Smersh and Memory
One reason for Poland’s sensitivity to President Obama’s mistaken identification of Nazi extermination facilities as being “Polish death camps” lies in the historical fact that the phrase has been used so often. Wikiquote has more than a dozen examples of the use of the phrase by various individuals going back to the 1980s.
The users don’t actually mean that the death camps were operated by Poland. They just make it sound that way. For some reason, perhaps for reasons of cacaphonia more than anything else, no other country except Germany has had the “death camp” phrase affixed so readily affixed to its national name as Poland. Nobody knows why. Despite the popular belief that many of the Nazi extermination facilities were built in Poland, there were in fact comparatively few.
Most German Nazi concentration camps were located in the territory of Nazi Germany. A complete list, drawn up in 1967 by the German Ministry of Justice, names about 1,200 camps and subcamps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. During WWII, Nazi concentration camps were also located in many European countries such Germany, Austria, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Belarus, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Italia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Macedonia. Unlike with “Polish death camps”, the media did not attach geographical context in reference to camps located in other countries (for example “French concentration camps” or “Norwegian concentration camps”).
Still the phrase seemed to roll off the tongue. The Economist points out that “few things annoy Poles more than being blamed for the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers of their homeland.”
[It has been pointed out privately and in comments below that most special purpose death camps, as opposed to other types of concentration camps, were in Poland. I regret the error.]
For many years, Polish media, diplomats and politicians have tried to persuade outsiders to stop using the phrase “Polish death camps” as a shorthand description of Auschwitz and other exemplars of Nazi brutality and mass murder.
As President Obama’s speech proved, that effort has been less than successful.
The irony is that Poland unlike some other defeated Allied nations, never surrendered to the Nazis. After refusing to bow to the Nazis they held out against the Soviets. The Polish government in exile only returned to Warsaw in 1990, 50 years after it was invaded by Hitler. Its resistance was the largest “in all of Nazi-occupied Europe”. Untold thousands of clandestine fighters died for the allied cause. Despite this, it was never portrayed in the same romantic light that the French resistance, for example, was depicted.
There was instead something obstinately quixotic about the Poles; something faintly ridiculous, as if they had had a talent for missing every opportunity to come out on the soft side of history. Nothing exemplified this tragic talent more than the Warsaw Uprising. It was “timed to coincide with the Soviet Union’s Red Army approaching the eastern suburbs of the city and the retreat of German forces.”
Naturally, they were betrayed.
“Controversially, the Soviet advance stopped short, enabling the Germans to regroup and literally demolish the city in crushing the Polish resistance, which fought for 63 days with little outside support.” It was savagely crushed with an almost unholy glee. The Nazis even deployed special self propelled artillery that they had found no other opportunity to use, so godawful it was, assault guns whose monstrous shells exploded a single building at a discharge. It was like they were saving this horror just for the Poles. The Warsaw fighters held on, doomed of course.
Initially, the Poles established control over most of central Warsaw, but the Soviets ignored Polish attempts to establish radio contact and did not advance beyond the city limits. Intense street fighting between the Germans and Poles continued. By 14 September, Polish forces under Soviet high command occupied the east bank of the Wisła River opposite the insurgents’ positions; but only 1,200 men made it across to the west bank, and they were not reinforced by the bulk of the Red Army. This, and the lack of Soviet air support from a base 5 minutes flying time away, led to allegations that Joseph Stalin tactically halted his forces to let the operation fail and allow the Polish nationalists to be crushed.
Winston Churchill pleaded with Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt to help Britain’s Polish allies, to no avail. Then, without Soviet air clearance, Churchill sent over 200 low-level supply drops by the Royal Air Force, the South African Air Force and the Polish Air Force under British High Command. Later, after gaining Soviet air clearance, the US Army Air Force sent one high-level mass airdrop as part of Operation Frantic.
Although the exact number of casualties remains unknown, it is estimated that about 16,000 members of the Polish resistance were killed and about 6,000 badly wounded. In addition, between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly from mass murders. Jews being harboured by Poles were exposed by German house-to-house clearances and mass evictions of entire neighbourhoods. German casualties totalled over 8,000 soldiers killed and missing, and 9,000 wounded. During the urban combat approximately 25% of Warsaw’s buildings were destroyed. Following the surrender of Polish forces, German troops systematically leveled another 35% of the city block by block. Together with earlier damage suffered in the 1939 invasion of Poland and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, over 85% of the city was destroyed by January 1945, when the Soviets entered the city.
They were — and perhaps still are — pawns to great power politics. The verbatim text of exchanges between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill discussing the question of dropping ammunition and guns to the Warsaw defenders make for fascinating reading to outsiders, but to Polish eyes they are record of everything that was tragic about their unstinting resistance.
Aug. 18, 1944 Winston Churchill’s telegram to F. D. Roosevelt:
“The refusal of the Soviets to allow the U.S. aircraft to bring succour to the heroic insurgents in Warsaw, added to their own complete neglect to fly supplies when only a few score of miles away, constitutes an episode of profound and far-reaching gravity. If, as is almost certain, the German triumph in Warsaw is followed by a wholesale massacre, no measure can be put upon the full consequences that will arise. I am willing to send a personal message to Stalin if you think this wise and if you will yourself send a separate similar message.”
Aug. 24, 1944 message from F. D. Roosevelt to Winston Churchill
… I do not consider it advantageous to the long range general war prospect for me to join with you in the proposed message to U.J. [Uncle Joe].
I have no objection to your sending such a message if you consider it advisable to do so.
And despite the near certainty that President Obama did not mean to imply that the Poles actually operated the death camps, here was the same old jinx raising its head in the President’s speech again. He referred to “Polish death camps” — Polski Obóz Śmierci — though goodness knows his speechwriter would never have thought to use “French death camps” in a public speech.
Not the "Polish Death Camps Again!"
In the end Poland may be the victim of pop history. Poland and Death Camps have been as conjoined as hamburgers and fries; beans and weiners. You can hardly blame speechwriters for knowing only the Cliff Notes version of history. The same kind of history that yearly commemorates the civilian deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and forgets the Battle of Manila, where casualties were as high as both combined; that remembers Jean Moulin and forgets Witold Pilecki, of the Polish Home army operative who actually volunteered to go into Auschwitz to find out for allied intelligence what was going on there — only to be executed by Soviet Forces in 1948.
Perhaps that predestination to oblivion goes with the national character. Who can forget Vesper Lynd’s posthumous explanation of the reason she worked for the Soviets at the end of Casino Royale. The NKVD had imprisoned in their dungeons her wartime Polish lover; a pilot with the RAF. Each year they let him write one letter to assure her he was alive — for as long as she cooperated.
Bond casts away the letter in fierce contempt. All Bond can say is “the bitch is dead.” So one might have guessed, was the Polish pilot. But then who cared? Even in fiction, who even notices?
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Brave Poland!
The strains of Chopin’s Prelude in A Minor was his expression of the melancholy of the fate of living between the Russian and the Hun.
