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Morgenthau Report

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The Morgenthau report was a report issued by the United States' commission led by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Homer H. Johnson, Brigadier General Edgar Jadwin and from the British side, Sir Stuart M. Samuel to investigate reports of mistreatment of Jews in Poland. The report was published on October 3, 1919.

Western public opinion has been increasingly aware of primarily newspaper reports of mistreatment and atrocities committed against Jews in Eastern Europe, following the aftermath of the First World War and flare up of several local conflicts (such as Polish-Ukrainian War and Polish-Soviet War). In June of 1919, Herbert Hoover, then head of the American Relief Administration (ARA) and after discussions with Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski, wrote to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson warning that the reports of atrocities were damaging the reputation of Poland, a nascent ally being cultivated by the U.S. to counter Soviet Russia. Hoover, whose ARA oversaw relief efforts in Europe, secured the support of Padrewski through blunt warnings that the reports of atrocities against Jews "could develop into a most serious embarrassment to all of us in connection with the relief of Poland." Such pressure for government action reached the point where President Woodrow Wilson sent an official commission to investigate the matter. The Morgenthau commission was dispatched by United States to verify those reports.

Morgenthau's delegation was met by thousands of Polish Jews in Warsaw and other Polish cities it visited, who viewed him as a savior, although Morgenthau—an assimilationist critical of Jewish nationalism—was shunned by Polish Zionist leaders. While the Polish Jewish press gave the delegation a warm welcome, the non-Jewish Polish press response raanged from cool to overtly hostile with instances of open expressions of anti-Jewish hostility. The daily Robotnicza called for a complete boycott of Polish Jews, while the leading weekly Mysl Niepodlegla accused Wilson of siding against the Polish people in favor of Jews who "live upon usury, fraud, receiving of stolen goods, white slavery, counterfeiting and willful bankruptcy." While Paderewski had welcomed the investigation, Morgenthau found hostility in other Polish political circles, especially from the camps of National Democratic Party ("Endecja") leader Roman Dmowski and his rival, Chief of State Jozef Pilsudski. Compared to Paderewski, who had substantial U.S. support, Pilsudski at the time was regarded as a a less reliable military adventurer, and was described by Morgenthau as a "high-class pirate." Pilsudski resented the interference of Morgenthau's mission in Polish affairs, although he was acknowledged as an opponent of the open anti-semitism of Dmowski and a leader committed to a liberal policy towards Jews and other minorities that respected their rights. Morgenthau immersed himself in meetings with representatives of all segments of Polish society from all sides of the dispute. He attended a packed service for the 35 Jewish victims of the Pinsk massacre of April 1919, noting afterward that "This was the first time I ever completely realized what the collective grief of a persecuted people was like."

The Morgenthau report ultimately identified eight major incidents in the years 1918–1919, and estimated the number of victims at 200–300 Jews. Four of these were attributed to the actions of deserters and undisciplined individual soldiers; none were blamed on official government policy. Among the incidents, in Pińsk a Polish officer accused a group of Jewish civilians of Bolshevism and plotting against the Poles and shot thirty-five of them (Pinsk massacre). In Lviv (then Lwów or Lemberg) in 1918, after the Polish Army captured the city, hundreds of people were killed in the chaos, including some seventy-two Jews (however more Christians died in the chaos than the Jews). The report states that in Lemberg Lviv "disreputable elements plundered to the extent of many millions of crowns the dwellings and stores in the Jewish quarter, and did not hesitate to murder when they met with resistance." In Warsaw, soldiers of Blue Army assaulted Jews in the streets, but were punished by military authorities. Some other events in Poland were later found to have been exaggerated, especially by contemporary newspapers such as the New York Times, although serious abuses against the Jews, including pogroms, continued elsewhere, especially in Ukraine. The result of the concern over the fate of Poland's Jews was a series of explicit clauses in the Versailles Treaty protecting the rights of minorities in Poland. In 1921, Poland's March Constitution gave the Jews the same legal rights as other citizens and guaranteed them religious tolerance.

While critical of some local Polish authorities on scene, the commission also stated that in general the Polish military and civil authorities did do their best to prevent the incidents and their recurrence in the future. It concluded that some forms of discrimination against Jews was of political rather than anti-Semitic nature, rooted in political competition. The report specifically avoided use of the term "pogrom," noting that the term was used used to apply to a wide range of "excesses," (Morgenthau's preferred term) and had no specific definition. Tadeusz Piotrowski, citing Richard C. Lukas, noted that Morgenthau reasons for avoiding the word pogrom was based on the chaotic conditions existing within a war zone (as Jews were not the only group targeted) and further, that Poles also died at the hand of Jews, significant portion of which supported the Soviets and formed militias to fight their Polish equivalents and regular army.

