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Persecution of the Jews by the Nazi German occupation government, particularly in the urban areas, began immediately after the 1939 German invasion of Poland. In the first year and a half, the Germans confined themselves to stripping the Jews of their property, herding them into ghettoes and putting them into forced labor in war-related industries. During this period the Jewish community leadership, the Judenrat, which, unlike Polish authorities, had an official recognition by the Germans, was able to bargain with the occupier. However, after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, special extermination squads (the Einsatzgruppen) were organized to kill Jews in the areas of eastern Poland which had been annexed by the Soviets in 1939.

"The final solution"

At the Wannsee conference near Berlin on 20 January 1942, Dr Josef Bühler urged Reinhard Heydrich to begin the proposed "final solution to the Jewish question". Accordingly, in 1942, the Germans began the systematic killing of the Jews, beginning with the Jewish population of the General Government. Six extermination camps (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka) were established in which the most extreme measure of the Holocaust, the mass murder of millions of Jews from Poland and other countries, was carried out between 1942 and 1944. Of Poland's prewar Jewish population of 3 million, only about 50,000 survived the war.

Under the German occupation all non-Jewish Poles were punished by death if a Jew were found concealed in their home or on their property. On November 10, 1941, the death penalty was expanded by Hans Frank to apply to Poles who helped Jews "in any way: by taking them in for the night, giving them a lift in a vehicle of any kind" or "feed runaway Jews or sell them foodstuffs." The law was made public by posters distributed in all major cities. Capital punishment of entire families, for aiding Jews, was the most draconian such Nazi practice against any nation in occupied Europe. Nonetheless, several thousand Poles were reportedly executed by the Nazis for aiding Jews.

The role played by Poles during the Holocaust has been the subject of considerable debate since the fall of Communism in Poland. Polish political parties, the Catholic Church, and Jewish organisations both inside and outside Poland have contributed. Prior to Second World War there were 3 million Jews in Polish Second Republic, about 10% of the population, living predominantly in urban environment. Several hundred thousand joined the already numerous Jewish minority during the Russian Civil War. The presence of this large non-Christian, mostly acculturated minority in newly independent Poland – a deeply Catholic country – had become a source of tension, and periodically of violence between Poles and Jews. There was both official and popular anti-Semitism in Poland before the war, at times encouraged by the Catholic Church and by some political parties, but not directly by the government. There were also political forces in Poland which opposed anti-Semitism, but in the later 1930s reactionary and anti-Semitic forces had gained ground.

In some cases during World War II, the Germans were able to exploit this anti-Jewish sentiment. Some persons betrayed hidden Jews to the Germans, and others made their living as "Jew-hunters" (szmalcownik), blackmailing hiding Jews, or blackmailing Poles who protected them. Regardless of danger, many Poles hid and aided Jews rather than collaborate in their destruction. The Polish Secret State considered szmalcownictwo an act of collaboration with the Germans, and with the aid of Armia Krajowa punished it with the death sentence as a criminal act of treason.

Local anti-Semitism was particularly strong in the eastern areas which had been occupied by the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941. Here the local population had wittnessed the Polish Jews welcoming and collaborating with the Soviets, and also assumed that, driven by vengeance, Jewish Communists had been prominent in the repressions and mass deportations of Catholic Poles following the Soviet invasion.

A few German-inspired massacres were carried out in that region, with the help from, or even active participation by, non-Jewish Poles. For example, the massacre in Jedwabne, in which between 300 (Institute of National Remembrance's Final Findings) and 1,600 (Jan T. Gross) Jews were beaten and burned alive in a barn by some of Jedwabne's citizens in the presence of German gandarmerie. The full extent of Polish participation in the massacres of the Polish Jewish community remains a controversial subject, but the Polish Institute for National Remembrance identified 22 other towns that had pogroms similar to Jedwabne. The reasons for these massacres are still debated, but they included: anti-Semitism, resentment over Jewish cooperation with the Soviet invaders including during Polish-Soviet War of 1920 and the 1939 invasion of Kresy, as well as the instances of simple greed.

Struggle for survival

In general, during the German occupation, most Poles were engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. They were in no position to oppose or impede the German extermination of the Jews even if they had wanted to. There were however many cases of Poles risking death to hide Jewish families and in other ways assist the Jews. Only in occupied Poland was death a standard punishment for a Polish person and his whole family and sometimes also their neighbours, for any help given to Jews. In September 1942 the Provisional Committee for Aid to Jews (Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy Żydom) was founded on the initiative of Zofia Kossak-Szczucka. This body later became the Council for Aid to Jews (Rada Pomocy Żydom), known by the code-name Żegota. It is not known how many Jews were helped by Żegota, but at one point in 1943 it had 2,500 Jewish children under its care in Warsaw alone. (See also an example of the village that helped Jews: Markowa). Because of these sorts of actions, Polish citizens have the highest amount of Righteous Among the Nations awards at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.