I once knew an old Pole who had been a young private in 1939 in the Polish Army , captured by the Germans and had to work in a Labor battalion to live, escaped from the Germans, joined the Polish Resistance, and then finally fled Poland for fear of his life when the Soviets came in 1945. He loved the United States very much, but he missed his beloved Poland. I wonder if he lived to see the Berlin Wall fall and the end of the Warsaw Pact? I wonder if he ever got to go home again?
Yeah, not too many death camps in Poland. Maybe that little place called Auschwitz is what they’re thinking of. -PB
The tragic reality is that after the soviet take over of Poland they appointed ethnic Jews were the enforcers of a horrendous regime-
-the leadership of the NKVD were ethic non religious Jews-they ordered the slaughterers in the Ukraine as Robert Conquest documents
The Blood Lands is a good account
“This is a history of political mass murder.
The fourteen million were always victims of a Soviet or Nazi killing policy, often of an interaction between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but never casualties of the war between them.
A quarter of them were killed before the Second World War even began. A further two hundred thousand died between1939 and 1941, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were not only at peace, but allies.
The deaths of the fourteen million were sometimes projected in economic plans, or hastened by economic considerations, but were not caused by economic necessity in any strict sense.
Stalin knew what would happen when he seized food from the starving peasants of Ukraine in 1933, just as Hitler knew what could be expected when he deprived Soviet prisoners of war food eight years later. In both cases, more than three million people died.
The hundreds of thousands of Soviet peasants and workers shot during Great Terror in 1937 and 1938 were victims of express directives of Stalin, just as the millions of Jews shot and gassed between 1941and 1945 were victims of an explicit policy of Hitler.”
http://bloodlandsbook.com/?p=4
It is what it is
The most interesting thing about Pilecki, and I was surprised to learn of it, is that he was organizing a clandestine cell within Auschwitz.
If Pilecki actually did this stuff, then he was one tough hombre. It is bad enough trying to organize a secret cell on the outside. But to build an intel and resistance group and operate a radio station inside Auschwitz, well that’s a class act.
The French Resistance is a true historical marvel. It always had a substantial and very active Polish Emigre component.
Prior to the Nazi invasion of Russia it was frequenty betrayed by French Communists who later somehow emerged as war heroes. It also included Vichy official like Mitterand.
Membership of the Resistance peaked in 1951.
God forbid FDR might have angered our ally and friend good ol’ Uncle Joe. At least Churchill had some stones and a sense of morality.
I must say, as many times as Poland has been on the shit end of the stick, so to speak, it pains me to see how we’ve poked them in the eye with this incident and the revocation of missile defense. I don’t know much about the Poles, but they seem like good people and very loyal allies. But we know what happens to the most loyal of American allies…
Wretchard, the reason the Western media and entertainment industry portrayed the French resistance as heroes and entirely neglected the Polish resistance was because the French resistance was Communist and the Polish resistance was anti-Communist. Some things never change.
Poland is a special place. Their medieval Golden Liberty political system, however ineffective, was so weirdly different from the absolutism of the rest of Europe. At one point 80% of the world’s Jews lived there. During WWII Poland had the smallest percentage of quislings. Even now, many Jews are choosing to emigrate to Poland again.
Exsqueeze me, but my fuzzy historical knowledge includes a lot of anti-semitism in Poland for the last thousand years. Googling, there seems a constant tension between official Polish government, the Church, and the population at large. Very Hannah Arendt. Frankly, the Wikipedia entry, for example, seems expurgated.
http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/HistoryJewishPersecution/
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Warsaw.html
If Poland was not guilty of the Nazi death camps, well, um, look one just has to wonder at the energy with which they reacted to Obambus’ gaffe, however un-PC it might be in the modern day. As you say, the Nazis are infamous enough that perhaps little association with the Polish people or government comes from use of the term “Polish death camp” anyway, Poland as a nation was certainly a victim of the Nazis (and Soviets) and can hardly be held responsible for what happened after that. It just seems to me they doth protest too much. Well, perhaps they can get some points for the strength of their rejection of the past, whatever the precise details might have been.
–
I just now read the Wikipedia entry on the controversy. Eh. Heavy revisionism, is what it sounds like to me, given the longer perspective. Polish history down the memory hole. Well again, maybe it really is for the greater good. Hoorah.
“Despite this, it was never portrayed in the same romantic light that the French resistance, for example, was depicted.”
sure, most of your medias prefer to emphasize that the French surrendered (yet hardly, but never, it’s mentionned in them the 100 000 dead soldiers that fought in Dunkirk for that the Brits could escape), in accessing to the armistice, the goal was to spare Paris from being destroyed like Warshaw, and that another generation of French would disappear of the planet like in WW1, De Gaulle himself said, one must know when it it isn’t worth of sacrifying a whole population, especially for the gratuitous glory of not “surrendering”. Poland didn’t lose a whole generation of young men in WW1.
The Czech never opposed against the german occupation, this is the country that has the one of the least war casualties made by the Germans, I discussed this fact with a Czech, he told me it wasn’t worth the deal, they preferred to survive the conflict.
“though goodness knows his speechwriter would never have thought to use “French death camps” in a public speech.”
BECAUSE they weren’t death camps, except in Alsace, but that was for the french romantic resistants !
Though I would oppose the comparison with the Poles’ fate, they who were the people that Hitler wanted to eradicate from their territory., knowing that, they had no alternative but to resist until the death, that was promissed within the Generalplan Ost, and the Soviets had not much sympathy for them too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
http://kimel.net/poland.html
As for Jean Moulin, sorry but he died under the Gestapo torture, and never betrayed his nets.
Americans have been dissing Poles for over a century. When I was a kid, “Polak jokes” were still told on a regular basis and the Poles were always portrayed as bumbling buffoons. I see our prez is just following in that grand tradition.
I think one has to actually go to Poland (and not to just Krakow or some other tourist spot) to really understand the horrors the country encountered throughout the 20th century. Having married into a Polish immigrant family, I went to Silesia last year to meet my husband’s grandparents. These people are amazing; they survived WWII and communism with their senses of humor somehow still in tact. While I was there, I visited Auschwitz and also the city of Lodz. Lodz, if you’re not familiar with it, was the site of a ghetto second only in size to the one in Warsaw. It held a couple hundred thousand Jews, gypsies and others. The Nazis liquidated it in 1944. Only a few hundred survived. It’s hard to describe, but in my travels through Poland, I noticed a palpable sense in the air of I don’t know what, sadness? Melancholy? We Americans maybe don’t understand the Polish sense of outrage over O’s comments because we have no idea what it’s like to have been occupied for years by an enemy hell-bent on destroying you and everything/one you hold dear.
