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Institute of National Remembrance
Instytut Pamięci Narodowej

Institute of National Remembrance logoThe logo of IPN IPN headquarters at 7 Wołoska Street in Warsaw
Abbreviation	IPN
Formation	18 December 1998 (26 years ago) (1998-12-18)
Dissolved	n/a
Purpose	Education, research, archive, and identification. Commemorating the Struggle and Martyrdom. Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation.
Headquarters	Warsaw, Poland
Location	7 Wołoska Street
Region served	Republic of Poland
Membership	Staff
Official language	Polish
President	Jarosław Szarek
Main organ	Council
Affiliations	Platform of European Memory and Conscience Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., partner institutions in Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary
Staff	Several hundred
Website	www.ipn.gov.pl
Remarks	The IPN Headquarters in Warsaw co-ordinates the operations of eleven Branch Offices and their Delegations

The Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (Template:Lang-pl; IPN) is a Polish government institution in charge of prosecution, archives, education, and, since 2007, lustration, in relation to crimes against the Polish nation. In 2018, the institution's mission statement was amended to include "protecting the reputation of the Republic of Poland and the Polish Nation". The IPN investigates Nazi and communist crimes committed between 1917 and 1990, documents its findings, and disseminates them to the public.

The institute was established by the Polish Parliament on 18 December 1998 and incorporated the earlier, 1991-established Main Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (which had replaced a 1945-established body on Nazi crimes). It began its activities on 1 July 2000. The IPN is a founding member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.

Some scholars have criticized the IPN for politicization, especially under Law and Justice governments.

Purpose

IPN's main areas of activity, in line with its original mission statement, include researching and documenting the losses which were suffered by the Polish Nation as a result of World War II and during the post-war totalitarian period. The Institute informs about the patriotic traditions of resistance against the occupational forces, and the Polish citizens' fight for sovereignty of the nation, including their efforts in defence of freedom and human dignity in general. IPN investigates crimes committed on Polish soil against Polish citizens as well as people of other citizenships wronged in the country. War crimes which are not affected by statute of limitations according to Polish law include:

1. crimes of the Soviet and Polish communist regimes committed in the country from 17 September 1939 until fall of communism on 31 December 1989,
2. deportations to the Soviet Union of Polish soldiers of Armia Krajowa, and other Polish resistance organizations as well as Polish inhabitants of the former Polish eastern territories,
3. pacifications of Polish communities between Vistula and Bug Rivers in the years 1944 to 1947 by UB-NKVD,
4. crimes committed by the law enforcement agencies of the Polish People's Republic, particularly Ministry of Public Security of Poland and Main Directorate of Information of the Polish Army,
5. crimes under the category of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It is the IPN's duty to prosecute crimes against peace and humanity, as much as war crimes. Its mission includes the need to compensate for damages which were suffered by the repressed and harmed people at a time when human rights were disobeyed by the state, and educate the public about recent history of Poland. IPN collects, organises and archives all documents about the Polish communist security apparatus active from 22 July 1944 to 31 December 1989.

Following the election of the Law and Justice party, the government formulated in 2016 a new IPN law. The 2016 law stipulated that the IPN should oppose publications of false information that dishonors or harms the Polish nation. It also called for popularizing history as part of "an element of patriotic education". The new law also removed the influence of academia and the judiciary on the IPN.

A 2018 amendment to the law, added article 55a that attempts to defend the "good name" of Poland. Initially conceived as a criminal offense (3 years of jail) with an exemption for arts and research, following an international outcry, the article was modified to a civil offense that may be tried in civil courts and the exemption was deleted. Defamation charges under the act may be made by the IPN as well as by accredited NGOs such as the Polish League Against Defamation. By the same law, the institution's mission statement was changed to include "protecting the reputation of the Republic of Poland and the Polish Nation".

Organisation

IPN was created by special legislation on 18 December 1998. The IPN is divided into:

• Main Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (Główna Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu)
• Bureau of Provision and Archivization of Documents (Biuro Udostępniania i Archiwizacji Dokumentów)
• Bureau of Public Education (or Public Education Office, Biuro Edukacji Publicznej)
• Lustration Bureau (Biuro Lustracyjne) (new bureau, since October 2006)
• local chapters.

On 29 April 2010, acting president Bronislaw Komorowski signed into law a parliamentary act that reformed the Institute of National Remembrance.

Director

IPN is governed by the director, who has a sovereign position that is independent of the Polish state hierarchy. The director may not be dismissed during his term, unless he commits a harmful act. Prior to 2016, the election of the director was a complex procedure, which involves the selection of a panel of candidates by the IPN Collegium (members appointed by the Polish Parliament and judiciary). The Polish Parliament (Sejm) then elects one of the candidates, with a required supermajority (60%). The director has a 5-year term of office. Following 2016 legislation in the PiS controlled parliament, the former pluralist Collegium was replaced with a nine-member Collegium composed of PiS supporters, and the Sejm appoints the director after consulting with the College without an election between candidates.

