Długoborski, Wácław

Wácław Długoborski (3 Jan. 1926 – 21 Oct. 2021) was a partisan (civilian) fighter during World War II in Poland. He was arrested for this in 1943, and deported to the Auschwitz Camp. After the war, he became a professional historian in Communist Poland, and among other things was curator for research at the Auschwitz Museum. Together with Polish historian Franciszek Piper, he published a five-volume study of the Auschwitz Camp’s history in 1999 that deals with extermination claims only superficially in its slim Volume 3 (English in Długoborski/Piper 2000).

In an interview with a German newspaper, he admitted in 1998 that, during the Communist time in Poland, historians had to lie about the history of Auschwitz:

Up until 1989 in eastern Europe, a prohibition against casting doubt upon the figure of 4 million killed was in force; at the memorial site of Auschwitz, employees who doubted the correctness of the estimate were threatened with disciplinary measures.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 September 1998

This was the same year that democratic Poland introduced a law threatening any historical dissent in this regard with up to three years imprisonment, hence not just disciplinary measures. Considering that Poland still has active Holocaust denial laws in place, it is reasonable to assume that current historians at the Auschwitz Museum continue to lie, and that, in the future, they will point to present-day laws in defense of their ongoing historical falsifications.