Here’s a Polish resistance fighter worth celebrating though. Check out this woman, Irina Gut Opdyke. I read her book a few years back. While working as a housekeeper for a Nazi officer, she hid something like 8 Jews in his basement. Now THAT is audacious.
http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/Opdyke.htm
I would’nt oppose the comparison…
It seems to me that the most interesting places I never knew anything about in Europe were Budapest, Prague, Krakow and Vienna. A whole civilization seems to have flourished and disappeared there, all within the last hundred years. The Pale of Settlement, the Golem, the Pogroms are vague terms in a past that I should like to know more about.
Prague seems especially mysterious with its narrow streets, archways and bridges. Layers of history, I guess. Once I had the idea of going to Prague to visit the cathedral where Gabic and Kubis made their last stand against the SS after getting Heydrich.
Kafka lived in Prague, with its dominating Castle. He wrote a story called “Before the Law”, which was first related to me I think in my second year of college by my New Testament teacher.
I wonder what the best place to get goulash is in Prague.
Totalitarians exploit encourage and manipulate hate. That is what they do. Antisemitism was prevalent in Poland and was encouraged by both the Right and the Left, with consequences that were exploited by the Communists for at least two generations after the war. Current East European society still struggles with that legacy as new would be totalitarians seek to exploit it. Further East in Lithuania or the Ukraine or then Byelorussia the Germans expressed surprise at the emotional intensity the locals brought to antisemitic activity. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising had suffered from the failure of the Polish Resistance to collaborate with the Jewish rebellion.
Champions of freedom in Eastern Europe are struggling to clean the poison out of their lands. Their gifts in culture experience and industry are significant. Obama shows he is at best a wannabe Totalitarian by exploiting opportunities to increase rancor. It would not surprise me if someone had asked “Is this wise?” about the Polish Death Camp line and some bright bulb, maybe Mr Modesty himself, had said “It will nail the Jews to our side.” On the other hand it may have just been arrogance and incompetence. This administration seems to be run like a combination undergraduate extra-curricular activities club and floating Bull Session.
I have or had, it has been a few years since I looked at it, a US Army Map Service map issued in 1944 of South East Poland. I found it in the basement of a US government facility in Europe that I was inventorying. It was awaiting destruction and I was told that it was now considered declassified and I could keep it. It shows Auschwitz and Birkenau and the rail lines. We knew.
4. Rodney
sources?
Communists are not known for betraying their camp, there were some quarrels between the different resistance nets, it might have happened that some were “given” to the Gestapo, but by the “concurrence”
Of course there have been resistants of the last hour, though they aren’t those that are quoted as heros
6. Walt
yes and not only, also because France was/is the most european mediatised country in the world, and also because we are a country with images, cinema, had some ready-made scenarios
0bama a divider not a uniter.
FDR could have stopped much of the murder that went on at the death camps by showing the American public what was known about the camps – he chose not to -
he was an anti-semite. He wanted the nazis YMS to expend their energies killing Jews. Am I paranoid about this? – I don’t think so.
Dems politicians continuously act only for the .001% and claim to be the 99%.
There is considerable disinformation concerning inmate resistance against the Nazis running the death camps. Keep in mind that Poland was under the Soviet boot for several decades after the conclusion of WW-II and prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Information produced within Poland during that period was written by people who were either subject to Marxist-Leninist censorship or themselves advancing the Marxist-Leninist narrative. For example, the communists running Poland at the time preferred to advance the narrative that KZ-Auschwitz was mainly focused on suppressing Polish nationalism and the genocide directed against the Jews, Gypsies, etc. was merely a secondary function. In truth, the Nazis did regard the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia as a high priority but this activity was secondary to their main objective of exterminating European Jews. There are ironies/surprises concerning Nazi concentration camps. For example, the Nazi concentration camp KZ-Buchenwald located near Wiemar, Germany was not an industrialized death camp like KZ-Birkenau (part of Auschwitz) but mainly involved with forced labor to support the German war effort. Of course, living conditions at KZ-Buchenwald were incredibly brutal with a high death rate and many people were executed including high ranking German communists, e.g. Ernst Thälmann. However many people died at KZ-Buchenwald ***after*** the Nazis lost WW-II due to the Soviets maintaining KZ-Buchenwald as a concentration camp for the disposal of German Nazis (poetic justice?). There is a propaganda that Jewish inmates at KZ-Birkenau had a well organized resistance centered around the sonderkomandos who emptied out gas chambers and loaded corpses into the cremation ovens. However these stories of organized resistance do not hold up well under critical analysis. My impression is the SS did an effective job of utterly terrorizing the inmates at these death camps to the point that the inmates put up almost no resistance and went meekly to their deaths. There were only a few cases where people realized they were being lead to their own murder and had sufficient presence of mind and courage that they grabbed a Luger from an SS-officer and killed a few Nazis before they were gunned down themselves. For the most part, the Holocaust is a story of savagery, horror, inhumanity and cowardice.
Eggplant @17-
I seem to recall also that the Nazis were extremely good at recruiting snitches and kapos among the prisoner populations to keep order and an eye out for those plotting escape or resistance.
Eggplant..
Kamp policy was to never use firearms within the fence perimeter. Clubs and dogs did the trick. So there was absolutely no way to ever get ones hands on the equalizer.
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Too many conflate death camps with concentration camps.
The reality is that ALL of the most widely known ( in the West ) death camps were in Poland. Most were pure extermination facilities: Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmo, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau — the last being unique — a super scale labor camp and extermination camp beyond all other horrors.
None of the concentration camps in the west were ever designed or modified to be out and out death camps.
Consequent to Barbarossa, the NAZIs set up city specific death camps at Maly Trostenets and even in Serbia: Sajmiste…
But, on the whole, a staggering fraction of the murders were in the open field with ‘Special Action Squads.’ Subsequently, Sonderaktion 1005 had the SS digging up their victims to destroy the evidence.
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This is why Poland, with its memorials, has such a strong link with the Shoah. The rest of the victims are everywhere — and nowhere.
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BFTP @13…
The Eight Air Force bombed the synthetic crude oil works just down the road from Auschwitz. Hence, there are bomb plot snap shots of the entire complex.
The problem for Ike was that at the time he had both Bomber Command and the Eight Air Force entirely dedicated to destroying the French rail network. This was April onwards. It coincided with the horrific news that the SS were sweeping through Hungary to exterminate the Jews there. ( This was when Soros made his bones turning in Jews to the Nazis — it’s in his bio. )
Ike could see, right before his eyes in France, just how fast the Germans could repair rail roads: over night! He and Spaatz concluded that any campaign to frustrate the SS would cripple Overlord, imperil the bomber fleets ( too predictable a target = FLAK forever ) and cause the evil to be merely shifted to an out of range, open air gun range; which is how the genocide jumped into high gear in the first place.
In sum: we had no military option that would’ve ever thwarted the extermination engine. Only killing Hitler would bring it to an end. Thusly, Ike concentrated his energies.
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FDR’s crime was to block Jewish immigration when it would’ve made a difference, the 30′s.
That today’s Jewish-American voters don’t make that connection is obvious.