Leon Kieres

The first director of the IPN was Leon Kieres, elected by the Sejm for five years on 8 June 2000 (term 30 June 2000 – 29 December 2005). The IPN granted some 6,500 people the "victim of communism" status and gathered significant archive material. The institute faced difficulties since it was new and also since the Democratic Left Alliance (containing former communists) attempted to close the institute. The publication of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross, proved to be a lifeline for the IPN as Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski intervened to save the IPN since he deemed the IPN's research to be important as part of Jewish-Polish reconciliation and "apology diplomacy".

Janusz Kurtyka

The second director was Janusz Kurtyka, elected on 9 December 2005 with a term that started 29 December 2005 until his death in the Smolensk airplane crash on 10 April 2010. The elections were controversial, as during the elections a leak against Andrzej Przewoźnik accusing him of collaboration with Służba Bezpieczeństwa caused him to withdraw his candidacy. Przewoźnik was cleared of the accusations only after he had lost the election.

In 2006, the IPN opened a "Lustration Bureau" that increased the director's power. The bureau was assigned the task of examining the past of all candidates to public office. Kurtyka widened archive access to the public, and shifted focus from compensating victims to researching collaboration.

Franciszek Gryciuk was acting director from 2010 to 2011.

Łukasz Kamiński

Łukasz Kamiński, was elected by the Sejm in 2011 following the death of his predecessor. Kamiński headed the Wroclaw Regional Bureau of Public Education prior to his election. During his term the IPN faced a wide array of criticism calling for an overhaul or even replacement. Critics founds fault in the IPN being a state institution, the lack of historical knowledge of its prosecutors, a relatively high number of microhistories with a debatable methodology, overuse of the martyrology motif, research methodology, and isolationism from the wider research community. In response, Kamiński implemented several changes, including organizing public debates with outside historians to counter the charge of isolationism and has suggested refocusing on victims as opposed to agents.

Jarosław Szarek

Jarosław Szarek was appointed to head the IPN on 22 July 2016. Szarek is affiliated with PiS, and in his campaign to be elected said that "Germans were the executors of the Jedwabne crime and that they had coerced a small group of Poles to become involved". Following his appointment, Szarek dismissed Krzysztof Persak who was the coauthor of the two-volume 2002 IPN study on the Jedwabne pogrom. In subsequent months, the IPN was featured in media headlines for releasing controversial documents, additional Wałęsa documents, memory politics in schools and efforts to change communist street names, and legislation efforts. According to historian Idesbald Goddeeris, this marks a return of politics to the IPN.

Activities

Research

According to Valentin Behr, IPN research into the communist era is valuable, noting that "the resources at its disposal have made it unrivalled as a research centre in the academic world"; at the same time he noted that the research is mostly focused on the era's negative aspects, and that it "is far from producing a critical approach to history, one that asks its own questions and is methodologically pluralistic." He also noted that in recent years that problem is being ameliorated as the Institute work "has somewhat diversified as its administration has taken note of criticism on the part of academics."

Education

The IPN's Public Education Office (BEP) vaguely defined role in the IPN act is to inform society of communist and Nazi crimes and institutions. This vaguely defined role allowed Paweł Machcewicz, BEP's director in 2000, freedom to create a wide range of activities.

Researchers at the IPN conduct not only research, but are required to take part in public outreach. BEP has published music CDs, DVDs, and serials. It has founded "historical clubs" for debates and lectures. It has also organized outdoor historical fairs, picnic, and games.

The IPN Bulletin (Template:Lang-pl) is a high circulation popular-scientific journal, intended for lay readers and youth. Some 12,000 of 15,000 copies of the Bulletin are distributed free of charge to secondary schools in Poland, and the rest are sold in bookstores. The Bulletin contains: popular-scientific and academic articles, polemics, manifestos, appeals to readers, promotional material on the IPN and BEP, denials and commentary on reports in the news, as well as multimedia supplements.

The IPN also publishes the Remembrance and Justice (Template:Lang-pl) scientific journal.

The Institution of National Remembrance has issued several board games to help educate people about recent Polish history:

• 303 – a game about the Battle of Britain that focuses on the Polish 303 Squadron.
• Kolejka – a game about being forced to queue for basic household products during the Communist era.

