The ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association has managed to remove more than 3,500 items with fascist and antisemitic content through its cooperation with the major online sales platform Allegro. These included numerous copies of contemporary editions of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ without critical commentary as well as books by David Irving, a rabidly antisemitic pseudo-historian who has denied the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz and the extermination of six million Jews during World War II.
Irving calls Auschwitz a ‘Disneyland’. For peddling such ideas in
public, in 2006 he was sentenced to prison by a court in Austria. In
2007, thanks to an intervention by ‘NEVER AGAIN’ and the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, he was removed from the International Book
Fair in Warsaw. In September 2019, Irving with a group of followers
planned another ‘sightseeing trip’ through the former death
camps. The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that his
theories are unacceptable under the Polish law and he would not be
allowed to enter Poland.
- ‘Upon our recommendations, Allegro removes such items, even
though new ones continue to pop up and need to be removed, too; this
requires much effort and commitment,’ said a member of the ‘NEVER
AGAIN’ team Jacek Dziegielewski. Dr Anna Tatar, also a ‘NEVER
AGAIN’ Association representative, adds: ‘The final decision on
removal is always taken by Allegro, but in almost all the cases our
interventions were successful. We have formed a partnership which
allows us to counter racist and fascist propaganda very effectively.
And we are talking about the biggest internet sales platform in the
region of Central and Eastern Europe, with more than 21 million
registered users, at a time of a general growth of antisemitic and
racist hate speech in our society.’
The offers reported by ‘NEVER AGAIN’ included newly-made Third
Reich flags and SS uniforms, records with Nazi music, lighters with
an image of Hitler, or pendants with Mussolini.
Moreover, in cooperation with ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Allegro removed books
by SS officer Leon Degrelle who praised Hitler after the war and
denied the Holocaust, by Hennecke Kardel who claimed that the Jews
themselves were responsible for the Holocaust, and publications
glorifying the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist group who murdered many
Jews.
The legal basis for deleting the auctions are Articles 256 and 257 of
the Polish Penal Code together with the provisions in Appendix No. 1
to the Allegro Code of Conduct. In 2018, the ‘NEVER AGAIN’
Association became a partner to Allegro’s programme of ‘The
Rights Protection Cooperation’ and since then helps eliminate
offensive content from the platform.
The ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association is an independent anti-racist organization established in Warsaw in 1996. Among others, it is a member of the International Network against Cyber Hate (INACH), which brings together organizations from twenty countries fighting hatred and discrimination on the Internet.
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