'Zero tolerance' for totalitarian ideas: Polish interior minister

Joachim Brudziński was speaking in parliament amid a crackdown on an extreme nationalist organisation that a television exposé showed glorifying Hitler and fascism.

There can be no tolerance for "any manifestation of promoting, affirming or glorifying criminal totalitarian systems," Brudziński told MPs on Thursday, specifying that he was referring to "German Nazism and Soviet communism, the bloodiest forms of totalitarianism experienced by the Polish people.”

Brudziński said: "I think we have agreement across the political spectrum in this area. The issue is not subject to any debate.”

Prosecutors in Poland have detained six suspected neo-Nazis after footage aired by a private television station appeared to show a group glorifying Hitler and Nazi Germany, the country’s PAP news agency reported on Thursday.

President Andrzej Duda on Wednesday condemned any instance of promoting Nazism in Poland.

“We cannot allow these organisations to exist in Poland … they are anti-Polish, there is no room in Polish society for someone who praises Adolf Hitler, the person responsible for the annihilation of Poles and other nations, especially Jews,” Duda said.

Last weekend, private broadcaster TVN aired undercover recordings of what it said were celebrations of Hitler’s birth anniversary last May by an extreme nationalist organisation called Pride and Modernity.

The revelations caused outrage and condemnation in Poland, a country that suffered massive damage after being invaded by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany in World War II.

The Soviet Union attacked Poland in the early days of World War II as Poles struggled against German occupation. A Soviet-installed communist regime in Warsaw ruled for more than four decades after the war.

(gs/pk)

Source: PAP