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Institute of National Remembrance

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This is about the Polish institution. You may also be looking for the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.
Institute of National Remembrance
Instytut Pamięci Narodowej
Institute of National Remembrance logoThe logo of IPN IPN headquarters at 7 Wołoska Street in Warsaw
AbbreviationIPN
Formation1998-12-18
TypeINGO
Legal statusAssociation
PurposeLegal, educational
HeadquartersWarsaw, Poland
Location
  • 7 Wołoska Street
Region served Republic of Poland
MembershipStaff
Official language Polish
PresidentJarosław Szarek
Main organCouncil
Affiliations
StaffSeveral hundred
Websitewww.ipn.gov.pl
RemarksThe 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-affiliated research institute with lustration prerogatives and prosecutorial powers. It was created by legislation enacted by the Polish Parliament. The Institute specializes in the legal and historical examination of 20th-century Polish history. The IPN investigates Nazi and communist crimes committed in Poland between 1939 and the Revolutions of 1989, 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. During the first fifteen years following its inception, the IPN collected over 90 kilometres (56 mi) of archives, released 1,794 publications, organized 453 exhibits, held 817 conferences, and launched 30 educational internet portals. In the same period, Institute researchers interviewed over 103,000 witnesses and interrogated 508 individuals charged with criminal offences, leading to 137 sentences by courts of justice.

Pursuant to a new law which went into effect on 15 March 2007, the IPN was to be mandated to carry out lustration procedures prescribed by Polish law. However, on 11 May 2007 key articles of that law were judged unconstitutional by Poland's constitutional court, so the IPN's role in the lustration process is at present unclear. The IPN is a founding member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.

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.

Organisation

Main entrance

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. The election of the director is 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.

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

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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. During the elections a leak against Andrzej Przewoźnik accusing him of collaboration caused him to withdraw his candidacy. 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. Andrzej Friszke sees Kurtyka's term as the beginning of politicization of the IPN. Kurtyka's management was absolutist, and he surrounded himself with many PiS supporters. An official ""history policy" was formulated that promoted martyrological and romantic formulations of history. Kurtyka has a close relationship with PiS party during his term. Researchers whose views were not aligned with the director left the IPN, and they were replaced with researchers of a similar viewpoint.

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, an insider, 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.

Activities

Research

Archive at the former IPN headquarters at 28 Towarowa Street in Warsaw

Following the public debate on Jan T. Gross's book Neighbors, the IPN conducted an in-depth investigation into the Jedwabne pogrom. The investigation was politicized, and the IPN's director was involved in defending Poland's god name outside of Poland during the investigation.

Education

IPN is involved in dissemination of its research results in the form of publications, particularly the IPN Bulletin (Biuletyn IPN, Pamięć.pl) and the Remembrance and Justice periodicals, exhibitions, seminars, panel discussions, film reviews, workshops and school curricula. Since December 2000 IPN has organized over 30 academic conferences (particularly the Warsaw Congress of Science organized every year in September); 22 exhibitions in various museums and educational competitions involving thousands of students. "IPN Bulletin" is of an informative and popular-scientific character and contains articles pertaining to the history of Poland in the years 1939–1990 as well as describes the current IPN activities. Remembrance and Justice appears every half a year and is a scientific historical magazine. IPN also publishes books which are usually edited as collections of documents, reports and memories, but also scientific elaborations (78 of such publications have appeared till April 2007).

The Public Education Office co-operates on a permanent basis with the Ministry of National Education and Sport, having signed a Co-operation Agreement in 2001. IPN gives opinions of curricula and textbooks on history that are used in Polish schools and is involved in teacher training activities. The IPN also co-organizes postgraduate diploma studies on history at the Jagiellonian University and the University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska.

Board games

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

Lustration

Further information: Lustration in Poland

On 18 December 2006 Polish law regulating IPN was changed and came into effect on 15 March 2007. This change gave IPN new lustration powers. However, key articles of that law were judged unconstitutional by Poland's Constitutional Court on 11 May 2007, making the role of IPN in lustration unclear and putting the whole process into question.

