Prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Polish far-right European lawmaker Grzegorz Braun on Monday for publicly denying Nazi crimes committed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during World War II.
The probe was initiated by the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish Nation in Kraków and concerns comments Braun made on July 10 during a live interview on Radio Wnet.
According to the prosecutor’s office, Braun denied — “in public and contrary to established facts” — the genocide the Nazis carried out at Auschwitz between 1941 and 1944, in particular the murder of Jews and other victims using gas chambers. Some 1.1 million people were killed in the camp.
The case falls under Article 55 of the country’s Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, which makes Holocaust denial a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.
The decision to launch the probe followed formal complaints from several public institutions and figures, among them Auschwitz Museum Director Piotr Cywiński.
During the July 10 broadcast, Braun called Auschwitz’s gas chambers “a fake” and accused the state-run museum of suppressing research and promoting a “pseudo-historical narrative.” The show’s host, Łukasz Jankowski, then ended the interview, saying Braun had gone too far.
“Denying the existence of gas chambers is not only an expression of antisemitism and an ideology of hatred — in Poland, it is also a crime. In this matter, a formal notification will be immediately submitted to the public prosecutor’s office,” Cywiński said in a statement on social media. He added that the museum intended to sue Braun for defamation.
Braun made the remarks while attending an event in Jedwabne, a village of 2,000 in the northeast of Poland. The ceremony marked the anniversary of a 1941 pogrom in which historians say local Poles, under German oversight, murdered more than 340 Jews — burning many of them alive in a barn. Braun and other Polish nationalists reject those findings.
The incident is the latest in a string of inflammatory acts by Braun, who has previously disrupted a Holocaust memorial ceremony in the country’s parliament, vandalized an LGBTQ+ exhibition and confronted a doctor performing abortions at a hospital.
Braun ran for president in May elections and won 6.34 percent of the vote.
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