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Speaking to Poland's Wnet radio on Thursday, Braun said that
“ritual murder is a fact, and such a thing as Auschwitz with its
gas chambers is unfortunately a fake,” news agency PAP reported.
The reporter then ended the interview.
Some Christians in medieval Europe believed that Jews murdered
Christians to use their blood for ritual purposes, something
which historians say has no basis in Jewish religious law or
historical fact and instead reflected anti-Jewish hostility in
Christian Europe.
A spokesperson for the Warsaw district prosecutor's office,
Piotr Antoni Skiba, said prosecutors were conducting a
preliminary investigation into Braun’s potential denial of Nazi
crimes.
The director of the Auschwitz museum, Piotr Cywinski, said he
would file a separate complaint with prosecutors. He said that
“denying the fact that gas chambers existed is not only a
manifestation of anti-Semitism and an ideology of hatred; in
Poland it is also a crime.”
Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the
Auschwitz site in southern Poland, which was under German
occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews
killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles,
Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk described Braun's words as “a
disgrace.” He said that "we must do everything so that no one in
the world associates Poland with such people, such faces and
such actions.”
On Thursday, Braun was in the northeastern town of Jedwabne on
the anniversary of a 1941 massacre in which Jews were burned
alive by Polish neighbors during the Nazi occupation.
He was among a group of people who tried to block the departure
of cars carrying people who participated in a ceremony marking
the anniversary, including Poland's chief rabbi, PAP reported.
Police intervened and they were able to leave.
Some Poles want the massacre site excavated to uncover possible
evidence that Germans ordered Polish villagers to do the
killings. Braun demanded the exhumation of the victims on
Thursday.
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