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WRT Warsaw: Hitler insisted that it be razed to the ground, 100%. What post-war accounts I’ve read make me believe that Stalin permitted Adolf’s wish.
This clip shows the Sturm Tiger firing its monster rocket round :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCbFyIaVOPA&feature=related
It was inspired by Stalingrad’s fighting.
Smart bombs mean that such a design will never be adopted in the modern day.
E2 – does the name ‘soros’ ring a bell?
Yes, the death camps on Poland were run by Germans.
Yes, it is wrong to call these ‘Polish’ death camps.
Yes, the Polish government may justly object to the use of this name.
However, the claim implied by this objection – that Poland is being falsely attainted of antisemitism – is false. Polish antisemitism had deep roots and violent expression, even if it was never organized on a mass level like German antisemitism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_violence_in_Poland,_1944-1946
It’s worth pausing to consider the meaning of the events in the above links. A Jew survives six years of war, deportation, starvation, concentration camps, trudges back to his home, and finds it occupied by his Polish neighbors. The next day he is murdered so they can keep his property.
The nazis left few Jews in Poland. But of the survivors, hardly any chose to remain.
14.Marie Claude
Good question. The net moves so fast.
Perhaps in Malcolm Muggeridge who was in the British S. Service in Paris in 1944, but I cannot immediately find the reference. By the time I remember and sort it out the Club will have moved on.
Certainly in my native Australia Communist Unions sabotaged the war effort in the early part of the war, but that is a long way from handing people over to the Gestapo. But then the mentality is the same. Orders from Moscow.
In DC Federal Court in the summer of 2001 a lawsuit was filed on behalf of those imprisoned in Auschwitz, charging that the US. military did not bomb the rail lines leading to the camp, thereby enabling its operation.
The reality is that the U.S. – or for that matter, the British – lacked the capability to destroy the rail lines leading to Auschwitz until very late in the war. Or for that matter, even damage them significantly. Completely aside from the need for the aircraft elsewhere to win the war, we lacked the technical capability.
But the Soviets could have accomplished that mission. Funny that nobody is suing them, huh?
Blert #19:
A book devoted to the debate over bombing Auschwitz makes somewhat of a case that we could have flown special P-38 missions to bomb the ovens starting in 1944. It would have been a very special very high risk mission, similar to the P-38 mission to bomb Ploesti, and which suffered disastrous losses. And there still is a real question of would it have done any good; the Germans certainly would not have let everyone there loose if the ovens no longer worked.
“Despite the popular belief that many of the Nazi extermination facilities were built in Poland, there were in fact comparatively few.”
Blert has the right of it. Not all concentration camps were extermination camps (Vernichtungslager). Although the slave-labor camps (Arbeitslager) had horrendous death tolls from malnutrition, mistreatment, execution and starvation, like the labor-camp side of Auschwitz Wiesel described in Night, or Płaszów of Schindler’s List notoriety, and at the end of the war the guards massacred inmates rather than have them liberated by the advancing Allies; nonetheless the purpose-built death factories were six in number, all in Poland: Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, and Majdanek.
There were thousands of concentration camps, as well as POW-camps, hard-labour camps and so on scattered all over Europe, in Germany itself to begin with. But all the EXTERMINATION camps (there was half a dozen of them: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek etc.) were built and located in the lands of the GG, the General Gouvernment, that is, Poland. That’s obviously no fault of the Poles themselves, and yes, it is true that they didn’t set up anything similar to the Quisling governments of other occupied countries and, besides, were the first to fiught the nazis, fighting them to the bitter end.
They also fought the Russians, and paid dearly for it. Polish troops and officers retreated from German occupied Poland to its Soviet occupied parts, believing, quite reasonably, that the Nazi-Soviet friendship/alliance wouldn’t last and that, eventually, they would be needed and would be able to go on fighting the Germans. But that was not what Stalin thought, and he ordered his NKVD to arrest and execute some 20 thousand Polish officers. That happened in the forest called Katyn and is quite well depicted in Andrzej Wajda’s film.
But Polish troops went on fighting the German all over Europe and even in the Middle East. They played quite an important role in North Africa, in Italy (Monte Casino) and in Normandy — much more important, btw, than the (Free) French who, nonetheless, were counted among the winners and were given their own zone to control in Germany, while the Poles were simply given up to the USSR.
Among the Poles’ most important contribution to the war effort and eventual victory over the 1.000 Year Reich was the following: it was Polish intelligence that managed to get hold of one Enigma machine and, when Poland fell, the Poles smuggled it to Britain: this was absolutely central to the whole operation that allowed the allies to break the secret German communications codes. I’ve also read in more than one place that as many as 20% of the pilots who fought and won the Battle of Britain were Poles.
And, as boring and distressing as it is to hear people endlessly talking about the so-called “war crimes” that were the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while having not a word to say about the Manilla massacre, about which they probably don’t know anything, it is at least as irritating to hear the condemnations of the bombing of Dresden made by people who simply ignore that, during the Warsaw Rising, maybe 10 times as many people were killed there by the Nazis. And even worse: while Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden, terrible as they were, were rational war actions that furthered quick victory and an end to all senseless killing, the massacres of Manilla and Warsaw were done by armies that knew themselves to be defeated: they made no tactical or strategic sense at all, not even as a way to delay defeat or to be able to negotiate surrender on better terms. Even in the context of wartime atrocities, Manilla and Warsaw were as pure examples of senseless, useless, murderous and sadistic killing as one can get. The Germans had already withdrawn from Warsaw and were going home in order to shorten their lines and defend their own home territory. Nevertheless, they returned just to demolish the city and butcher its population, I mean, just for the pleasure of it. This action didn’t delay for a single day their ultimate defeat, and they knew it. In military terms, it was a pure and simple waste of bullets, explosives and manpower. But so was the massacre of the Jews, something the Nazis and their allies went on doing until the last possible minute of the war, and, here and there, they may even have extended the war a little bit more just in order to murder some more Jews.
On the other hand, it is true that there was a lot of anti-semitism in Poland. Jewish resistence fighters were commonly betrayed to the Nazis and, anyway, almost never got any help from the Polish resistence fighters themselves. Nor did the Polish Ghetto rising of 1943 get much help or sympathy from the non-Jewish Poles. For two years after the war’s end, Jewish survivors returning from the camps were murdered by the Poles and, in some cases, there were full-fledged pogroms of returning Jews. Something between 1.500-2.500 Jews were killed in Poland between 1945-47. And, in the mid-60s, the communist government of the country promoted a vast anti-semitic campaign which made many of the few remaining Jews to leave Poland. Poland’s population before WW2 was around 30 million. The country lost 3 million Jews and 3 million non-Jewish inhabitants.
Their anti-semitism shouldn’t blind us to the fact that Poland was one of the countries that fought most fiercely and heroically against both Nazis and Soviets, nor should their undoubted heroism blind us to their anti-semitism: human beings and history are complex and complicated.
