The Polish Blue Police (Policja Granatowa, the Granatowa Policja, the Navy Blue Police) was the regular Polish municipal and rural police force, retained in service by the German occupation authorities to administer day-to-day policing in the General Government, the German colonial administration of central Poland. The force took its informal name from the colour of its uniforms. It was around 12,000 strong at its wartime peak. Its members continued to wear the pre-war Polish police uniforms with German command badges added. The Blue Police participated in the round-ups of Jews from the Polish ghettos, the searches for Jews in hiding, and the surrender of Jews to German custody for deportation or shooting. The post-war historiographical reckoning with the Blue Police’s role has been one of the most painful and contested chapters of Polish national memory.
The chain of command
The Blue Police operated under German command after the dissolution of the Polish state in October 1939. German Order Police officers commanded the force at district and regional level. Polish officers retained command at local level. The force was paid by the German occupation authorities, equipped by them, and used by them as the principal day-to-day instrument of policing in the General Government. It was not a German formation; it was a Polish formation conscripted into German service.
Membership in the force was, at the senior level, partly voluntary, but at the rank-and-file level was substantially conscripted. Pre-war Polish police officers who refused to serve under the Germans were sent to concentration camps. The result is that the rank-and-file membership of the Blue Police is not, on its own, evidence of pro-German sympathy. The conduct of individual officers is what counts.
The ghetto round-ups
From 1941 onwards the Blue Police participated in the round-ups of Polish Jews from the rural Jewish communities into the ghettos. The work was conducted under direct German supervision but with Polish manpower. From 1942, when the deportations from the ghettos to the killing camps began, the Blue Police participated in the herding of ghetto residents to the railheads. In some cases the Blue Police escorted the deportation trains. Survivor testimony from Treblinka and Bełżec mentions Blue Police escorts.
The Judenjagd
The most extensively studied Blue Police role is in the Judenjagd, the Jew hunt, the German campaign of 1942 to 1944 to find and kill the Jews who had escaped from the ghettos and were hiding in the countryside. The historian Jan Grabowski’s book Hunt for the Jews (2013) examined the records of one rural county, Dąbrowa Tarnowska, in detail. Grabowski concluded that around two thirds of the Jews who attempted to hide in the area were caught, and that the Blue Police were responsible for the catches in the great majority of cases. The Polish villagers who reported the hidden Jews and the Blue Police who arrested them were doing it in a context where the Germans had set up financial incentives, payment of around three to five kilograms of sugar or a small cash bounty per Jew turned in. The bounties were paid.
The Grabowski work, and the parallel work of Barbara Engelking and her collaborators at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, established the Blue Police role beyond reasonable historical dispute. The work has been controversial in Poland because it cuts across the official Polish national narrative of universal Polish resistance to the German occupation. The work has been challenged in Polish courts under the 2018 Holocaust law, and the historians have been subjected to legal harassment. The historical findings, however, have not been seriously contested in international scholarship.
The Polish underground response
The Polish underground state, the Armia Krajowa and its civilian arm, recognised the Blue Police problem and took action against the worst individual offenders. The underground courts sentenced and executed a number of Blue Police officers for crimes against Jewish hidden persons. The numbers were small relative to the scale of the problem; the Polish underground was preoccupied with the wider war against the German occupation and the looming Soviet threat, and Jewish hiding cases were a secondary priority. But the Polish underground did not regard the Blue Police as a legitimate Polish institution, and acted on that view to the extent its resources allowed.
The post-war prosecution
The post-war Polish state prosecuted Blue Police members under the August 1944 decree on collaborators. Several thousand prosecutions were brought between 1944 and 1956. The prosecutions were uneven; some led to executions, some to long prison terms, many to acquittals or short sentences. The People’s Republic of Poland prosecuted Blue Police members principally as collaborators with German occupation, not specifically as participants in the Holocaust. The Holocaust framing was added by historians from the 1990s onwards.
The 2018 law
The Polish parliamentary law of 2018, in its original form, made it a criminal offence to ascribe responsibility for the Holocaust or for individual crimes against Jews to the Polish nation or the Polish state
. The law was widely criticised internationally and the criminal penalties were dropped after diplomatic protest, but the civil-law version remains and has been used to bring legal actions against historians, including against Grabowski and Engelking, for their work on the Blue Police and on Polish village complicity. The legal pressure has not stopped the work but has slowed it.
What it was
The Polish Blue Police is the case of the conscripted national police force whose continued operation under foreign occupation produced, at the rank-and-file level, extensive participation in the killing of the country’s Jewish citizens. The contrast with the Germans is real: the Blue Police were not Nazis, did not believe in the Final Solution, and in many cases were themselves Polish patriots who hated the Germans. They participated nonetheless. The participation was driven, depending on the individual, by fear of German reprisal for non-cooperation, by the financial incentives the Germans had offered for hidden Jews, by pre-existing local antisemitism, and by the logic of bureaucratic obedience to immediate superiors. The Polish Jewish death toll, around three million people of whom around half had attempted to hide outside the ghettos, was made higher by what the Blue Police did. The numbers cannot be disaggregated precisely. The participation was real.
See also
Sources
- Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, Indiana University Press, 2013
- Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (eds), Dalej jest noc, two volumes, Center for Holocaust Research, Warsaw, 2018
- Marek Getter, Policja Polska Generalnego Gubernatorstwa, Warsaw, 2008
- USHMM: Polish Blue Police