Polish Professor Fired for Publishing Revisionist Views of the Holocaust

A history professor was fired from his teaching job at a Polish university on Wednesday for publishing a book claiming that Nazi Germany did not have a comprehensive plan to exterminate Jews. A disciplinary commission at Opole University dismissed Dariusz Ratajczak, and recommended that he not be employed by any other Polish university for three years.

Mr. Ratajczak, who is 37, said he would appeal.

The historian had already been under suspension since he published the book, Dangerous Themes, last year. Among other claims, the book says that the gas chambers at the Nazi death camps were intended to kill lice on prisoners.

Last December, a court in Opole, which is 190 miles southwest of Warsaw, found Mr. Ratajczak guilty of spreading revisionist ideas about the Holocaust. Under Polish law, it is illegal to publicly deny Nazi or Communist-era crimes. The court, however, declined to punish him, saying his book had only limited distribution and had not done much damage. The court also said Mr. Ratajczak had distanced himself from revisionist views in a preface to the second edition of the book.

After his dismissal this week, Mr. Ratajczak told the Associated Press: “I was only presenting various views on the Holocaust to students.” It was the same defense he had made to the five-member university disciplinary commission. But according to one commission member, Maciej Dymkowski, a professor of social psychology at Opole, “he used the arguments of the Holocaust revisionists,” and failed to convince the body that he did not share those ideas.

According to excerpts reprinted in newspapers, the book calls testimony from Holocaust eyewitnesses “useless” and describes researchers of Nazi crimes as “followers of the religion of the Holocaust,” who impose on others “a false image of the past.”

Another historian, Ryszard Bender of the Catholic University of Lublin, was criticized by Lublin administrators for comments he made last January during a discussion on a Catholic radio station, Radio Maria, supporting Mr. Ratajczak’s ideas. Without naming Mr. Bender, the administration condemned the comments as “un-Christian.”

Yet academics involved in the resurgence of Jewish studies in Poland over the last 15 years say that Mr. Ratajczak and Mr. Bender are isolated exceptions.

“They don’t represent any stream in Polish academia,” says Robert Gadek, director of the Center for Jewish Culture, in Krakow. “Academics are very much aware of what the truth was.”