"The Polish state acts as the guardian of the truth, which must not be relativised in any way," he said. "I want to make a promise here to (preserve) the complete truth about that era," he added, in a speech in the southern city of Oswiecim to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Sunday's ceremony at Auschwitz was attended by a number of former prisoners at the camp.
Morawiecki's speech comes after last year's row over a Polish law that made it illegal to accuse the Polish nation or state of complicity in Nazi German crimes. After protests from Israel and the US, Poland amended the law to remove the possibility of fines or a prison sentence. Morawiecki appeared to be responding to an idea often mentioned in Poland, which claims that historians try to attribute responsibility for the genocide of Jews exclusively to the Nazis, without recalling the role played by the German state and Germans as a nation.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. With one million Jews killed there between 1940 to 1945, the camp has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of the European Jews.