When Karol Tendera heard someone referring to his harrowing daily encounters with death as occurring in a "Polish," rather than a German concentration camp, he decided he would not let it go. With pro bono legal support from Lech Obara & Partners, an Olsztyn-based law firm, and the Patria Nostra Association, he initiated legal proceedings to seek justice.
While the legal case’s origins are debated, with some citing 2013 and others 2015, for Karol Tendera (1921–2019), the struggle began in 1940. That year, he and fellow students from a Kraków technical school were deported to Germany for forced labour. Following his escape two years later, he returned to Kraków, only to be captured by the Nazis and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. There, he was subjected to pseudoscientific experiments, including procedures conducted by the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele himself. He was later transferred to the Flossenbürg camp, where he remained until liberation.
More than half a century later, his path crossed with the German TV broadcaster ZDF. On 1 July 2013, the ZDF online portal published an announcement for the documentary film “Lost Film Treasures 1945: The Liberation of Concentration Camps,” which contained the inaccurate phrase “Polish extermination camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz in July 1944 and January 1945.”
“I am the head of the former prisoners of KL Auschwitz club. At one of the meetings, I expressed my outrage at the spread of negative opinion about Poland. Attorney Obara from Olsztyn suggested that I pursue legal action as the plaintiff. We demanded that the defendant be prohibited from disseminating terms such as ‘Polish death camp’ or ‘Polish concentration camp,’ issue a public apology, and publish it in two national newspapers as well as on ZDF’s website,” Tendera recounted in a 2018 interview with Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, titled We Must
Firmly Stand Up for the Truth. (Full interview: https://ipn.gov.pl/pl/aktualnosci/56764,Trzeba-stanowczo-upominac-sie-o-prawde-Rozmowa-z-Karolem-Tendera-bylym-wiezniem-.html
The District Court in Kraków acknowledged that ZDF had violated Tendera’s personal rights, specifically his human dignity, national identity and national dignity, but dismissed the case, claiming that an adequate apology had been issued by ZDF on two occasions via letters delivered to his legal representative in 2013, and in a statement published on the ZDF news website.
Represented pro bono by attorney Lech Obara, Tendera launched a formal appeal. The former prisoner also received support from the Polish Ombudsman.
The Court of Appeals in Kraków overturned the District Court’s decision, ruling that ZDF must publish an apology on its website’s homepage for a duration of 30 days. However, the apology was placed at the bottom of the page under an obscure title: Apology to Karol Tendera, with the full text accessible only via a specific link.
As a result, a decision was made to initiate enforcement proceedings in Germany. The court in Mainz reviewed the request favourably, ordering ZDF to republish the apology. ZDF’s legal team contested this ruling and appealed to a higher court, but the higher regional court in Koblenz also dismissed the appeal. It confirmed that the Kraków Appeals Court’s ruling regarding the apology to former Auschwitz prisoner Karol Tendera for violating his “human dignity and national identity,” could be enforced in Germany.
Tendera and his legal team had hoped that ZDF would accept the ruling. Instead, the German broadcaster appealed to the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, the highest court in Germany’s judicial system. In August 2018, the court ruled that the TV station
ZDF was not obliged to apologise Karol Tendera in the manner required by the Polish court for using the term “Polish death camps.”
According to the Federal Court, ZDF did not have to comply with the judgment because it would violate the German legal order of the country, where the right to freedom of expression and freedom of the media applies.
The Court concluded that ZDF’s actions were sufficient because, following the intervention of the Polish embassy, the phrase “Polish death camps” was changed to “German death camps in Poland.” Additionally, the station issued a personal apology to Karol Tendera on two occasions. In the Tribunal’s view, this concluded the matter.
Lech Obara commented on the verdict: “The Federal Court of Justice has ruled that German television did not violate the rules of freedom of speech, and only then does their law allow for a judgment obliging them to apologise. The public order clause, which mainly concerns moral issues, was used here.”
“A lawsuit against German publishers will now need to be filed in a German court,” he further stated. “The case of Karol Tendera demonstrated that German judges at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe (Germany’s highest court) were prepared to protect a German publisher, citing an unusual interpretation of freedom of expression. Worse still, they did not even attempt to consider whether this specific understanding of freedom of expression should not give away to Karol Tendera’s right to protection of his dignity, which had been violated by the statements of German journalists,” explained the Polish lawyer. “In doing so, the court sent a clear signal to lower German courts that the interests of German journalists should outweigh the personal rights of Polish citizens and that similar cases should be decided accordingly.”
Karol Tendera died in 2019 at the age of 98. Polish President Andrzej Duda commemorated Tendera’s passing on X (formerly Twitter), writing: “Karol Tendera has passed away. He was a prisoner of the German Auschwitz camp, number 100430. Until his final days, he fought for historical truth—and won. A prisoner of war, a hero of our time. Honour his memory. RIP” ( https:// x.com/AndrzejDuda/status/1179127315726516224).
In 2021, Jerzy Tendera, Karol Tendera’s son, filed a complaint against Germany with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He argued that the German judges had violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights by protecting statements that distorted or denied Holocaust memory.
The complaint further accused the German state of violating the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the Convention, emphasising that, according to prior ECHR rulings, an unjustified refusal to enforce a valid judgment from another country—as occurred in this instance—can constitute a violation of the right to effective judicial protection.
Jerzy Tendera is also represented by Patria Nostra.
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