Poland says Netflix Holocaust documentary 'rewrites history'

Poland has complained to Netflix that a Holocaust documentary series on Nazi German death camps "rewrites history" by featuring an "incorrect" map.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called on the popular US streaming and production website to correct the "terrible mistake" that he believed had been "committed unintentionally".

A Netflix consultant in Poland who only identified herself as Malgorzata told AFP on Tuesday the company was "treating the issue as a priority" and that its headquarters would soon issue an official statement.

"Netflix did not intend to offend anyone or compromise any values," she added.

The Auschwitz memorial museum also tweeted that historical and geographical information in the Netflix documentary about the locations of Nazi death camps was "simply wrong".

A map featured in "The Devil Next Door" documentary wrongly shows death camps built by Nazi Germany during World War II inside the borders of modern-day Poland that were established only after the end of the war.

In reality, Nazi Germany set up the camps inside territory it occupied following its September 1939 invasion and takeover of Poland.

"Not only is the map incorrect, but it deceives viewers into believing that Poland was responsible for establishing and maintaining the camps, and for committing crimes therein," Morawiecki said in the letter to Netflix boss Reed Hastings posted on his official Facebook page on Monday.

"As my country did not even exist at that time as an independent state, and millions of Poles were murdered at these sites, this element of 'The Devil Next Door' is nothing short of rewriting history," he said.

The map in question appears in a documentary focused on retired US autoworker John Demjanjuk, convicted in a landmark 2011 German court ruling for serving as a guard at the Nazi German Sobibor camp in occupied Poland.

Poland suffered some of the worst horrors of World War II: nearly six million Poles died in the conflict that killed more than 50 million people overall.

That figure includes the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, half of them Polish.

© 2019 AFP