Mariusz Bechta

Mariusz Bechta (born 1972) is a Polish historian and publisher, affiliated with the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). Bechta has published various fascist literature and patronaged the growth of Nazi rock (Rock Against Communism) in Poland; his academic monographs — themed around rebuffing Polish complicity with the Nazis in the murder of Jews — have been severely criticized by historians and held as ideological tracts.

Education and career Bechta was born in 1972 in Biała Podlaska. He graduated from the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw in 1997. He received his doctoral degree in 2011 from the same faculty under Tomasz Wituch, with a thesis titled . Using their connections with conservative dailies, the brothers sought to mainstream Nazi bands.

A few years later, they started two advertising-cum-publishing agencies — and — which primarily republished works by European fascists, including by Léon Degrelle, Julius Evola, Jan Mosdorf, Robert Brasillach, Ryszard Mozgol, and Krzysztof Kawęcki. Since 2003, Bechta has been the Editor-in-Chief of Templum Novum, a fascist magazine. Similarly, Mariusz Zajączkowski, a historian specializing in Ukrainian-Polish relations, rejects Bechta's interpretation of the pogrom as unsupported by evidence and questions his ideological motivations; Bechta not only drew from very poor sources including those recorded decades after the event but also misrepresented archival sources and cherry-picked evidence.

, a historian of communism in Poland, finds Bechta's works wholly unreliable, unethical, and ahistorical; he compares Bechta's methodology with that of David Irving, a Holocaust denier. Mazur alleges that Bechta cherry-picks evidence to fit them into a preconceived worldview — for an example, in absolving Romuald Rajs and other members of his brigade from accusations of ethnocide, he did not even consider their testimony rife with anti-minority sentiments.