Blast From the Past: the poor plaintiffs are tragically deluded about the accuracy, or rather in-, of WWII heavy bombers (the only planes with sufficient range). The US daylight CEP was over 1000 meters, in other words fewer than half their bombs would land even within a kilometer of the target; the British nighttime figure was much worse. Hollywood notwithstanding, they didn’t bullseye anything. It was carpet-bombing.
Nor is the raid on the Amiens prison an example here: that was pulled off by short-range fighter-bombers against a target just 50 miles behind German lines.
Marie Claude @ 9:
“Poland didn’t lose a whole generation of young men in WW1.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_during_World_War_I
There was no nation named “Poland” prior to 1914. The territory that is now Poland was either part of the Russian, German, or Austrian-Hungarian empires; it had been divided up between them before the Napoleonic wars. But the young men of that territory were still conscripted into the armies of those empires during WWI; 450,000 died. Not to mention the devastion of the land as it was fought over; most of the battles on the “Eastern Front” of WWI occurred in Poland.
Budapest. Hungary was, among all European nation, the one where Jews achieved the best results in the mainstream culture. For instance: Hungary’s main musical export item were conductors, and most of the best Hungarian conductors abroad were Jewish: Sir Georg Solti, Antal Dorati, Eugene Ormandy etc. The two best post-WW2 Humgarian composers were Jews as well: Gyorgy Ligeti and Gyorgy Kurtag, as well as many pianists etc. Hungarian Jews were important as operetta composers, dramatists, actors etc. Some of the best known Hungarian writers living abroad were Jewish, for instance, Arthur Koestler and Ferenc (Franz) Molnar. The same applies to Hungarian-Jewish photographers: Cappa, Kertesz etc. 7 out of 10 Nobel Prizes given to Hungarians (1 literary, the rest in the hard sciences) went to Jews. And many of the best Hungarian writers and poets of the last 50/60 years were also Jews. Hungarian Jews got more Olympic Golds than the whole of South America. Many of the main founders of Hollywood movie industry were Hungarian Jews and, curiously, their role was central in the pre-war British film industry (the Korda family, Emeric Pressburger etc.). All in all, Jews were only 5% of the country’s population and a large part of the other Hungarians didn’t really admire them: they’d rather hated them for their success. They still do.
Oh, and forget about goulash in Prague: it is a Hungarian dish. But the great Hungarian-Jewish dish is called “sólet”. It is a kind of bean stew, like the French “cassoulet”, and you can eat it either in the Jewish or non Jewish versions. The first is made mainly with goose-meat, while the Christian version is made with pork. BTW, Czech cooking is considered rather poor: they are, however, renowned for their beer, mainly those from the Plsen region. Hungarian cooking is a kind of synthesis of elements from both Central Europe, part of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and developed as such because of a 150 year Ottoman occupation of a large part of Hungary in the 16th/17th centuries.
There used to be some pretty decent Hungarian restaurants in NY, mostly concentrated on the upper East side, around 1st ave. and 80th st. If they’re still there, they’re worth trying.
From Barry Rubin’s blog – A leading Czech intellectual told a cheering audience in Prague, “Americans proved they weren’t racist by electing Obama in 2008. Now they must prove they aren’t stupid by voting him out of office in 2012.”
We must either believe that Obama really is so smart that he speaks in nuance that we don’t get, or that he really is the credentialed ignoramus that he appears to be.
When I was a kid, “Polak jokes” were still told on a regular basis and the Poles were always portrayed as bumbling buffoons. I see our prez is just following in that grand tradition.
In apologizing for a slur against Asians, former Mayor Marion Barry mentioned “Polacks.” A clever GOP operative would bombard Polish-American neighborhoods with ads tying the two gaffes together.
As Josh said, anti-semitism was rampant in Poland. Nevertheless, the camps were Nazi/German-created and run entities. I understand the Poles reaction, because whatever their sentiments at the time about Jews, they are tired of being one of Europe’s ‘foster children,’ neglected, forgotten and betrayed repeatedly by European powers and by history. Jan Sobieski saved Central and maybe Western Europe from the Ottomans by lifting the siege of Vienna.
The Polish camps were by far the biggest “death camps” of the network of concentration camps. Most camps in the network were not deliberate extermination camps, but death was a byproduct of the brutal conditions of most of those places.
Interesting thread. Other than popular fiction (Mila 18, etc.) I have little historical knowledge of the Poland in discussion. I do offer one story though. Years ago, while on active duty in the Navy, circa 1973, I met a young officer who had immigrated from Poland with his family when he was about 11 or 12 years old; that would have been about 1963 or so.
Over a couple of beers he mentioned that Poland was 99% Catholic and, with a wink and nod, indicated that Poles used the occupation to insure that majority remained in tact.
Who knows?
ta
Re 23. RWE and 27. bartok
“In DC Federal Court in the summer of 2001 a lawsuit was filed on behalf of those imprisoned in Auschwitz, charging that the US. military did not bomb the rail lines leading to the camp, thereby enabling its operation.
The reality is that the U.S. – or for that matter, the British – lacked the capability to destroy the rail lines leading to Auschwitz until very late in the war.”
We had the capability in the summer of 1944, which is when the half a million Hungarian Jews were deported. The reality is the Germans were quite good at repairing bomb damage to rail lines, so the effect would have been temporary. Temporary would have been pretty good since the Soviets were approaching.
Also, (I speculate) Hitler would have diverted the resources being used to repair the rail lines on the western front to repair the death camp rails, which would have impaired supply to the Nazis fighting us in France. After all, he ordered the trains being used to supply his army in the east diverted to deport the Hungarian Jews in the first place.
“the Germans certainly would not have let everyone there loose if the ovens no longer worked.”
Of course, but destroying the ovens or gas chambers would have massively slowed down the operations. While I doubt the B-17s had the accuracy to hit only the ovens, they could have leveled the camp which also would have worked. In mid 44 with strained resources it could have taken months to rebuild the camp, which would have made a difference for hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Re 17. Eggplant
“My impression is the SS did an effective job of utterly terrorizing the inmates at these death camps to the point that the inmates put up almost no resistance and went meekly to their deaths.”
This is accurate, with the caveat that Jews who had some military or underground experience were psychologically prepared to resist.
The one large scale revolt and escape from a camp was at Sobibor (in eastern Poland) October 14, 1943. Some of the leaders had been in the Red Army, and some had been contact with the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, which inspired the Sobibor revolt.
See also:
http://www.sobibor.info/
http://www.amazon.com/Escape-From-Sobibor-Rutger-Hauer/dp/B00005BJWC/
Of the 150 successful escapees, 92 were killed in hiding “mostly by hostile native elements” ie Poles. See http://www.sobibor.info/dragnet.html
Similarly, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was organized by Jews associated with the general Polish resistance or from right wing Zionist groups. However, when fighting began the Polish resistance did not help them.
If G-d forbid there were ‘camps’ of some sort in the US I would expect veterans would emerge as leaders of the resistance.