Criticism

Politicization

In 2005, after Law and Justice's (PiS) electoral victory, the IPN focused on crimes against the Polish nation. Part of PiS's platform was historical policy (Template:Lang-pl) on the national and international level to promote the Polish point of view. During PiS's control of government between 2005 and 2007, the IPN was the focus of heated public controversies, in particular in regards to the past of Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa. As a result, in scientific literature the IPN has been referred to as a "Ministry of Memory" or an institution involved in "memory games".

In 2008, Adam Michnik said that the IPN is "engaging in activities that destroy this memory. Today's memory police resort to the hateful methods of the communist secret services and direct them at a victim of this very secret service. These policemen violate the truth and fundamental ethical principles."

Concerns have been raised of politicization of the IPN, starting with its legal mandate (no comparable institution in any other European country holds prosecutorial power) and continuing to its choice of staff, which at times tended towards particular political views.

According to Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, following 2015, the IPN has transformed into a body promoting revisionism.

When the New Polish School of Holocaust Scholarship in Paris, was disrupted by protesters, IPN was criticized by French higher education minister Frédérique Vidal, who said the disturbances were "highly regrettable" and "anti-Semitic". Vidal further stated the disturbances organized by Gazeta Polska activists, appeared to have been condoned by the IPN whose representative did not condemn the disruption and which criticized the conference on social media that were further re-tweeted by the Embassy of Poland, Paris.

Role in lustration and Wildstein list

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). One incident which drew criticism involved the so-called Wildstein list; a partial list of names of people who allegedly worked for the communist era Polish intelligence service, which was copied from IPN archives (without IPN permission) in 2004 by journalist Bronisław Wildstein and published in the Internet in 2005. The list gained much attention in Polish media and politics, and during that time IPN security procedures and handling of the matter came under criticism.

IPN presidential election

The election of a new IPN president in December 2005 was controversial. Janusz Kurtyka, the incumbent IPN president, was contested by Andrzej Przewoźnik. Przewoźnik's candidature received a severe setback after documents were found which suggested his possible co-operation with Służba Bezpieczeństwa, Communist Poland's internal intelligence agency and secret police. Przewoźnik was cleared of the accusations only after he had lost the election.

Employee incidents

In September 2017, a historian in charge of education in Lublin for the IPN, wrote in a column in Gazeta Polska that "after the aggression of Germany into Poland, the situation of the Jews did not look very bad" and "although the occupation authorities took over, they ordered the wearing of armbands with the star of David, charged them heavy taxes, began to designate Jews-only zones only for the Jews, but at the same time permitted the creation of Judenrat, that is, organs of self-government." In 2014, the same historian said in an expert opinion to a Polish court that the Nazi party was a leftist party and that the swastika is an ambiguous symbol. These statements were widely criticized by other historians including Dariusz Libionka, and the IPN issued a statement saying that the "In connection with the thesis in the article by Tomasz Panfil in the Gazeta Polska, the Institute of National Remembrance declares that position presented there is in no way compatible with the historical knowledge about the situation of the Jewish population in Poland after September 1, 1939." and that it expects the historian "will, in his scientific and journalistic activities, show diligence and respect to the principles of historical and research reliability." In October 2017, education minister Anna Zalewska presented the historian with a medal for "special merits for education".

In October 2017, the Simon Wiesenthal Center urged the IPN to fire the deputy director of its publishing office because he had published several books by Holocaust denier David Irving. The IPN responded that the official "is not a Holocaust denier himself so there is no reason to dismiss him".

Praise

IPN actions have also attracted support. In 2006 an open letter was published, declaring that:

History of Solidarity and anti-communist resistance in Poland cannot be damaged by scientific studies and resulting increase in our knowledge of the past. History of opposition to totalitarianism belongs to millions of Poles and not to one social or political group which usurps the right to decide which parts of national history should be discussed and which forgotten.

This letter was signed by a former Prime Minister of Poland, Jan Olszewski; the Mayor of Zakopane, Piotr Bąk; Polish-American Professor and member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council Marek Jan Chodakiewicz; Professors Maria Dzielska, Piotr Franaszek and Tomasz Gąsowski of the Jagiellonian University; Professor Marek Czachor of Gdańsk University of Technology, journalist and writer Marcin Wolski; Solidarity co-founder Anna Walentynowicz and dozens of others.

