A Polish historian resigned Monday from the government’s historical institute after controversy erupted over his past ties with a far-right organization and photos of him making the stiff-armed fascist salute.

Tomasz Greniuch was recently appointed to head the Wroclaw office of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a state organization whose role is to document Nazi and communist crimes carried out on Polish soil.
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Greniuch also authored a book, “The Way of the Nationalist,” published in 2013, which glorifies Léon Degrelle, a Belgian collaborator of the Third Reich, according to the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.
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Outrage in Poland has grown as images have been published of Greniuch making the stiff-armed salute years ago, and participating in demonstrations as a young man with the National Radical Camp, a far-right group that traces its roots to an anti-Semitic and openly fascist movement that existed before World War II.

Greniuch had already been posted to lead the IPN office in the southwestern Polish city of Opole three years earlier. In a 2019 interview, he said he had not cut himself off from his earlier views, but had changed his behavior.

“When you have your dream job, you try to be a professional,” he said.