Netflix has announced on social media it will make edits to a documentary aired on the network about John Demjanjuk, a sadistic guard at the Treblinka German Nazi death camp, after the Polish Prime Minister wrote a letter to the company’s CEO citing maps in the film implied the camp was in what is now modern day Poland.
In a statement posted on Twitter the network said:
We are hugely proud of ‘The Devil Next Door’ and stand by its filmmakers, their research and their work.
In order to provide more information to our members about the important issues raised in this documentary and to avoid any misunderstanding, in the coming days we will be adding text to some of the maps featured in the series.
This will make it clearer that the extermination and concentration camps in Poland were built and operated by the German Nazi regime who invaded the country and occupied it from 1939-1945.
As Breitbart News reported, Mateusz Morawiecki sent a letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings accusing the film The Devil Next Door of “obfuscating historical facts,” including showcasing maps that “falsely places several German Nazi concentration camps within modern-day Poland’s borders,” according to the Polish Press Agency.
In the letter the PM wrote: “Not only is this map incorrect but it decides viewers into believing that Poland was responsible for establishing and maintaining these camps, and for committing the crimes therein.”
He added: “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. I believe that this terrible mistake has been committed unintentionally … and I am hoping that you will be able to correct it as soon as possible.”
On Friday morning, the PM thanked Netflix for its decision in a post on Facebook, according to the Polish website The First News.
“Errors are not always caused by ill will, so it is worth talking constructively about their correction,” he posted. “Thank you Netflix and my team that this time it was possible to clarify the situation and solve the problem so quickly.”
“The Polish government has repeatedly pushed for commentary on the death camps to label them as being operated by the Nazis in ‘German-occupied Poland,’ because the eastern European nation had no government of its own on its home soil after the invasion of Adolf Hitler’s forces,” Bloomberg reported.
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