Nazi history and behaviour is clear to readers

Dear Editor, Chris Jezewski (Letters IC 22/09/2016) says that in order to avoid “confusing the perpetrators with the victims” of the Nazi concentration camps, your paper should not say the camps were in Poland, instead saying they were in “German-occupied” Poland. 

I don’t think this is necessary, and would go so far as to say The Irish Catholic should continue to respect its readers’ intelligence by assuming that they have at some point in their lives heard of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and that they have the wit and knowledge to realise that events which took place in Poland might not have taken place because the Polish people wanted them to.

After all, we have a long history of foreign rule in Ireland, and while I admit that there might advantages to saying that various abuses or atrocities took place in “British-occupied Ireland”, I doubt many people confuse perpetrators and victims when discussing Cromwell, the Penal Laws, the Famine, the Black and Tans, internment, Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday, etc.

Please: we know the Nazis occupied Poland during the Second World War, so don’t waste ink and space in spelling it out whenever the subject comes up.

Yours etc.,

Barbara Madden,

Swords, Co. Dublin.