(JTA) — The deputy prime minister of Poland said the opposition’s rhetoric toward members of his right-wing party recalls how Jews were treated in Nazi propaganda.
Piotr Glinski made his remark in an interview for the Wprost this week, the Polish media reported Monday.
“The language toward Law and Justice is to exclude, annihilate, dehumanize, delegitimize, as Jews were treated by Goebbels,” Glinski, who is also minister of culture, said in the interview.
Joseph Goebbels was the propaganda minister for Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.
Law and Justice was elected as Poland’s ruling party in 2015.
Domestically, Law and Justice is under attack for its revamping of the judicial system, allegedly to bring it under tighter political control.
The party’s criminalizing of rhetoric blaming Poland for Nazi crimes triggered a diplomatic crisis with Israel, where many claimed it was designed to whitewash complicity in the Holocaust by locals and would interfere with historical research.
Poland later amended the law, decriminalizing the action it targets, easing the tensions.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.