Lustration

One of the most controversial aspects of IPN is a by-product of its role in collecting and publishing previously secret archives from the Polish communist security apparatus, the Służba Bezpieczeństwa: revealing secret agents and collaborators (a process called lustration). Following the election of a Law and Justice government in 2005, in a series of legislative amendments during 2006 and the beginning of 2007 file access and lustration powers were radically expanded. However, several articles of the 2006-7 amendments were judged unconstitutional by Poland's Constitutional Court on 11 May 2007. Following the court ruling the IPN's lustration power was still wider in relation to the original 1997 law, and include loss of position for those who submitted false lustration declarations as well as a lustration process of candidates for senior office as well as .

An incident which caused controversy involved the "Wildstein list", a partial list of persons who allegedly worked for the communist-era Polish intelligence service, copied in 2004 from IPN archives (without IPN permission) by journalist Bronisław Wildstein and published on the Internet in 2005. The list gained much attention in Polish media and politics, and IPN security procedures and handling of the matter came under criticism.

In 2008 two IPN employees, Sławomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk, published a book, SB a Lech Wałęsa. Przyczynek do biografii (The Security Service and Lech Wałęsa: A Contribution to a Biography) which caused a major controversy. The book's premise was that in the 1970s the Solidarity leader and later President of Poland Lech Wałęsa was a secret informant of the Polish communist Security Service. Michael Szporer writes that the book should have been more nuanced in its judgment of anti-communist leaders, and that it unfairly singled out Wałęsa.

Criticism

According to Georges Mink [fr], common criticisms of the IPN include: its dominance in the Polish research field, which is guaranteed by a budget that far supersedes that of any similar academic institution; the "thematic monotony... of micro-historical studies... of no real scientific interest" of its research; its focus on "martyrology"; and various criticisms of methodology and ethics. Some of these criticisms have been addressed by Director Łukasz Kamiński during his tenure and who according to Mink "has made significant changes"; however, Minsk, writing in 2017, was also concerned with the recent administrative and personnel changes in IPN, including the election of Jarosław Szarek as director, which he posits are likely to result in further the politicization of the institute.

Politicization

In 2005, after Law and Justice's (PiS) electoral victory, the IPN focused on crimes against the Polish nation. During PiS's control of the government between 2005 and 2007, the IPN was the focus of heated public controversies, in particular in regard to the past of Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa. As a result, in scholarly literature the IPN has been referred to as a "Ministry of Memory" or as an institution involved in "memory games". IPN's budget is five times higher than that of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Several scholars have criticized the IPN for turning in recent years, with the rise of the Law and Justice government and the 2018 amendment to the IPN law, from objective historical research towards historical revisionism.

Organizational and methodological concerns

Valentin Behr writes that the IPN is most "concerned with the production of an official narrative about Poland’s recent past" and therefore it lacks innovation in its research, nothing however that situation is being remedied under recent leadership. He observes that IPN "has mainly taken in historians from the fringes of the academic field" who were either unable to obtain a prominent academic position or ideologically drawn to the IPN's approach, and noted that "in the academic field, being an ‘IPN historian’ can be a stigma". He explains this by pointing to a generational divide in Polish academia, visible when comparing IPN to other Polish research outlets, and observing that "Hiring young historians was done deliberately to give the Institute greater autonomy from the academic world, considered as too leftist to describe the dark sides of the communist regime". He praises IPN for creating hiring opportunities for many history specialists who can carry dedicated research there without the need for an appointment at another institution, and for training young historians, noting that "the IPN is now the leading employer of young PhD students and PhDs in history specialized in contemporary history, ahead of universities". He finally observes a contradiction in that the young historians at IPN are torn between deferring to their seniors and exploring new approaches and ideas.

Historian Dariusz Stola states that the IPN is very bureaucratic in nature, comparing it to a "regular continental European bureaucracy, with usual deficiencies of its kind", and concludes that in this aspect the IPN resembles the former communist institutions it is supposed to deal with, equally "bureaucratic, centralist, heavy, inclined to extensive growth and quantity rather than quality of production".

