I was just watching a video on Youtube and got an ad from the Polish National Foundation, the ads message seemed to be that the Germans were horrible to the Polish people and that the Germans alone were responsible for the death camps in Poland.
I have limited knowledge on the topic, but the fact that I'm seeing an ad about this kind of makes me question the accuracy of the video.
So, the question of Polish collaboration with the Nazi occupiers is by its very political nature still a rather contentious one. Which is why you see an ad about it but more on that later.
We have had several previous threads on this subject e.g. here with an answer by /u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton and here with an answer by /u/marisacoulter.
The gist of it is, particularly concerning the death camps as well as the camp complex in Auschwitz, Poland had no role in running them. They were located in territory that is now Polish territory but at the time was either territories incorporated by the German Reich or in a sort of legal limbo as the General Government but was emphatically and decidedly not run by Poles but instead by Germans. There is a line of argument that says that no Polish state existed during the time of Nazi occupation – whether the Home Army underground constitutes one in the de facto rather than the strictly legal sense is a point of debate – and thus the Polish state was wholly unable to display a level of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers that can be observed e.g. in France.
The only role Poles played in the death camp and the Auschwitz camp complex was either as prisoners and victims – Polish Jews after all constitute almost half of all Holocaust victims – or seldom as kapos. I discuss the kapos here and the important point concerning them is that the kapos were victims forced by Nazi cruelty to become a part in their own victimization.
However, to fully grasp why you are seeing this ad campaign and why this is an issue in the first place, it is necessary to point out that while the Polish state did not collaborate and while Poles had no part in running the death and concentration camp system in what today is Polish territory, there was a not insignificant amount of collaboration by individual Poles.
The above linked post mentions e.g. the Blue Police which as /u/marisacoulter points out was an
institutional, organized example of Poles who worked for the Germans to assist them in carrying out the Holocaust (which absolutely fits the definition of 'collaboration')
Then there were also events such as the Jedwabne pogrom, where in 1941 a group of about 40 Poles killed their 340 Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. This is often cited as an example of the prevalence of anti-semitism in occupied Poland. Anti-semitism that is structurally and ideologically different than those of the Nazis but anti-semitism nonetheless.
In recent years, scholars in Poland and outside of Poland have worked on better documenting and understanding these phenomenons. The two most prominent examples are probably Jan Gross and Jan Grabowski. I have discussed these scholars previously here and here and the important point is that the works of both Gross and Grabowski opened up a rather vicious debate in Poland around their own national past, at a point in time when there was a state-instituted backlash against such research driven by the wish to create a nationalist narrative based on an unambivalent story of Polish victimhood on the hands of Germans, Soviets and – in one peculiar version of this narrative – Jews in the form of Żydokomuna, meaning the assumption – strong in Polish nationalist circles – of Judeo-Communism and Jewish collaboration with the Soviets.
A lot of the criticism leveled at Gross and Grabowski is only half or not at all motivated by a criticism of their historical method and interpretation but often rather by contemporary political reasons and by the fact that their research is positioned against what many see as the rightful and just narrative of Polish history. The letter you linked needs to be viewed in that context also. Not just because its origins lie with the "Polish League Against Defamation" but also because it alleges that Grabowski would besmirch the Polish nation, which is a distortion of what he actually writes.
And this is where we come to the ad campaign as well as recent legal efforts by the current Polish government both against the usage of "Polish Death Camp Auschwitz" (which, to be frank, is complete rubbish moniker) as well as against "defaming the Polish nation", the latter of which has caused serious concerns that the Polish government plans to silence historians such as Gross and Grabowski by means of criminally persecuting them.
As rubbish a moniker "Polish Death Camps" is, there is only a tiny handful of cases where it has been used and where the people who made the mistake have been quick to retract it. Therefore, some argue that the recent legislation in form of the Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, which in its final form not just criminalizes the use of the phrase "Polish death camps" but mandates that
[Anyone] who, in public and against the facts, ascribes to the Polish Nation or to the Polish State, responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich, [as] defined in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, attached to the International Agreement on the prosecution and punishment of major war criminals of the Axis Powers, signed in London on August 8, 1945 [...], or for other offences which are crimes against peace [or] humanity or [that are] war crimes, or who otherwise grossly reduces the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of said crimes, is subject to a fine or [to] imprisonment for up to 3 years.
is an act intended to criminalize the discussion of the complicity of individual Poles or groups of Poles. While Paragraph 3 of the law explicitly excludes scholarly and artistic activity, the question whether a historian giving an interview about Jedwabne or the Blue Police in a newspaper would constitute a crime under this law is currently undetermined but a thing many people fear.
As mentioned above, the use of the phrase "Polish death camps" is given its low occurance arguably not the reason for this law. Rather, it and the ad campaign are part of a resurgence or a particular brand of nationalist politics in Poland, which seek to heavily advance a double genocide model, silence discussion of collaboration and complicit and generate legitimacy from a victim narrative. Observable also in the proliferation of myths about the Koniuchy massacre or the removal of cultural representatives from various posts for among other reasons "showing too much Jewish content".
The reasons why this is happening now and what further effects it has outside of historiography I fear are not for this subreddit because of the rule against modern politics but rest assured in that a.) Poles and the Polish state had no role in running death camps and that at the same time b.) the reasons for why you are seeing this now and why there is legislation now are not really related to the actual history of WWII but to contemporary political narratives.
Here's the ad if you're interested