesters wrapped in Polish flags, some stamped with the words "Polish Holocaust," laid flowers and sang the Polish national anthem.
"The Jewish nation and Israel is doing everything to change the history of the Polish nation," said Piotr Rybak of the Polish Independence Movement, who led Sunday's protest. "Polish patriots cannot allow this."
Asked by an opposition politician on Twitter how long it would take the government to react to such situations, Interior Minister Joachim Brudziński wrote: "React to what? To the fact that someone is not in their right mind and blames all the evil in this world and his frustrations on a particular nation?"
"If you are trying to blame this government for anti-Semitism in the heads of seriously crazy (I believe) fools, it is indecent and unwise," he added.
The protest comes at a time of surging anti-Semitism in parts of Europe and as critics accuse the Polish Independence Movement of trying to build a nationalist sense of grievance among Poles by seeking to minimize Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
During decades of communist rule, Poles were taught to believe that, with a few exceptions, the nation had conducted itself honorably during a war that killed a fifth of the population.
Many still refuse to accept research showing thousands participated in the Holocaust – in addition to the thousands that had risked their lives to help the Jews – and feel the West has failed to recognize Poland's own wartime suffering.
More than 3 million of Poland's 3.2 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, accounting for about half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Jews from across Europe were sent to be killed at death camps built and operated by the Germans on Polish soil, including Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis also killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians.
Diplomatic relations between Poland and Israel were strained last year after the Polish Independence Movement government sought to impose jail terms for suggesting the nation was complicit in the Holocaust.
On Friday, Volkhard Knigge, director of the Buchenwald Memorials Foundation, barred the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) from attending a commemoration for the 56,000 people who perished there in the Holocaust.
"The Buchenwald Memorials believes that representatives of the AfD must not take part in the ceremony on its premises while they haven't credibly distanced themselves from their party's anti-democratic, anti-human rights and revisionist positions," Knigge wrote in a letter.
The AfD, which rejects charges of racism, expressed regret at the decision to ban it from taking part in the wreath-laying ceremony.
"Mr. Knigge is such a prisoner of his friend-enemy dichotomy that he is unable to build bridges on an important memorial day like today," said Stefan Moeller, an AfD lawmaker in the Thuringia state parliament.
Knigge specifically took issue with Björn Höcke, the AfD's leader in Thuringia, the region where Buchenwald is located, who told supporters two years ago that Berlin's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was a "memorial of shame" and that history books should be rewritten to focus more on German victims.
Germany's domestic spy agency said this month it would investigate the AfD to see whether its policies breached constitutional safeguards against extremism.
The agency said it would pay closer attention to the AfD's youth wing and elements close to Höcke. The AfD leadership has condemned the investigation and said it would take legal action.
Last week, AfD lawmakers in the Bavarian parliament staged a walkout during a speech by a Jewish community leader and a Holocaust survivor after she accused the party of playing down Nazi crimes.
