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Dariusz Ratajczak

Opole, Poland - Body of Dariusz Ratajczak, found guilty by a court in 2002 of claiming that the Nazis never planned the Holocaust, has been found dead in a shopping centre car park in the western city of Opole.

“The body, which was severely decomposed, has been identified by Ratajczak’s family, so additional DNA tests will not have to be carried out,” says Lidia Sieradzka from the Prosecutor’s Office in Opole.

Judging by the state of the body and recent high temperatures, the man has been dead for up to two weeks, say police. Security guards at the Karolinka shopping centre claim, however, that the historian’s Renault Kangoo was left at the car park on the same day, June 11, that was discovered.

In the car police found documents which belonged to 48-year-old revisionist historian Ratajczak. Now, recordings from CCTV are being examined.

The cause of Ratajczak’s death remains uncertain. Police think it is unlikely that he was murdered, however, because no injuries were found on the body during the autopsy.

Police established that the historian, who had problems with finding a job in Poland, planned to go to Holland or Belgium to work in a company which sells flowers. For that purpose he bought the Renault Kangoo, in which his body was found between the front and rear seats, and in which he might have recently lived in.

Police remove the body

In 2000, Dariusz Ratajczak was fired from the University of Opole, where he worked for eleven years, and banned from teaching at other universities for three years after the publication of his book “Tematy niebezpieczne (Dangerous Themes), in which he claimed that it was not possible to kill millions of in the Auschwitz death camp gas chambers and that Nazis did not have a plan to mass murder Jews.

Earlier, in 1999, a Polish court found Ratajczak guilty of “public denial” of German wartime crimes – which is against the law in Poland – but because the book was self-published with a print run of just 260 it was not thought to be able to create a “social annoyance” and he was not punished. Ratajczak claimed at the time that his book was merely a review of many different views on the Holocaust, including revisionist works by British historian David Irving and others.

A court upheld the leniency of the verdict in 2002 after it was appealed by prosecutors.

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