True it is that there has been a lot of anti-Semitism in Polish history. To get a visceral historical feeling for this (and to read some great 20th C. literature), try “The Slave” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. He was there; he knew what it was like. However, it should be noted that the vast majority of crimes against Jews in Poland were perpetrated by outsiders. Even in the two links provided by a previous poster, there is much confusion whether these crimes were initiated or followed through by Poles, or whether it was mainly accomplished by outsiders.
Fact is, if not for the Russian, Swede and Cossack (in the 1648 Khmelnytsky Uprising) incursions over the centuries, the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews would have remained in Poland. Fact is, with all the instability in Palestine nowadays, Jews are now returning to Poland in numbers. They know. Poland was the one last refuge in the West, together with the Ottomans in the East, where Jews could live largely without catastrophe for centuries. It was also the Poles who defeated the Communists in 1920 and kept the Reds at bay.
From time to time in the dark ages of human history, there have arisen certain groups who have stood against the current of time. They provided a spark of enlightenment; often their more powerful neighbors saw the light and took the torch of civilization, but often forgot the source of light. So it was with the Jews; so it was with the Poles and other groups.
I have no Polish or Eastern European ancestral blood, but the truth needs to get out.
History is molded, twisted to conform to current political needs. Example: popular, highly awarded TV program “The Amazing Race” contestants were required to find the memorial in Hirohisma, Japan, showing the effects of the Atom bomb..A time of silent reflection required…Next, the contestants requirement; travel to Oahua, Hawaii…Search for: no, not the Pearl Harbor Memorial, no silent reflection awarded there, not one mention, to balance dropping the Atom Bomb… ..What chance Richard, do you t,hink the Battle of Manilla has of keeping its blood stains intact from the scrubbers of history..
Mr Fernandez, if you are going to wander around the Danube River basin, you might want to read “Women’s Work, the first 20,000 Years.” Elizabeth Wayland-Barber writes about textile production in the neolithic. The Meditteranean and the Danube river basin were the homes of most innovation- looms, for instance.
The national costumes are variations of outfits worn since, arguably, the neolithic. The competence in textiles–you can find a good local restaurant by finding the street where the young women are wearing hand-knit sweaters- look at the hem- if there’s sort of a line of yarn- that’s probably hand-knit. The rest of the sweater will look commercially made- they are that good- of fine yarn- acrylic more likely than wool, so don’t look for wool as the quality mark-
They were literate, settled and a brew of Catholic and Orthodox, depending on the country. So, rich, lush, amazing books. I think you would really love it.
38. ari
For a guy who claims to have “no metro in his sexual,” I am fascinated by the history of textiles. If I ever run into Steve Martin, I will tell him that “dead men DID wear plaid,” because that textile pattern was first developed before the dawn of history in the very regions you mentioned. People were buried in their finery, which sometimes included plaid-patterned clothing.
c @ 36: Fact is, with all the instability in Palestine nowadays, Jews are now returning to Poland in numbers.
Any particular numbers? Dozens? Hundreds? More?
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Certainly Poland has positive history, ancient and modern, to build on.
All the more reason to represent their past honestly with reasonable acknowledgement of faults, only to be expected.
34. Jay
Bombing railroads never worked. At least bombing the rails themselves didn’t. The allies tried that in both Italy and France. A direct hit would not destroy the rail. It would scoop out a shallow crater and on a small percentage of hits bend a rail. The Nazis kept work partied with the necessary tools at intervals along the critical lines to repair them.
A few hundred men with shovels could move the soil back into the craters and reset the rails in just a few minutes. Way before the bombers got back to their base. The work parties were all locals, so the only military resource used was the guards.
Stopping rail transport depends on the terrain. In France, with it’s many streams (they call them rivers) the bridges were the weak point. Blow the bridge up and the trains don’t cross. In Italy, it was the tunnels. In the Polish plains, there are not many tunnels or bridges. Blowing up what bridges there were would have slowed the already slow Soviet advance.
No, the sad fact is that at that time those that knew the Jews were being murdered really didn’t care. It was total war and lots of people were being murdered. IIRC, it was Stalin who said ‘killing one man is a crime, killing a million is a statistic’.
Jay #34:
At the range required to hit the area around Auschwitz the only aircraft we had that could get there carrying a bomb load for most of the war were heavy bombers. The only ways that heavy bombers can hit rail lines from the altitudes required for daylight bombing are to either blow away a city where the rail lines pass through or to hit a railroad marshaling yard, which often amounted to the same thing. Please go look at a map and select the Polish cities you want destroyed along with their populations in order to interfere with delivery of people to Auschwitz. Not surprisingly, the Allies did not select any.
In France, leading up to the Normandy invasion, they US and British did not try to bomb individual rail lines, knowing that to be both difficult and futile. They went after a few bridges and, especially, marshaling yards, and did so with great care in order to avoid French casualties to the extent possible. The RAF conducted night attacks at low altitude, and that was possible because of the relatively short distances involved, which enabled them to use high accuracy radio navigation aids, Oboe, so to mark the target accurately. The 8th AF went over in daylight and did a good job as well – but of course by that time most Luftwaffe fighter aircraft had been pulled back into Germany to defend against the Allied bombing attacks. None of this would be true for attacks in Poland. Even if the Germans did not care if we hit Auschwitz, they would assume we were bound for a target in Germany and would have reacted strongly.
As for bombing the whole camp at Auschwitz, yes, we could have done that, at least by daylight bombing. And it would have killed everyone there. While some say now that the people there would rather have died that way, the idea was unthinkable to the Allies.
So the only way we could have either stopped the railroads shipping people to Auschwitz or bombed the camp or the ovens was to kill a whole lot of innocent people. A late war P-38 mission, with some of the fighters carrying a mixture of bombs and drop tanks and staged through a tiny island in the Adriatic might have succeeded in destroying the ovens at Auschwitz – but when they tried that tactic at Ploesti they lost 30% of the fighter-bombers. And it would not have stopped the German death camps. They had plenty of bullets. They had a slave work force that could dig graves.
RWE…
The crux was that the SS would’ve simply moved their extermination into the open fields of the Bloodlands.
ONLY ultimate victory could shut them down.
It’s shocking, but only 1/6th of the victims, say 2,000,000 died at or around Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The majority of the murder was free-form: bullets, whips, dogs, starvation, torture — even forced marches.
Somehow it seems to be omitted, but the condemned at Birkenau were force marched, a Death March, really, back towards the west. It made the Bataan Death March look small. Like the Japanese, the SS typically clubbed the stragglers to death. This horrific episode destroyed any deniability for Eastern Germans. The trail of the unburied dead ran all the way back to the death camp. Being winter, they froze.
This death march is why the western concentration camps were overflowing with victims as 12 Army Group advanced east.
