About those Polish concentration camps

The New York Times has now followed the lead of the Wall Street Journal and inserted an instruction in its style book for reporters and editors: Auschwitz was a "German Nazi" concentration camp, not a Polish one! Why did it take more than sixty years to figure that out?

Personally, I don't even like the term "Nazi," which has always struck me as an alibi for Germans behaving badly from 1933 to 1945. "The Nazi army." "Nazi-occupied Europe." The army was actually German--does that really need to be said? The Germans occupied Europe--does that really need to be said? And of course the Germans built the concentration camps, in Poland and elsewhere. (But mostly in Poland! Poland had three million Jews, and it was easier and more sanitary to murder them there. Indeed, German, French, Dutch, and other Jews were exported to Poland for the express purpose of working or otherwise doing them to death.) The impression left is that the Nazis came from some alien planet, and returned there in May 1945, never to trouble us again, leaving only the Poles with guilt for the atrocities the Germans committed.

I don't know how many letters to the editor I have written over the years on the subject of "Polish concentration camps,"  to The New Yorker among others. I never got an answer, and the letter was never published. Perhaps now this will change, but I am not optimistic. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford