Poland is trying to change the name of Auschwitz concentration camp to emphasise that Nazi Germans rather than Poles were responsible for the most murderous centre of the Holocaust.
The Polish government has asked the United Nations to change the name of its World Heritage site from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "the Former Nazi German Concentration Camp of Auschwitz", despite criticism of the move by some Jewish groups.
Warsaw is incensed by references in foreign media to the "Polish concentration camp" and "Polish gas chambers" to describe the Nazi Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps.
"We cannot continue to ignore repeated publications that defame Poland," said Jan Kasprzyk, a Culture Ministry official.
"The new name is completely accurate. By stating who was the perpetrator of a war that ended more than 60 years ago, honest mistakes could be avoided," he added.
But Maram Stern from World Jewish Congress accused Warsaw of seeking "to redefine history by changing the [Auschwitz] name", comments which stirred uproar in Poland.
"Although the camp had been built and run by Nazi Germany, everyone in the area had known about its existence and workers were recruited from the Polish population in the neighbouring village," Mr Stern said in a statement.
The Polish government denies the recruitment allegation and says Allied powers could have done more to halt the genocide by bombing the camp by plane.
Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at the site, which remains at the heart of sometimes tense Polish-Jewish relations.
For some Jews, the line taken by Poland's ruling communists in the 1940s and 1950s - that Auschwitz was a place of martyrdom of Poles and other nations as much as Jews - revealed widespread anti-Semitism in Poland and raised suspicions of Polish complicity with the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry.
But many in Poland are outraged by accusations of complicity with the Nazis, who killed three million non-Jewish Poles and razed Warsaw. They say thousands of Poles risked their lives to save Jews and many were killed by the Nazis for it.
Poles are the largest group awarded Israel's Righteous Among the Nations title for helping to save Jews.