The Polish record under German occupation is one of the most argued-over chapters of the Holocaust. Around three million Polish Jews were murdered between 1939 and 1945. Around three million non-Jewish Polish citizens were also killed by the German occupiers and by the Soviet occupiers. The German occupation of Poland was the most brutal in occupied Europe, both in scale and in intent: the German plan was to reduce the Polish state to nothing and to remove or kill most of its non-Jewish Slavic population over the long term. The Polish Jewish population was killed first, faster, and at the highest rate. The Polish non-Jewish population was killed alongside, in different ways, in numbers that mean Poland lost around six million of its citizens, around 17 per cent of its pre-war population, the highest national death rate in the Second World War.
The Polish record on the Holocaust is therefore the record of a country whose own people were also being killed, often in adjacent fields and at adjacent moments. It includes both the largest organised resistance movement in occupied Europe, which sheltered Jewish refugees and ran rescue operations, and a layer of local participation in killing and denunciation that has been a source of continuing national argument since 1945.
The German occupation
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. The country was divided in October 1939 between Germany and the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The German part was further subdivided: areas in the west and north were annexed directly to the Reich, with the local Polish population scheduled for expulsion or Germanisation; the rest, the Generalgouvernement, was administered as a colonial possession under Hans Frank. The German policy was the destruction of Polish national life: the universities were closed, the intellectual class was targeted in the AB Aktion of summer 1940 (around 30,000 Polish professionals murdered), Polish national symbols were banned, and the population was reduced to forced labour for the German war economy.
The Polish Jewish population was concentrated almost entirely in the Generalgouvernement and the annexed areas. They were ghettoised from late 1939 onwards. By mid-1942 they had been deported, in their millions, to Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. The Operation Reinhard killing programme, run from offices in occupied Poland, did most of its work between March 1942 and October 1943.
The Polish Underground State
Poland produced the most extensive resistance movement in occupied Europe. The Polish Underground State maintained a clandestine government, an underground army (the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army), an underground civil administration, an underground press, an underground judiciary, and underground universities. The Home Army at peak had around 400,000 members. The Polish underground reported on the German extermination programme to the Polish government in exile in London from 1941 onwards; Polish couriers, particularly Jan Karski, brought eyewitness accounts of the ghettos and of a German extermination camp to London and Washington in 1942.
The Polish Underground State included a specifically Jewish rescue organisation, Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews, founded in December 1942 and run jointly by Polish underground figures and Jewish underground figures. Żegota helped tens of thousands of Polish Jews who had escaped the ghettos. Members of Żegota included Irena Sendler, the social worker who saved around 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, and Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw zoo who hid hundreds of Jewish refugees in the empty animal enclosures and zoo buildings.
The Polish Righteous
Yad Vashem has recognised more Polish citizens as Righteous Among the Nations than citizens of any other country: over 7,000 individuals at the most recent count. The figure includes the operators of farm shelters, urban hiding places, document forgers, smugglers, and others who saved Jewish lives at substantial personal risk. The risk was real. The German occupation in Poland alone, of all occupied territories, made sheltering Jews punishable by death not only for the helper but for the helper’s entire family. Several hundred Polish helpers and their families were executed during the occupation for sheltering Jews.
The Polish denunciation
The other side of the record is the layer of Polish denouncers and active collaborators. The Polish Blue Police, the local Polish police force operating under German control, took part in round-ups and ghetto guarding. Polish szmalcownicy, the so-called blackmailers, made a living from identifying Jewish refugees on the Aryan side of Warsaw and elsewhere and either turning them in for the German bounty or extorting payment from them. Polish villagers in some rural areas hunted down Jewish escapees from the ghettos for the bounty offered. The Jedwabne massacre of 10 July 1941, in which Polish civilians murdered around 340 of their Jewish neighbours, is the best-known case but was not the only one. Similar local pogroms took place in other towns in the Białystok region in summer 1941. Each is covered on the Specific Atrocities pages.
The size of the Polish denunciation layer is contested. Modern Polish research has produced figures of several thousand active denouncers and many tens of thousands of passive informants. The figure has political weight in Poland because it cuts across the post-war national narrative of universal Polish heroism.
The post-war argument
The Polish post-war state, under communist rule, took the position that all Polish suffering had been the work of the Germans and that Polish-Jewish relations during the war had been entirely heroic. The 1968 Polish communist anti-Zionist campaign expelled most of the surviving Polish Jewish community. After 1989, the post-communist Polish state and Polish historians began to address the Polish layer of the Holocaust more frankly. Jan Gross’s book Neighbours (2000) and the subsequent debate over Jedwabne were the watershed. The current Polish government has, since 2015, pushed back against the Gross line and against the wider acknowledgement of Polish participation, with new laws restricting the public discussion of Polish wartime conduct. The argument inside Poland is not settled.
What the Polish record adds up to
The Polish record contains both the most extensive organised rescue effort in occupied Europe and a layer of active local collaboration that contributed to thousands of Jewish deaths. Both are real. Both belong on the same page. The Holocaust in Poland was overwhelmingly a German crime, made possible by German occupation policy and German operational machinery. It was made worse, in particular places at particular moments, by Polish participation. It was made survivable, in tens of thousands of cases, by Polish rescue. The full Polish record requires acknowledging all three.
See also
- Hans Frank
- The Polish Underground State
- The Jedwabne Massacre
- Irena Sendler
- Jan Karski
- Specific Atrocities
Sources
- Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Littman Library, 2013
- Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943, Indiana University Press, 1989
- Jan T. Gross, Neighbours, Princeton University Press, 2001
- Joshua Zimmerman, The Polish Underground and the Jews 1939-1945, Cambridge University Press, 2015
- USHMM: Poland