As for last minute operations: the SS ran Birkenau full tilt even as the Red Army pulled in so close that they could smell it. As per Warsaw, Stalin had his troops stand still practically on the edge of the death works. It had to be a deliberate policy, because the synthetic crude oil facility was a strategic prize of the first order. Stalin let it run on and on for weeks — with inmate labor — even while it was the single biggest syn-crude plant left in the Reich! This is why Birkenau was not given the Sonderaktion 1005 treatment; making it the ONLY super-scale facility to fall into Soviet hands.
From Treblinka to Sobibor, all of the others were given at least a partial Sonderaktion treatment. IIRC, Sobibor was the first to get the fulsome scrub down, followed by Treblinka. ( I could have that reversed. )
So much for clean consciences….
One other Sonderaktion occurred as Hitler realized the end was at hand: The SS swept through their astounding ‘work camp’ system — which is now numbered past 2,000, recent scholarship has established all prior figures to be w a a y low — sending every breathing Jew off to Birkenau in the late months of 1944.
Previous Sonderaktion 1005 gambits had erased all other extermination facilities.
By late 1944, the SS was frantic to murder and burn all their remaining victims. As fast as Birkenau ran, it was stuffed with fresh victims.
The only military force able to stop the SS was the Red Army — and, as I’ve noted, it took months to get back in gear.
This is but one indication that Stalin, himself, was a co-conspirator in the Holocaust.
For more, read Aaron and Loftus: The Unholy Trinity, ISBN 978-0312094072.
Blert #43:
As you imply, Auschwitz was in fact a work camp, not simply an extermination camp. They did not simply execute people there but used them as slave labor. As a result a higher percentage of the inmates survived than in some other camps.
Hitler originally proposed to ship all the Jewish people to Madagascar. Whether that was simply a propaganda ploy – like the party scenes painted on the wagons taking them to the camps – or whether he actually changed his mind and switched to execution, I do not know. I doubt anyone does. Of course after the war started the Germans were not in a position to send even a hundred commandos to Madagascar. I guess it could be argued that the Allies were responsible for the death camps by preventing the Kreigsmarine from seizing Madagascar. We’ll probably see a lawsuit on that next.
But it is a fact that the Germans both allowed a shipload of Jews to escape from Europe and worked behind the scenes to make sure no nation would let them in. Treatment of the Jews in Europe was spotty. The Danes signed a nonaggression pact with Germany but when told to hand over their Jews they smuggled 90% of them out of the country. In some occupied countries they were handed over easily. Switzerland refused to take them in. But Spain’s Franco refused to hand over any to the Germans and I think even offered them refuge in their embassies. Mussolini was less than enthusiastic over getting rid of Italy’s Jews as well.
In any case the Soviets had suitable aircraft well within range of Auschwitz and could have hit the ovens, railways, or even busted down the gates – Pe2’s could have handled that, if not some of the 870 B-25’s we sent them. But they chose not to.
By the way, I see there is a new book out about an agent who broke INTO Auschwitz. As Wretchard says, now, that is truly impressive.
blert @19 said:
“Kamp policy was to never use firearms within the fence perimeter. Clubs and dogs did the trick. So there was absolutely no way to ever get ones hands on the equalizer.”
This is incorrect. At KZ-Birkenau, immediately after the prisoners were unloaded from the train (cattle cars), there was this process called “selection”. Selection was always performed by an SS doctor. Josef Mengele was the most famous SS doctor who performed selection. During selection, those prisoners who were deemed fit were allowed to enter the camp, be tattooed a serial number and issued a prison uniform. Pregnant women, the elderly, young children and unfit adults were sent directly to the gas chambers for immediate execution. During the selection process there were always SS men standing by with high powered pellet pistols. If a prisoner started making a fuss, an SS man would go up to the person, engage in soothing language, lure the person out of sight from the rest of the prisoners and then shoot a pellet between the person’s eyes at point-blank range. The pellet pistol made no noise so no other prisoners were disturbed. The whole process ran like a well oiled machine (German organization at its finest). There was a documented case were some American Jews were going through the selection process and someone figured out they were about to be murdered (I believe it was a woman). She got close enough to an SS officer to grab his Luger and killed the bastard. Immediately, she and everyone else died in a hail of bullets from machine guns in the surrounding watch towers. I wish I could remember her name.
45. RWE @ 45 said:
“As you imply, Auschwitz was in fact a work camp, not simply an extermination camp. They did not simply execute people there but used them as slave labor. … Hitler originally proposed to ship all the Jewish people to Madagascar.”
Auschwitz was actually made up of three camps. The original Auschwitz had a gas chamber that was decommissioned after the main death camp at KZ-Birkenau was established. KZ-Birkenau was part of the Auschwitz camp system. The original Auschwitz became more involved with administration and dealing with political prisoners, e.g. Polish nationals. There was a third camp in the Auschwitz system called KZ-Monowitz. KZ-Monowitz was an industrial facility run by the IG Farben corporation and concerned with making synthetic rubber through use of slave labor. When I toured Auschwitz, I observed that KZ-Monowitz was still in operation as a synthetic rubber factory.
The story about Madagascar was Nazi propaganda and never a serious proposal.
blert @ 43 said:
“The majority of the murder was free-form: bullets, whips, dogs, starvation, torture — even forced marches.”
One of the many ironies of the Holocaust was the SS was very good at killing people but had significant trouble in dealing with the bodies. This was the main reason why KZ-Birkenau was setup. The whole genocide process at KZ-Birkenau was worked out scientifically from loading in the prisoners by train to extracting valuable materials from the corpses prior to cremation. Supposedly KZ-Birkenau ran at a profit from all the material extracted from prisoners. What’s really scary about the Holocaust is the SS had not yet hit their stride when they were forced to shutdown by the Red Army. Supposedly they were about to double the murder capacity at KZ-Birkenau with a revolutionary new cremation oven design. This raises an interesting question since most of Europe’s Jews had already been murdered. Who was next on the Nazi’s genocide list? My pet theory is the Slavic people were to be genocided after the German’s achieved victory. Able bodied Poles, Ukranians and Russians would have been allowed to live as helots toiling in the fields. Slavic people unsuitable for manual labor along with trouble makers would have been sent to camps like Auschwitz for final disposal. An incredible nightmare was prevented after the Nazis were defeated.
Eggplant, Is it safe to calculate that you toured Auschwitz since the end of WWII?
26. cas
I know, there also was the Russian/Polish war between 1919 and 1921, aimed at defining the eastern border, that is almost forgotten, whereas the Poles beat the Bolcheviks
http://theses.gla.ac.uk/663/01/2009crollphd.pdf
http://www.fonjallaz.net/Communisme/N2/pacte-hitler-staline/1920-guerre-urss-pologne.html
Greetings from Poland.
@8 Josh. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If we react you can say it is suspicious, if we don’t say anything then we obviously accept the phrase… I personally prefer to react, otherwise in time everybody will be convinced Poland ran death camps. Oh, and what would you say to someone speaking about the great American terrorist attack of 11th September 2001 ?
