Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), an institution devoted to probing crimes of the past, has issued a report including new estimates of World War II victims on the Polish side.
Joanna Najfeld reports
The Institute of National Remembrance was created a decade after the fall of Poland's communist regime in 1989 to research and prosecute crimes dating from both the war and the communist era. Its latest publication, entitled "Poland 1939-1945. Human losses and victims of repression under two occupations" and edited by Tomasz Szarota and Wojciech Materski estimates the number of Polish victims of World War Tow at about 5.5 to 5.8 million, including Polish and Jewish nationals.
'Germans are responsible for the significant majority of those victims. Soviet repression was less focused on direct extermiination, to a larger extent they were aiming at total economic exploitation,' said Janusz Kurtyka of the Institute of National Remebrance.
The numbers quoted in the publication are lower than previous estimates. Why? 'As research progresses, these differences change. There's nothing strange about this. Let's remember that these first estimates from just after the war were imperfect, due to the methods used, but also because they could be properly examined only on the territory that was left to Poland after the War. This excluded half of the country, which had been taken away from Poland,' explains historian Waldemar Grabowski.
Łukasz Kamiński of the Institute of National Remembrance emphasizes that the current estimated total number of victims is expected to grow, as further archives are searched. There are special problems with German archives, he explains: 'In some categories, we are not yet able to estimate the number of victims. For example, we have a problem with national minorities other than the Jewish one. There were also Ukrainians, Belarussians or Lithuanians among Polish citizens. So the scale of the casualties in these categories is still unknown, while it should be included in the total.'
According to Adam Burakowski, political analyst at the Polish Academy of Sciences, the question of victims belonging to national minorities who were citizens of Poland before the war, and were made Soviet citizens after the war, may be brought up again by Russians on the occasion of the 70th World War Two outbreak anniversary, as part of their recent history propaganda campaign.
'Considering the recent Russian attempts to re-write history, for example by suggesting Polish complicity in German aggression, we could expect Russians to publish their own estimates of Soviet war victims shortly. Probably, they could count citizens of pre-war Poland (estern Poland, annected to the USSR by the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact) as Soviet citizens, and this way enlarge the total amount of their losses. In my opinion, it could be an abuse,' Burakowski said.
In June, Poland's Institute of National remembrance launched a vast operation to create a name-by-name Internet list of Polish war victims.