Poland, Guilt and the Holocaust

Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

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Holocaust Studies

Making it a crime to imply any Polish culpability for Nazi crimes denies the historical record.
Poland is soon to unveil plans to make it illegal to refer to “Polish Death Camps”.

Many of the Nazis’ most brutal death camps – including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor – were located in Poland. But according to Zbigniew Ziobro, Poland’s Justice Minister, calling them Polish death camps “blasphemes” Poles.

His government’s new bill “will be a project that meets the expectations of many Poles, who are routinely blasphemed in the world, in Europe, even in Germany, saying that they are the perpetrators of the Holocaust and that in Poland were Polish concentration camps, Polish gas chambers. Enough with this lie, there must be accountability,” Minister Ziobro told Polish radio on Saturday, February 13, 2016.

There is evidence of both Polish heroism and Polish complicity for the Holocaust.

At issue is more than semantics. Poles are rightly very sensitive to depictions of their country; its wartime history is complex. Poland suffered greatly during World War II, and there were many heroic instances of individual Poles risking their lives to save Jews. But making it a crime to imply any Polish culpability for Nazi crimes denies the historical record – and sets a dangerous precedent for denying the full scope of the Holocaust.

A number of historians in recent years have unearthed new evidence both of Polish complicity in the Holocaust and of Polish heroism.

Righteous Poles

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, has documented 6,620 Polish “Righteous Gentiles” – Poles who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust – the most of any nation. Yad Vashem estimates that 1% of Poland’s pre-War Jewish population of 3.3 million Jews was saved by Polish friends and neighbors.

In his book The Righteous: Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, the late Oxford historian Martin Gilbert documented some of these individual cases and the grave dangers Poles faced in aiding Jews. He quotes a Jewish resident of the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum, who wrote in his diary that on November 18, 1940 – the day the Jews were confined to the ghetto – “many Christians brought bread for the Jewish acquaintances and friends”. These actions carried huge risk. One Christian Pole was observed “throwing a sack of bread over the wall” – and was promptly murdered by the Nazis for aiding Jews.

An inscription in the Memorial Book for Polish town of Skierniewice sums up Poland’s wartime atmosphere: “Sometimes a mere gesture of sympathy shown to those (Jews) persecuted could easily cost a life.” Tragically, historians have documented many instances of Poles being murdered for helping, or even betraying empathy with, Jews. The events of April 1942, in the Polish town of Mlawa, are typical: fifty of the town’s Jews were forced into a square to be executed by Nazi forces, and the town’s residents forced to watch. One bystander started shouting “Down with Hitler! Innocent blood is being shed!” – and was killed immediately for his words.

Polish Antisemitism

Yet historians have also documented many troubling instances of Polish antisemitism during the Holocaust as well. Even as he documented inspiring instances of Polish resistance and heroism, Martin Gilbert acknowledged that “many Poles looked with satisfaction at the Jews being moved into the (Warsaw) ghetto, even gloating….”

The United States Holocaust Museum has documented that “As German forces implemented the killing, they drew upon some Polish agencies, such as Polish police forces and railroad personnel, in the guarding of ghettos and the deportation of Jews to the killing centers. Individual Poles often helped in the identification, denunciation, and hunting down of Jews in hiding, often profiting from the associated blackmail, and actively participated in the plunder of Jewish property.”

Professor Peter Kenez of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has investigated the substantial German ethnic population in Poland during World War II who “welcomed the (Nazi) conquerors with enthusiasm” in his book The Coming of the Holocaust: From Antisemitism to Genocide (Cambridge University Press 2013).

Historian Ronald Modras, a professor at St. Louis University, has researched the role of the Catholic Church in fomenting profound Jew hatred in Poland and concluded, “The Catholic clergy (in Poland)… were not innocent bystanders or passive observers in the wave of antisemitism that encompassed Poland in the latter half of the 1930s… Even when nationalistic youth translated anti-Semitic attitudes into violence… instead of subjecting the violence to unambiguous criticism, church leaders rather gave explanations for antisemitism that ultimately served to justify it.” (The Catholic Church and Antisemitism: Poland 1933-1939. Routledge 2000). Former Harvard History Professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen similarly documented widespread anti-Jewish feeling in Poland’s religious leadership in his book A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (Alfred A. Knopf 2002).

Jedwabne Pogrom

Read more: Poland, Guilt and the Holocaust

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