FREE SPEECH AT STAKE IN POLISH LEGAL BATTLE OVER 1941 POGROM TRUTH
25 February 2026
A Polish far-right activist with US links is suing a co-founder of the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association. At the centre of the case are issues of freedom of speech, Holocaust distortion and the 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne.
Far-right activist Tomasz Sommer has filed a lawsuit with the District Court in Warsaw against Rafal Pankowski, a professor at Warsaw’s Civitas University and co-founder of the anti-racist ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association.
In a response submitted to the court in February 2026, defense counsel Dr Wojciech Marchwicki characterized the lawsuit as an attempt to ‘eliminate the possibility of justified criticism’ regarding historical scholarship in contemporary Poland.
Sommer is a close associate of Grzegorz Braun, the notorious Member of the European Parliament whose claim to fame includes a fire-extinguisher attack on a Chanuka ceremony in the Polish Parliament in 2023. Braun has repeatedly denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Sommer is an active YouTuber and editor of far-right publications as well as Non-Resident Research Fellow at the Institute of World Politics (IWP) in Washington, DC. The IWP has several high-profile connections to the MAGA movement and figures associated with the American far right.
He alleges that Pankowski violated his personal rights by criticising a film which Sommer produced about the 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne (north-eastern Poland). Sommer is demanding that numerous witnesses be called to testify, including Poland’s former President Aleksander Kwasniewski and Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, as well as Polish-American activist and author Marek Chodakiewicz who is the head of the IWP's Center for Intermarium Studies.
Rafal Pankowski is a sociologist and political scientist, a visiting professor at universities on several continents, an advisor to European institutions in the field of countering radicalization, and a Rotary Peace Fellow. For his work combating xenophobia and prejudice, he has received numerous distinctions including the Honorary Medal of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, awarded by the Association of Jewish Veterans and Victims of World War II.
According to Sommer, Pankowski damaged his good name by criticising the film entitled ‘Jedwabne: The True Story,’ published on YouTube in 2023. Sommer’s film had received financial support (over 80,000 zloty / $20,000) from the Patriotic Fund, an institution subordinate to the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage during the period of Law and Justice (PiS) rule.
This 68-minute documentary presents a curious interpretation of the events of 10 July 1941. The author denies the responsibility of the Polish perpetrators for the massacre of several hundred Jews in Jedwabne, thereby questioning the findings of the official investigation, and claims that behind-the-scenes actions by Jews aimed to conceal the ‘truth about Jedwabne’.
In a comment to the liberal Israeli daily ‘Ha’aretz’ in August 2023, the co-founder of ‘NEVER AGAIN’ said that the film ‘seeks to distort a pogrom in the town of Jedwabne in which Poles killed at least 340 Jews on July 10, 1941. Most of the victims were locked inside a barn that was set on fire.’ It ‘alleges that the accusations against Poles for the pogrom have been invented by a Jewish-led conspiracy,’ Pankowski said.
According to Sommer, the opinion expressed in the newspaper constituted a violation of his ‘good name as a scholar, historian, filmmaker, and ordinary person’ and of his ‘dignity as a person who rightly believes in his own worth.’
Although the article in ‘Ha’aretz’ had been published in 2023, Sommer filed his lawsuit only in the autumn of 2025. Sommer is demanding, among other remedies, the publication of an apology on the Israeli daily’s website and 10,000 zloty to be paid to his organization.
The defendant, Prof. Pankowski is represented by Dr Wojciech Marchwicki of the Rödl & Partner law firm, author of numerous publications on constitutional and procedural law, regularly recommended by international, independent legal rankings as a leading lawyer in Poland.
In a response to the lawsuit submitted to the court in February 2026, Dr Marchwicki stated: ‘The statements cited in the article were, on the one hand, a reliable summary of the content of the film and, on the other hand, incorporated an assessment of that content justified by the circumstances.’
According to Dr. Marchwicki, ‘In essence, the lawsuit filed in this case constitutes an attempt to eliminate the possibility of justified criticism [of the film]. On the one hand, the plaintiff tries to present himself as a reliable historian, but on the other hand he does not allow the possibility of his work being evaluated by other participants in the public debate. This is a strikingly inconsistent position.’
The ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association is an independent civil society organisation founded in Warsaw in 1996. It has campaigned against racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, for peace, intercultural dialogue, and human rights. ‘NEVER AGAIN’ has actively participated in international civil society networks, including the Alliance Against Genocide (AAG), the European Network for Countering Antisemitism through Education (ENCATE), and the European Practitioners Network Against Antisemitism (EPNA).
If you would like to express solidarity, write to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
More information:
www.NeverAgainAssociation.org
www.facebook.com/Respect.Diversity
www.twitter.com/StowNIGDYWIECEJ
www.linkedin.com/company/never-again-association
https://neveragainnw.bsky.social
https://www.instagram.com/stowarzyszenie_nigdy_wiecej