With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Polish leaders threaten fate of nearly finished WWII museum

Poland’s conservative government is taking steps that threaten an ambitious new World War II museum which international experts have spent eight years creating — the latest ideological battle the nation’s nationalistic authorities are waging against the pro-European rivals they ousted from power last year.

The Museum of the Second World War has been under development since 2008 and was due to open next year in Gdansk, where the first shots of the war were fired. The $120 million project was launched with the support of former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, now one of the European Union’s top leaders, a man deeply hated by the head of Poland’s new ruling Law and Justice party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

The Euro-skeptic Law and Justice party accuses the state-funded museum of not focusing enough on Poland, objecting to an approach that puts Poland’s wartime experience in the broader context of the fate of other nations under the German, Soviet and Japanese occupations. Kaczynski vowed in 2013 that if his party ever took power it would change the museum so it “expresses the Polish point of view.”

Read entire article at Daily Reflector