Morganthau noted that it would be unfair to condemn the entire Polish nation for the acts of renegade troops or mobs, and believed the attacks were not premeditated or the result of a preconceived plan. He noted, howewer, that "It is believed that these excesses were the result of a widespread anti-Semitic prejudice aggravated by the belief that the Jewish inhabitants were politically hostile to the Polish State."

Jadwin and Johnson submitted their report separately from Morgenthau's. As described by one historian Morgenthau emphasized that Jews had been deliberately murdered based solely on the fact that they were Jews, while Jadwin and Johnson concluded that the violence against Jews was largely rooted in Jewish separatism and commercial competition that the problem in Poland was due in large part to Jewish separatism and commercial competition.

Assessments of the mission's works varied, with supporters and critics alternately concluding that it had debunked allegations of Polish anti-semitism, while others considered it to have supported these allegations. Hoover considered the mission as having done a "fine service," while others considered its findings to be a "whitewash" of Polish atrocities.

Possible bias of Morgenthau report has been discussed by some scholars. Andrzej Kapiszewski has written that the report was influeneced by U.S. foreign policy objectives at the time. Neal Pease wrote: To protect Poland's international reputation against widespread, if exaggerated, accusations of mistreatment of her large Jewish minority, Washington dispatched an investigatory commission led by Henry Morgenthau, one of the most prominent American Jewish political figures. Morgenthau was selected for the job precisely because he was known to be sympathetic to Poland, and his report largely exculpated the Polish government, exactly as expected. Some contemporary responses in the Jewish press accused Morgenthau and Samuel, the Jewish members of the commission, of having prsented a "whitewash" of the massacres, and charged them with being guilty of treason.

Notes

  1. Sonja Wentling. "The Engineer and the Shtadlanim: Herbert Hoover and American Jewish non-Zionists, 1917-28." American Jewish History 88, 3(September 2000): 377-406.
  2. Mieczysław B. Biskupski, Piotr Stefan Wandycz. Ideology, Politics, and Diplomacy in East Central Europe. Boydell & Brewer, 2003.
  3. Neal Pease. Poland, the United States, and the Stabilization of Europe, 1919-1933. Oxford University Press US, 1986. Page 9.
  4. Neal Pease. "'This Troublesome Question': The United States and the 'Polish Pogroms' of 1918-1919." In: Mieczysław B. Biskupski, Piotr Stefan Wandycz. Ideology, Politics, and Diplomacy in East Central Europe. Boydell & Brewer, 2003.
  5. Neal Pease. Poland, the United States, and the Stabilization of Europe, 1919-1933. Oxford University Press US, 1986.
  6. Henry Morgenthau. The Jews in Poland And My Meetings with Paderewski, Pilsudski, and Dmowski. In: Walter Hines Page, Arthur Wilson Page. The World's Work: A History of Our Time. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922.
  7. Arthur Lehman Goodhart Poland and the Minority Races. G. Allen & Unwin ltd., 1920. Original from the University of Michigan, digitized Jun 7, 2007.
  8. Henry Morgenthau III. Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History. Ticknor & Fields, 1991.
  9. Sonja Wentling. "The Engineer and the Shtadlanim: Herbert Hoover and American Jewish non-Zionists, 1917-28." American Jewish History 88, 3(September 2000): 377-406.
  10. ^ Template:En icon Tadeusz Piotrowski (1997). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide... McFarland & Company. pp. p. 41-42. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl= and |coauthors= (help)
  11. David Engel. Poles, Jews, and Historical ObjectivityPoles, Jews, and Historical Objectivity. Slavic Review, Vol. 46, No. 3/4 (Autumn - Winter, 1987), pp. 568-580. See also Mission of The United States to Poland, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. Report
  12. ^ Andrzej Kapiszewski, Controversial Reports on the Situation of the Jews in Poland in the Aftermath of World War Studia Judaica 7: 2004 nr 2(14) s. 257-304 (pdf)
  13. Quoted in: Andrzej Kapiszewski, Controversial Reports on the Situation of the Jews in Poland in the Aftermath of World War Studia Judaica 7: 2004 nr 2(14) s. 257-304 (pdf)
  14. Sonja Wentling. "The Engineer and the Shtadlanim: Herbert Hoover and American Jewish non-Zionists, 1917-28." American Jewish History 88, 3(September 2000): 377-406.
  15. Mieczysław B. Biskupski, Piotr Stefan Wandycz. Ideology, Politics, and Diplomacy in East Central Europe. Boydell & Brewer, 2003.
  16. Neal Pease, Poland, the United States, and the Stabilization of Europe, 1919-1933, Oxford University Press, 1986, page 10
  17. Norman Davies. Great Britain and the Polish Jews, 1918-20. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Apr., 1973), pp. 119-142.
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