Neo-Nazis ‘mark Hitler’s birthday’

A television report shot with a hidden camera showing members of a Polish far-right group celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday sparked uproar on Monday, in a country still grappling with the memory of Nazi occupation.

The alarming footage, filmed in southwestern Poland and aired on news channel TVN24, shows a group of men wearing Nazi-inspired uniforms and performing Nazi salutes. Among those caught on camera was a man identified as Mateusz S., the leader of neo-Nazi group Pride and Modernity (DN).

He appears to have been speaking at an event marking 128 years since the birth of Nazi dictator Adolf Hilter, held on a hill near the southwestern Polish village of Wodzislaw on an undisclosed date.

Undercover journalists also filmed large red flags with Nazi swastikas hanging on the trees and an altar with a portrait of Hitler. Participants in the event set fire to a large wooden swastika soaked in flammable liquid that was fixed to a tree as they played a soundtrack of Nazi military marches.

The footage was broadcast on TVN24’s "Superwizjer" current affairs programme which also included clips from an ultranationalist rock festival in March 2017 involving both Poles and Germans, with swastikas or the initials SS tattooed on their bodies.

Poland’s rightwing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki took to Twitter to condemn the event, insisting that "promoting fascism or other totalitarian regimes is not only incompatible with Polish law. Above all it tramples on the memory of our ancestors and their heroic struggle for a just and hate-free Poland. "There is no tolerance for these kinds of behaviours and symbols," he added. World War II erupted when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.