Netflix says it will edit its documentary miniseries “The Devil Next Door,” about alleged notorious Nazi guard John Demjanjuk after Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki complained of inaccuracies in the series, Variety reported on Thursday.
Morawiecki said in a letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings last Sunday that the series showed maps that place Nazi concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, within the borders of modern-day Poland.
He wrote: “Not only is the map incorrect, but it deceives viewers into believing that Poland was responsible for establishing and maintaining these camps, and for committing the crimes therein. As my country did not even exist at that time as an independent state, and millions of Poles were murdered at these sites, this element of ‘The Devil Next Door’ is nothing short of rewriting history.”
Producers used representations of maps that appeared in American and Israeli television coverage of Demjanjuk’s trial in the 1980s, when he was accused of being a Ukrainian death-camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”
Netflix said it modify the series by adding on-screen text to spell out the fact that the concentration camps sat in territory occupied by the Nazis.
It said in a statement: “In order to provide more information to our members about the important issues raised in this documentary and to avoid any misunderstanding, in the coming days, we will be adding text to some of the maps featured in the series. This will make it clearer that the extermination and concentration camps in Poland were built and operated by the German Nazi regime, [which] invaded the country and occupied it from 1939-1945.”