Poland wants US conservative commentator Tucker Carlson to apologise for remarks justifying Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Poland’s chargé d’affaires in Washington Bogdan Klich said on October 5.
The diplomatic intervention follows Carlson’s October 2 interview with former British cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, in which Carlson said Nazi Germany’s territorial claims against Poland were justified and that Britain would have made the right decision had it not entered the war.
Klich demanded an immediate public retraction and apology, saying Carlson had become “an apologist for Adolf Hitler” and spread historical falsehoods.
Klich said Germany’s September 1939 attack was a premeditated war of aggression aimed at destroying the Polish state and physically eliminating its population. The official also pointed to Hitler’s agreement with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.
“Nazi propaganda cannot be rehabilitated under the guise of free speech,” Klich said in a social media post.
Poland does not currently have a full ambassador to the US, an effect of a long-running dispute between the government and the president's office over ambassadorial appointments.
President Karol Nawrocki, who has cultivated close ties with US President Donald Trump, has maintained his predecessor Andrzej Duda’s refusal to approve Bogdan Klich, the government’s nominee, who instead heads the embassy as chargé d’affaires.
Carlson's interview with Rees-Mogg also prompted a reaction from the Trump administration. US Ambassador to Poland Tom Rose, who is Jewish, called Carlson “the most dangerous demagogue in America” in response to the interview.
“Hitler's ‘legitimate claims’ against Poland justify the conquest and destruction of an entire nation in the most murderous occupation in human history? Was defeating Nazi Germany even worth it? By asking these 'so-called' questions, Tucker's goal isn't to illuminate history, it's to invert it,” Rose said on social media.
Carlson’s goal was the “deliberate destruction of moral truth,” Rose also said.
World War II cost Poland 20% of its population, including nearly the entire community of Polish Jews. Warsaw typically reacts sharply to claims distorting its wartime history, such as descriptions of Nazi death camps on Polish soil as “Polish camps”. On the other hand, some Jewish historians accuse Poland of whitewashing its attitude towards the Holocaust.
President Nawrocki demanded on September 1, the anniversary of the German invasion, that Berlin pay reparations for the loss of life and widespread destruction Poland endured during more than five years of brutal Nazi occupation.
In the October 2 interview with Rees-Mogg on The Tucker Carlson Show, Carlson’s own online show, the host said the idea that Hitler had simply invaded Poland without a preceding territorial dispute was false.
Germany had lost substantial territory after World War I, including parts of Prussia, he said, angering Germans and providing what Carlson called “a justification for it”.
Carlson thus omitted that Poland was re-established as an independent state after World War I from territories previously ruled by Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary, amid the collapse of Europe’s old empires.
Hitler’s objectives in 1939 went far beyond recovering German territories lost after the war: Nazi policy aimed to destroy Poland as an independent state and turn large parts of Eastern Europe into Lebensraum — literally “living space” — for German settlement, with much of the Polish population ultimately intended for expulsion, forced labour or killing.
Carlson also said Britain had no stake in the dispute and had ultimately damaged itself by going to war, saying that the decision “destroyed their empire and their country”. Rees-Mogg responded by saying World War II was “the classic good versus evil” and that Britain “did the right thing” by fighting and defeating Hitler.
Britain entered the war days after Germany’s invasion of Poland and endured months of German air raids, dealing Hitler his first serious setback of the war, with far-reaching consequences later in the conflict.
Carlson rose to prominence after joining Fox News in 2009, where he hosted Tucker Carlson Tonight, one of the network’s flagship prime-time programmes, from 2016 until Fox abruptly parted ways with him in April 2023.
Carlson then launched his subscription-based Tucker Carlson Network in December 2023 and The Tucker Carlson Show podcast in 2024.
Once one of Donald Trump’s most prominent media allies and a speaker at the 2024 Republican convention, Carlson broke sharply with Trump over the US war with Iran, apologising in April 2026 for having supported him and saying in June that he would no longer support the Republican Party.
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