See also

Notes

  1. The Institute of National Remembrance Guide, Warsaw 2009 Archived 12 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine (PDF 3.4 MB)
  2. ^ Template:Pl icon 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
  3. ^ About the Institute From IPN English website. Last accessed on 20 April 2007
  4. ^ "Nauka polska: Instytucje naukowe – identyfikator rekordu: i6575". Archived from the original on 16 May 2007. Retrieved 22 April 2007. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  5. 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.
  6. 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. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  7. ^ "Polish court strikes down spy law". BBC News. 11 May 2007. Retrieved 5 June 2018.
  8. Czech Prime minister Petr Nečas (14 October 2011). "The years of totalitarianism were years of struggle for liberty". Platform of European Memory and Conscience. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
  9. Template:Pl iconAbout the Institute From IPN Polish website. Last accessed on 24 April 2007
  10. Archived 28 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  11. ^ Mink, Georges. "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.
  12. Senat zgodził się na wybór Jarosława Szarka na prezesa IPN, PAP, 22 July 2016
  13. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ewa_Ochman/publication/236788294_Collective_Remembrance_in_Jedwabne_Unsettled_Memory_of_World_War_II_in_Postcommunist_Poland/links/59ed32910f7e9bfdeb71add5/Collective-Remembrance-in-Jedwabne-Unsettled-Memory-of-World-War-II-in-Postcommunist-Poland.pdf Wolentarska-Ochman, Ewa. "Collective remembrance in Jedwabne: Unsettled memory of World War II in postcommunist Poland." History & Memory 18.1 (2006): 152-178.
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference IPNabout_research was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. Template:Pl icon Najważniejsze wiadomości – Informacje i materiały pomocnicze dla organów realizujących postanowienia ustawy lustracyjnej IPN News. Last accessed on 24 April 2007
  16. ^ [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17504902.2019.1567668 Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Jolanta. "The uses and the abuses of education about the Holocaust in Poland after 1989." Holocaust Studies 25.3 (2019): 329-350.
  17. Behr, Valentin. "Historical policy-making in post-1989 Poland: a sociological approach to the narratives of communism." European Politics and Society 18.1 (2017): 81-95.
  18. On the Side of Geremek, New York Review of Books, 25 September 2008, Adam Michnik
  19. Peters, Florian. "Remaking Polish National History: Reenactment over Reflection". Cultures of History Forum. Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Retrieved 27 March 2018.
  20. ^ Behr, Valentin (2019). "Entre histoire et propagande. Les contributions de l'Institut polonais de la mémoire nationale à la mise en récit de la Seconde Guerre mondiale". Allemagne d'aujourd'hui (in French) (228): 82–92. doi:10.3917/all.228.0082.
  21. Jakub Iwaniuk (4 March 2019). "La Pologne minimise les incidents lors d'un colloque sur la Shoah à Paris". Le Monde (in French). {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |newspaper= (help)
  22. Colloquium on the Shoah in Paris: France protests with Poland, Le Figaro, 1 March 2019
  23. Tom Hundley, Poland looks back in anger, 1 December 2006, Chicago Tribune
  24. Wojciech Czuchnowski, Bronisław Wildstein: człowiek z listą, Gazeta Wyborcza, last accessed on 12 May 2006
  25. Template:Pl icon Olejniczak: Kurtyka powinien zrezygnować, Polish Press Agency, 13 December 2005, last accessed on 28 April 2007
  26. ^ Poland honors historian who said Nazi invasion wasn’t so bad for Jews, Times of Israel (JTA), 24 October 2017
  27. Polish institute rebuffs historian who said Nazi invasion not that bad for Jews, Times of Israel (JTA), 5 October 2017
  28. Poland urged to fire publisher of works by Holocaust denier, AP, 3 October 2017
  29. Polish body urged to sack official who published David Irving’s books, Jewish News, 3 October 2017
  30. ^ List w "obronie historyków z IPN", Polish Press Agency article reprinted on Wirtualna Polska. Last accessed on 20 April 2007.
  31. Copy of a letter Archived 27 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Tezusz, Last accessed on 20 April 2007

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