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In a troubling incident last Thursday, Polish police interrupted an official Israeli military delegation at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau and ordered participants to remove their Israeli flags, abruptly halting a decades-old tradition of Holocaust remembrance led by uniformed officers.
The group of 180 officers from the Israel Defense Forces and other Israeli security agencies was participating in the “Witnesses in Uniform” program, which brings Israeli personnel to sites of Nazi atrocities to honor the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. As the delegation marched solemnly with Israeli flags through the former Nazi death camp, a Polish police officer intervened and demanded the flags be taken down.
IDF delegation leaders attempted to reason with the local authorities, but were ultimately forced to comply. The flags were removed and placed in a vehicle used for coordinating the ceremony.
“Every year, delegations enter with flags,” one delegation member of the delegation told Ynet. “There are iconic photos of uniformed officers with flags at Birkenau. We believe this stems from a mix of antisemitism and an attempt to reshape the historical narrative.”
Onlookers filmed the exchange, capturing a moment that participants described as humiliating and very upsetting.
The officer added that no such ceremony had ever been interrupted before — not at Auschwitz, nor at Treblinka, Warsaw, or Majdanek — making this break with protocol especially painful.
“Forcing us to abandon a long-standing tradition — especially at a site where the Jewish people were nearly annihilated — was deeply disturbing,” said another member of the group. “Losing a significant part of our ceremony hurt us all.”
The incident follows a recent wave of Holocaust distortion in Poland, including inflammatory remarks by far-right Polish lawmaker Grzegorz Braun, who just weeks ago denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.
In a statement on Friday, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum expressed regret over the incident, calling it an “unfortunate and entirely avoidable situation” that occurred because it had not been informed ahead of time of the delegation’s planned flag march.
We were deeply concerned by the incident involving the Israeli military delegation at the entrance to the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp. The Museum had not been informed in advance about the planned official ceremony involving a military formation marching with flags through…
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) August 1, 2025