See also

• Laws against Holocaust denial

Notes

1. Remembrance, Institute of National. "Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation". Institute of National Remembrance. Retrieved 28 January 2020.
2. The Institute of National Remembrance Guide, Warsaw 2009 Archived 12 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine (PDF 3.4 MB)
3. ^ Goddeeris, Idesbald. "History Riding on the Waves of Government Coalitions: The First Fifteen Years of the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland (2001–2016)." The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2018. 255-269.
4. ^ "Full text of Poland's controversial Holocaust legislation". The Times of Israel. 1 February 2018. Retrieved 4 October 2019.
5. ^ "Nauka polska: Instytucje naukowe – identyfikator rekordu: i6575". Archived from the original on 16 May 2007. Retrieved 22 April 2007.
6. ^ About the Institute From IPN English website. Last accessed on 20 April 2007
7. Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Iacob, Bogdan (2015). Remembrance, History, and Justice: Coming to Terms with Traumatic Pasts in Democratic Societies. Central European University Press. p. 243. ISBN 978-9-63386-092-2.
8. Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (12 June 2015). "15 lat Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej w liczbach". Komunikaty. Archived from the original on 22 June 2016. Retrieved 28 June 2016.
9. Czech Prime minister Petr Nečas (14 October 2011). "The years of totalitarianism were years of struggle for liberty". Platform of European Memory and Conscience. Archived from the original on 30 March 2012. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
10. ^ Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Jolanta. "The uses and the abuses of education about the Holocaust in Poland after 1989.", Holocaust Studies 25.3 (2019): 329-350.
11. Goddeeris, Idesbald (2018). "History Riding on the Waves of Government Coalitions: The First Fifteen Years of the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland (2001–2016)". The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 255–269. ISBN 978-1-349-95306-6.
12. ^ Hackmann, Jörg (2 October 2018). "Defending the "Good Name" of the Polish Nation: Politics of History as a Battlefield in Poland, 2015–18". Journal of Genocide Research. 20 (4): 587–606. doi:10.1080/14623528.2018.1528742 – via Taylor and Francis+NEJM.
13. Soroka, George; Krawatzek, Félix (13 April 2019). "Nationalism, Democracy, and Memory Laws". Journal of Democracy. 30 (2): 157–171. doi:10.1353/jod.2019.0032 – via Project MUSE.
14. ^ (in Polish) Nowelizacja ustawy z dnia 18 grudnia 1998 r. o Instytucie Pamięci Narodowej – Komisji Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu oraz ustawy z dnia 18 października 2006 r. o ujawnianiu informacji o dokumentach organów bezpieczeństwa państwa z lat 1944–1990 oraz treści tych dokumentów. Last accessed on 24 April 2006
15. (in Polish)About the Institute From IPN Polish website. Last accessed on 24 April 2007
16. Archived 28 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine
17. ^ Mink, Georges (2017). "Is there a new institutional response to the crimes of Communism? National memory agencies in post-Communist countries: the Polish case (1998–2014), with references to East Germany". Nationalities Papers. 45 (6): 1013–1027. doi:10.1080/00905992.2017.1360853.
18. ^ (in Polish) Olejniczak: Kurtyka powinien zrezygnować, Polish Press Agency, 13 December 2005, last accessed on 28 April 2007
19. Senat zgodził się na wybór Jarosława Szarka na prezesa IPN, PAP, 22 July 2016
20. ^ Behr, Valentin (2 January 2017). "Historical policy-making in post-1989 Poland: a sociological approach to the narratives of communism". European Politics and Society. 18 (1): 81–95. doi:10.1080/23745118.2016.1269447. ISSN 2374-5118.
21. The Populist Radical Right in Poland: The Patriots, Rafał Pankowski, page 38
22. ^ The Post-communist Condition: Public and Private Discourses of Transformation, John Benjamins Publishing Company, page 172, chapter by Marta Kurkowska-Budzan
23. Tom Hundley, Poland looks back in anger, 1 December 2006, Chicago Tribune
24. ^ "Szczerbiak, Aleks. "Deepening democratisation? Exploring the declared motives for "late" lustration in Poland." East European Politics 32.4 (2016): 426-445" (PDF).
25. "Polish court strikes down spy law". BBC News. 11 May 2007. Retrieved 5 June 2018.
26. Wojciech Czuchnowski, Bronisław Wildstein: człowiek z listą, Gazeta Wyborcza, last accessed on 12 May 2006
27. Totalitarian Societies and Democratic Transition: Essays in memory of Victor Zaslavsky, pages 406-7, Vladislav Zubok, CEU Press
28. Harry de Quetteville (14 June 2008). "Lech Walesa was Communist spy, claims book". The Daily Telegraph. Berlin. Retrieved 4 October 2008.
29. Solidarity: The Great Workers Strike of 1980, Michael Szporer, Lexington Books, 2012, p. 286.
30. "Polish Memory Law: When history becomes a source of mistrust". New Eastern Europe - A bimonthly news magazine dedicated to Central and Eastern European affairs. 19 February 2018. Retrieved 20 October 2020.
31. Stola, Dariusz. "Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance: A Ministry of Memory?." The convolutions of historical politics (2012), pp. 54-55.

External links

• IPN Home Page (English)
• (in Polish) old Act of 18 December 1998 on the Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (Ustawa z dnia 18 grudnia 1998 r. o Instytucie Pamięci Narodowej – Komisji Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu)
• (in English) old Act of 18 December 1998 on the Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation

• Institute of National Remembrance