Holocaust in Poland



Persecution of the Jews by the German Nazi occupation government, particularly in the urban areas, began immediately after the occupation. In the first year and a half, however, the Germans confined themselves to stripping the Jews of their property and 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 some extent to bargain with the Germans. 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.

A few German-inspired massacres were carried out with help from, or even active participation by, Poles themselves. 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 tortured and beaten to death by some of Jedwabne's citizens. 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 cooperation with the Soviet invaders in Polish-Soviet War and during 1939 invasion of Kresy regions, and simple greed for the possessions of the Jews.

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" in the General Government. 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.

The role played by Poles in these events has been the subject of considerable debate. Since the fall of Communism in Poland, it has become possible to debate this issue openly, and Polish political parties, the Catholic Church, and Jewish organisations both inside and outside Poland have contributed. Before the war there were 3 million Jews in Poland, about 10% of the population. Poland was a deeply Catholic country and the presence of this large non-Christian minority had always been 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, the Germans were clearly able to exploit this anti-Jewish sentiment. Some Poles betrayed hidden Jews to the Germans, and others made their living as "Jew-hunters", although many others hid Jews rather than collaborate in their destruction. 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 accused the Jews of having collaborated with the Soviets, and also alleged that Jewish Communists had been prominent in the repressions and deportations of Catholic Poles of that period, leading to acts of vengeance that, on occasion resulted in innocents being targeted.

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 Poland was death a standard punishment for a person and his whole family, and sometimes also 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 Museum.

There was no collaborationist government in Poland, and relatively little active collaboration by individual Poles with any aspect of the German presence in Poland, including the Holocaust - certainly less than in France, for example. This was partly because the long-term German plan was to resettle Poland with Germans, and while German authorities were on occasion interested in recruiting Polish collaborators, Hitler always refused to take the idea seriously as it would require lessening of the terror reign in Poland. As such all 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 rather than Poles. The Polish underground movements, the nationalist Home Army (AK) and the Communist People's Army (AL), generally opposed collaboration in 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 through 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.

However, a distinct from the Home Army resistance movement, the ultra-nationalist Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (NSZ or National Armed Forces) organized a large number of murders of Jews in Poland.

At the same time, while the Home Army as a whole was largely untainted by the collaboration against the Jews, it is difficult to attribute separate cases of anti-Jewish violence since resistance members sometimes switched between the resistance forces. The cases of collaboration between the AK and the Nazi fources that did occur were more at the tactical level and mostly directed against the pro-Soviet partisans and, sometimes, 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".