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

Bechta was born in 1972 in Biała Podlaska.^[1] He graduated from the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw in 1997.^[2] He received his doctoral degree in 2011 from the same faculty on the Political and military conspiracy of the Polish national camp in Podlasie in the years 1939-1952, under Tomasz Wituch.^[2] Two years earlier, he had joined the Institute of National Remembrance and has been affiliated with the institute ever since; as of 2022, Bechta holds the rank of a "specialist".^[2][1]

During his student days, Bechta organized a solidarity event for Janusz Waluś, a Polish neo-Nazi extremist convicted for assassinating the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party.^[1][3] Around the same time, he founded the music label Narodowa Scena Rockowa (NSR) with his brother, which patronaged the development of Nazi rock in Poland; it sponsored Nazi records, sold racist t-shirts, and organized musical concerts.^[1][4][5] Using their connections with conservative dailies, the brothers sought to mainstream Nazi bands.^[1][6]

A few years later, they started two advertising-cum-publishing agencies — "Arte" and "Oficyna Wydawnicza Rekonkwista" — which primarily republished works by European fascists, including by Léon Degrelle, Julius Evola, Jan Mosdorf, Robert Brasillach, Ryszard Mozgol, and Krzysztof Kawęcki.^[1][3] Since 2003, Bechta has been the Editor-in-Chief of Templum Novum, a fascist magazine.^[1]

Cornelia Konczal, a professor of East European History at the University of Bielefeld, sees Bechta's interpretation of the Lublin pogrom of Jews — as an act of Polish "revenge" against pro-communist Jews — to downplay and ignore the historical evidence.^[7] 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.^[8]

Mariusz Mazur [pl], 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.^[9][10] 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.^[9][10] He critiques Bechta's defense of the National Armed Forces against charges of anti-semitism — by invoking the few Jew officials in their ranks — as unbecoming of a professional historian.^[10]

August Grabski, an assistant professor at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, finds Bechta's works ideologically motivated and guided by antisemitism.^[11][12]