Instytut Pamięci Narodowej

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
IPN headquarters on Wołoska Street in Warsaw

The Institute for National Remembrance ( Polish Instytut Pamięci Narodowej , IPN ) is a Polish state institution whose main task is to archive and manage documents on crimes committed by German and Soviet occupiers to Polish citizens during World War II as well as in time of the People's Republic of Poland were committed by the regime to Polish citizens regardless of their national options.

tasks

The IPN is responsible in particular for the administration and evaluation of the files of the communist-Polish intelligence services - Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (UB, Security Office), from 1956 Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB, Security Service) and comparable bodies in the period from the establishment of the Lublin Committee on July 21, 1944 to End of 1989. Since the handling of the communist past and especially the files from this period is still controversial in Poland, the IPN is repeatedly the subject of controversial discussions.

In terms of its tasks and its public position, the IPN can be compared to the authority of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic . However, the structure of the IPN is much larger and more complex; In addition to its headquarters in the capital Warsaw , it operates numerous branch offices. In addition to the administration of files, it also has two other major areas of responsibility: political education and the implementation of public prosecution investigations into National Socialist and Communist crimes in Poland. This distribution of tasks is reflected in the organizational structure of the IPN. It consists of:

  • the Main Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish People ( Główna Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu ),
  • the Office for Release and Archiving of Documents ( Biuro Udostępniania i Archiwizacji Dokumentów ),
  • the Public Education Bureau ( Biuro Edukacji Publicznej ).

The IPN is headed by a chairman who is elected by the Sejm with the approval of the Senate for a five-year term. The chairman is not bound by instructions from the legislature or executive in his work. The first chairman (until 2005) was the historian Leon Kieres . His successor was Janusz Kurtyka , who died in the tragic plane crash near Smolensk in April 2010. Łukasz Kamiński was appointed as his successor.

history

The IPN in its current form was established by a law that was passed on December 18, 1998 and came into force on January 1, 1999. The history of its predecessor institutions can, however, be traced back to 1945: At that time, the “Main Commission for Research into German (from 1949: National Socialist) Crimes in Poland” ( Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich or Hitlerowskich w Polsce ) was founded, the extensive archive material from the time collected and administered during the German occupation and provided material for trials against Nazi war criminals . The cooperation with the Central Office in Ludwigsburg consisted of mutual mutual legal assistance even before the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two states with the Warsaw Treaty in 1970.

In 1984 there was another name change - the name Instytut Pamięci Narodowej was added .

After the turnaround in 1989/1990 , the area of ​​responsibility of the commission was expanded to include Stalinist crimes and its name was accordingly expanded to "Main Commission for the Study of Crimes Against the Polish People" (Polish completely Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu - Instytut Pamięci Narodowej ).

With the law of 1998/99, scientific and legal activity was placed on a new basis and historical educational work was added as a third area of ​​responsibility. At the same time it was renamed “Institute for National Remembrance - Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish People” ( Instytut Pamięci Narodowej - Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu ), in common usage mostly with the abbreviation IPN.

The German name “Institute for National Remembrance” is its own translation. However, Pamięć also means "memory" or " memory ". In fact, “Institut für Nationales Gedächtnis” would be a more appropriate translation, since the German word “Gedächtnis” can be interpreted, similar to pamięć, both as a storage location for information and as “ remembrance ”. In addition, it is at least an implicit task of the IPN not only to organize pious remembrance, but also to influence public opinion in the sense of a “memory policy”, as can be seen from the preamble to the law on the IPN. As a result of this mixture of legal, scientific and political interest in knowledge, the IPN has repeatedly been involved in controversies.

The IPN first came into public discussion in 2001 in connection with the Jedwabne massacre committed by Poles of Jewish citizens in 1941 , for which it had to submit an investigation report.

In February 2005, the IPN was again in the center of public interest after confidential internal files with the names of 240,000 alleged former unofficial employees and victims of the Polish Stasi counterpart Służba Bezpieczeństwa came under unexplained circumstances to the subsequently dismissed employee of the newspaper Rzeczpospolita - Bronisław Wildstein who passed them on to colleagues.

The IPN had a database compiled from the written sources it received, listing 9,686 SS men who were deployed in the Auschwitz concentration camp . In January 2017, access to the database was activated on the Internet. The entries can u. a. browse by name.

The amendment to the law on the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) of February 6, 2018 regulates the discourse on the German occupation (also on Ukrainian nationalism). Public statements (with the exception of science and art) can be punished with penalties of up to three years if they are used to attribute to Poland “in breach of the facts the responsibility or co-responsibility for crimes” “committed by the Third German Reich”. The law mainly targets the use of terms such as “Polish death camps”. The IPN sees the fight against this as a particularly important task. Nationally and internationally, there is criticism that information and research on actual collaborations between Poland and the National Socialists and on anti-Semitic acts of violence could be censored by the Polish population.

Web links

Commons : Institute for National Remembrance  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ustawa z dnia 18 grudnia 1998 r. o Instytucie Pamięci Narodowej - Komisji Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu. (No longer available online.) Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, archived from the original on May 26, 2013 ; Retrieved December 4, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ipn.gov.pl
  2. ↑ Paulina Gulińska-Jurgiel: Judicial workup of Nazi crimes by the People's Republic and the collars Republic of Germany . Conference contribution on the limits of jurisdiction. Irritations and challenges of the judiciary in Germany in the 20th century , Berlin 2018. Conference report by Stefan Jehne, H-Soz-Kult , April 7, 2018.
  3. ↑ editorial Preface , accessed on 2 February 2017th
  4. ↑ IPN publikuje nazwiska esesmanów for Auschwitz . In: Dziennik , January 30, 2017, accessed February 2, 2017 (Polish).
  5. ↑ Załoga SS KL Auschwitz ( Memento of the original from February 2, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Polish, German, English). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / pamiec.pl
  6. ↑ Ustawa z dnia 26 stycznia 2018 r. o zmianie ustawy o Instytucie Pamięci Narodowej - Komisji Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, ustawy o grobach i cmentarzach wojennych, ustawy o muzeach oraz ustawy, o odpowiedzialności podmiotaba 1.
  7. ^ Statement of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in reference to the appeal of the Ambassador of Israel to change the amendment to the Act on the IPN. IPN, January 28, 2018, accessed February 7, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Deny complicity. Controversial Holocaust law in Poland. In: FAZ . February 1, 2018, accessed February 6, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Gabriele Lesser: Warsaw forbids calling Poles Nazi collaborators. In: The Standard. January 27, 2018, accessed February 6, 2018 .