Poland was occupied by the Nazis from 1939 to 1945 and no Polish collaboration government was ever formed during that period. There were no Polish guards at any of the camps. Scholars disagree about the degree of involvement of the Polish police (Blue Police) in the rounding up of Jews. Warsaw Ghetto historian Emmanuel Ringelblum and another eyewitness described Polish policemen carrying out extortion and beatings in the Ghetto. Relatively little active collaboration by individual Poles – with any aspect of the German presence in Poland – took place. All Nazi propaganda efforts to recruit Poles in either labour or auxiliary roles were met with almost no interest, due to contrast of everyday reality of German occupation. The non-German auxiliary workers in the extermination camps, for example, were mostly Ukrainians and Balts. The Polish underground movements, the Home Army (AK) and the Communist People's Army (AL) opposed collaboration in German anti-Jewish persecution, and punished it by death. The Polish Government in Exile was also the first (in November 1942) to reveal the existence of Nazi-run concentration camps and the systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, through its courier Jan Karski and the activities of Witold Pilecki, a member of Armia Krajowa who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz in order to organize a resistance movement inside the camp itself.

Apart from the Home Army resistance movement, the ultra-nationalist Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (NSZ or National Armed Forces) allegedly participated in murders of Jews. The communist terror apparatus in postwar Poland rutinely tortured the NSZ insurgents in order to force them to confess to such general charges. This was most notably the case with the 1946 trial of 23 officers of the NSZ in Lublin. The torturing of political prisoners did not automatically stop when the interrogations were concluded. Physical torture was being ordered also in the event they retracted in court their confessions of “killing Jews”.

While the Home Army as a whole was largely untainted by the collaboration against the Jews during German Nazi occupation of Poland, it would be equally difficult to attribute separate cases of anti-Jewish violence to Polish resistance members. The cases of collaboration between the AK and the Nazi forces that did occur were more at the tactical level and mostly directed against the pro-Soviet partisans and elements favorable to the Soviet regime and the Red Army rather than against the Jews. Such collaboration was tacit rather than open, for example Germans didn't officially provide the Polish resistance members with arms but rather left the arms stockpiles "unguarded".

Footnotes

1. ^ Robert Cherry, Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, ISBN 0742546667, Google Print, p.5 Cite error: The named reference "Cherry" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
2. Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project: Poland
3. Mordecai Paldiel, Gentile Rescuers of Jews, page 184. Published by KTAV Publishing House Inc.
4. Ron Riesenbach, The Story of the Survival of the Riesenbach Family
5. A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, London, 1987, p.527, see also: History of the Jews in Russia
6. Celia Stopnicka Heller, On the Edge of Destruction..., 1993, Wayne State University Press, 396 pages ISBN 0814324940
7. Jan, Grabowski (2004). "Ja tego żyda znam!" : szantażowanie żydów w Warszawie, 1939-1943 / "I know this Jew!": Blackmailing of the Jews in Warsaw 1939-1945 (in Polish). Warsaw, Poland: Wydawn. IFiS PAN : Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów. ISBN 8373880585. OCLC 60174481.
8. Prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, "Jedwabne: The Politics of Apology", presented at the Panel Jedwabne – A Scientific Analysis, Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Inc., June 8, 2002, Georgetown University, Washington DC.
9. Tomasz Strzembosz, “Inny obraz sąsiadów” archived by Internet Wayback Machine
10. http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/J/final.html
11. http://his.princeton.edu/info/e47/jan_gross.html
12. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,669067,00.html
13. http://isurvived.org/Frameset4References-3/-PolishRighteous.html
14. Raul Hilberg. The Destruction of the European Jews: Third Edition. Yale University Press, 2003.
15. Itamar Levin, Rachel Neiman Walls Around: The Plunder of Warsaw Jewry During World War II and Its Aftermath. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003.
16. http://www.republika.pl/unpack/1/dok03.html
17. Steven J Zaloga (1982). "The Underground Army". Polish Army, 1939-1945. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. ISBN 0-85045-417-4. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
18. The Polish Army 1939-45 By Steven J. Zaloga, Richard Hook
19. ^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1997). "Polish Collaboration". Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947. McFarland & Company. pp. 77–142. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
20. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, The Dialectics of Pain Glaukopis, vol. 2/3 (2004-2005). See also: John S. Micgiel, “‘Frenzy and Ferocity’: The Stalinist Judicial System in Poland, 1944-1947, and the Search for Redress,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies , no. 1101 (February 1994): 1-48. For concurring opinions see: Krzysztof Lesiakowski and Grzegorz Majchrzak interviewed by Barbara Polak, “O Aparacie Bezpieczeństwa,” Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, no. 6 (June 2002): 4-24; Barbara Polak, “O karach śmierci w latach 1944-1956,” Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, no. 11 (November 2002): 4-29.
21. Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland's Holocaust, ibidem.

References

• Lucjan Dobroszycki, Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community 1994, 164 pages.
• David Engel, Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-exile and the Jews, 1943-1945 1993, 317 pages.
• Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland's Holocaust 1997, 437 pages.
• Naomi Samson, Hide: A Child's View of the Holocaust 2000, 194 pages.
• Eric Sterling, John K. Roth, Life in the Ghettos During the Holocaust 2005, 356 pages.

External links

• Steve Paulsson, On the Marginal Role of Poles In Abetting the Nazi Perpetrators
• Steven Paulsson, 'Polish Complicity In The Shoah Is A Myth'
• "Editorial Remarks on Poland's Holocaust and its Remembrance" at isurvived.org, totallyjewish.com, 29th 2007 March 2007

Further reading

• Gunnar S. Paulsson. Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-300-09546-3, Review

• Holocaust by country
• History of Poland (1939–1945)
• Jewish Polish history
• Polish-German relations