A court in the southern Polish city of Kraków ruled on Friday that the German broadcaster and producers UFA Fiction must pay PLN 20,000 (EUR 4,645, USD 5,315) in moral damages to Zbigniew Radłowski, a 94-year-old veteran of Poland’s wartime Home Army (AK), who sued them more than two years ago, bringing the case together with an international association of former AK soldiers.
The Kraków court also ruled that each airing of the series should be preceded by a statement that the characters depicted in it are fictitious and that Poles helped Jews during World War II, while Germany occupied Poland at the time.
In a statement sent to Polish Radio, ZDF said it intended to appeal the ruling after studying it in detail.
The German broadcaster also said it regretted the Kraków court did not consider artistic freedom when ruling on the case, the Polish public broadcaster’s IAR news agency reported on Saturday.
When the case was brought to court in the summer of 2016, the plaintiffs claimed the TV drama Our Mothers, Our Fathers infringed the personal rights of former Home Army soldiers such as the right to national identity, the right to national pride and dignity and freedom from hate speech.
Germans 'portrayed as victims' of WWII
They argued the series contained scenes suggesting the Polish Home Army was complicit in crimes against Jews, while Germans were portrayed as the victims of World War II.
The plaintiffs demanded an apology on all television channels which screened the series, or for the first broadcast on other channels that bought the drama to be preceded by a statement that Germans were the only nation guilty for the Holocaust.
The court at the time rejected a motion by the defendants for the lawsuit to be dropped. It also dismissed arguments that Poland had no jurisdiction over the case. The judge ruled that a Polish court had a right and a duty to proceed with the case since the series was screened in Poland.
Polish veteran 'outraged'
Radłowski, a former Polish Army captain who survived the German Nazi-run Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, was quoted as saying in July 2016, after watching the TV series on a computer in court, that he was “outraged.”
He added he regarded the film as a deliberate falsification of history by Germans that aimed to “shift at least some of the responsibility for the Holocaust onto Poles.”
Polish critics have pointed out that Poland was the one country in Nazi German-occupied Europe that had an official branch of the resistance force devoted to saving Jews.
The Home Army was an official resistance force that was subordinate to the Polish government-in-exile in London.
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Source: IAR