Netflix to amend Holocaust documentary after complaints from Polish government

Netflix is to amend its Holocaust documentary The Devil Next Door, amid criticism from the Polish government about maps that located concentration and extermination camps within the country’s current borders. Released on 4 November, the five–part true-crime series tells the story of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian man and car plant worker who became a naturalised American citizen in 1958, and who was later accused of being notorious Nazi concentration camp guard Ivan The Terrible. According to Variety, following complaints by the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, and other members of the government, the show will be amended to explain that the camps were inside Nazi–occupied territory rather than Poland itself.

In a statement to the entertainment industry site, Netflix stated: “We are hugely proud of The Devil Next Door and stand by its film-makers, their research and their work. In order to provide more information to our members about the important issues raised in this documentary and to avoid any misunderstanding, in the coming days we will be adding text to some of the maps featured in the series.

In his complaint, Morawiecki railed against the maps shown in the programme, which are understood to be from US and Israeli TV broadcasts of Demjanjuk’s trial in 1988 – where he was found guilty of playing a part in the death of Jews at the Sobibor and Treblinka camps. Morawiecki said that they were “not only incorrect, but [deceive] viewers into believing that Poland was responsible for establishing and maintaining these camps, and for committing the crimes therein”. Morawiecki added that the documentary was “nothing short of rewriting history”.

In recent years, Poland’s nationalist government has focused on what it believes are unfair interpretations of Holocaust history that suggest Poland was complicit in the Nazi campaign of genocide against Jews. The government introduced a law last year that made it a criminal offence to refer to “Polish death camps” and imply complicity of the Polish state or nation in Nazi crimes.

It was a move that was strongly criticised in Israel and by some Polish intellectuals, who said it could restrict independent assessments of Polish history and could help to play down incidents of Polish complicity. The initial law, which threatened prison sentences of up to three years for violations, was toned down after the criticism, downgrading the offence from a criminal to a civil one.

In a critique separate to that of the government, on 10 November, the official Twitter account for the Auschwitz memorial also criticised the maps in the programme for using post–war borders, and for misleading geography: “Devil next door [sic] tells an important story. However not only it shows a map of Central Europe with post-war (not war-time occupation) borders but also the locations of Chelmno and Majdanek camps are simply wrong. One could expect more accuracy in such a production.”

Despite questions of accuracy, The Devil Next Door has drawn largely positive reviews since its release, and is currently the fourth most watched programme on the streaming site in the UK. While Demjanjuk had his first conviction from 1988 overturned in 1993, he was eventually sentenced to death in 2011 in Germany. He died shortly after, aged 91, before his appeal could be heard.