To Polish antisemitism – please don’t forget that before WWII it was quite common in whole Europe. In Poland it gained some traction during the Great Depression due to economic competition between Polish and Jews. There was some violence (investigated and persecuted), there was some discrimination (for example of university students), but totally incomparable to the Nazi practice. Funny thing here is that Polish government supported the Zionist movement hoping that at least some Jews will emmigrate to (then) Palestine easing the economic conflicts. It even trained Irgun fighters in guerrilla tactics: http://www.etzel.org.il/english/ac16.htm
During war Polish were next in line, just after Jews. In fact Germans started the occupation by killing Polish elites. First mass murders of doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers occurred in October 1939 already. Auschwitz was started as concentration/labor camp for Polish in 1940. So the people were terrorized. And the punishment for helping Jews was death for the helper and his/her family. Frankly speaking I’m astonished (and very proud) that people risked it. See also this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef_and_Wiktoria_Ulma and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_Jews_by_Poles_during_the_Holocaust
Another reason why this phrase is so infuriating.
Given the predelictions of those of us who frequent Wretchard’s blog, it is not surprising that most of the discussion has revolved around what happened around 70 years ago. That is certainly interesting — but shouldn’t we also pay some attention to the history being made today?
Obama — whom we are told is probably the smartest person ever to become President — read something off a teleprompter that was insulting to the people whom supposedly he was belatedly honoring. Was that yet another demonstration of Leftist provincialism, ignorance, and bad manners? Or was it yet another deliberate insult to the Polish nation?
Obama & those around him hate the US; that is not good, but at least we can understand his hate-driven motivation for doing so many destructive things to the country he supposedly leads. But what did Poland ever do to Obama? Or does he really hate everybody, and will get around to dissing all the other countries too if he is given enough time?
R @ 50: It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If we react you can say it is suspicious, if we don’t say anything then we obviously accept the phrase.
Silence does not have to mean consent, and reactions can be subtle or less so. If there was a gaffe, then it was a gaffe, and one can question the competence of white house and state department staff. One can even question their intentions, but in this case I don’t, particularly. Obambus is seldom any more subtle than “lipstick on a pig” kinds of snides, and Axelhead even less so, it’s the culture around there. Community organizers don’t do subtle.
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On a somewhat different topic, is there some new trend in the air for surveys and questionaires that are bluntly intrusive? The Los Angeles transit district sent one out by email a few days ago, I clicked it and started filling it out, but it starts with personal demographics, not travel. WRONG. Amateur hour. Or at least that’s what it would have been, ten years ago. It seemed to want to get VERY detailed travel info. Well sure that’s what they WANT, but the fact is, you CAN’T GET IT for free, just by asking, it’s way too tedious and you lose anyone with half a brain or half a life. So, some dufus calls me up on my landline and starts dragging me through it. I say hey, is this the same one I got online the other day, and he says yeah, and I say it’s a pain and intrusive, and he says well its important, and I say wrong answer and hang up on him. Which I would have just chalked up to how about that, but on Yahoo I just clicked on one of their user surveys and AGAIN it starts out with intrusive demographic and financial questions. Hey, the user isn’t invested yet and will turn off at those early in a survey, for gosh sakes. Or is it just me being an old fart, and everyone under the age of, oh, 50 these days is all too eager to answer any questions in any order no matter how personal, to any webbot that happens to show up on their screen?
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That intersects a bit with the Obambus issues in that, one has to wonder if anyone in the world has any individuality left, any sense of themselves as independent agents with something to protect, some place to go. Or is it all virtual reality, avatars, social networking, and fantastic narratives?
Eggplant #47:
“Who was next on the Nazi’s genocide list?”
A former Polish POW I worked with could have told you. The Germans showed the POWs a movie about their future plans for Europe. Poles would have been exterminated. Russia would have been depopulated and resettled with Germans. As it was, the Nazis also planned to exterminate Gypsies and tossed them in the camps as well.
As Redhead says, it was already underway. Of course the Germans denied they committed the massacre in the Katryn Forest and even took Polish POW doctors there to examine the remains found there and certify that the murders predated the German capture of the area.
Nazis on one side, Soviets on the other, and both bent on extermination. It’s amazing that the Poles turned out as well as they have.
And as we have mentioned before in these pages, at the very moment the Warsaw Uprising was being crushed, in Normandy the Polish Armored Division drove their Sherman tanks day and night to close the Falaise Gap.
Scythianeedle @ 48 asked:
“Eggplant, Is it safe to calculate that you toured Auschwitz since the end of WWII?”
I toured the place in 1986 while Poland was still under the Soviet boot. At the time I was living in Goettingen, Germany as a guest scientist working for the German Aerospace Authority (I’m a US citizen). During that visit to Poland, I stayed in Krakow, Poland which is a wonderful city and strongly recommended as a tourist destination.
One of my mentors was an Auschwitz survivor. He is a brilliant aerospace engineer but now retired. It is considered extremely rude to ask a Holocaust survivor about their experiences or how they survived. One must wait for the Holocaust survivor to tell their own story if they are willing (most aren’t). My mentor would tell little bits of his story to different people and we would later compare notes behind his back. The unfolded story was that he was a beautiful young boy when his immediate family disembarked at KZ-Birkenau. His entire family was selected and sent to the gas chambers. However an SS officer took a liking to him, saved him from certain death and made him his orderly. The SS officer left KZ-Birkenau well before the Soviets came and was reassigned to Bergen-Belsen. Somehow my mentor got free of the SS officer and landed in an orphanage. Eventually his American relatives got him to America and he followed a path that resulted in his becoming a very successful aeronautical engineer. This sort of story is typical of Holocaust survivors, i.e. they survive through some sort of quirk of fate.
If you want to educate yourself about the Holocaust, the following sources are of interest:
“Eyewitness Auschwitz – Three Years in the Gas Chambers” by Filip Muller
Google “Henryk Tauber” and read what you can find on the web.
Two interesting but unreliable sources are:
“Commandant of Auschwitz: Autobiography” by Rudolf Höss
“Auschwitz — A doctor’s eyewitness account” by Miklós Nyiszli
These last two sources are problematic. Rudolf Hoess was the first commandant of Auschwitz. He was an extremely wicked man and wrote his autobiography while awaiting execution for crimes against humanity. In his autobiography, he lied whenever he could to make himself appear even more evil than he really was (no minor achievement). Miklós Nyiszli is a major disappointment to anyone interested in the Holocaust’s history. In theory, Nyiszli’s testimony should have been as valuable as the testimonies of Muller and Tauber. Unfortunately his story was serialized as a series of articles published by a Soviet Block newspaper. The editor of the newspaper felt the need to “improve” Nyiszli’s story and give it a Marxist-Leninist slant. Consequently when reading Nyiszli’s story, you do not know what is true or what is a communist fairytale. Unfortunately, Nyiszli died before he could provide an unedited version and history lost an important source about the Holocaust.
c @ 36: Fact is, with all the instability in Palestine nowadays, Jews are now returning to Poland in numbers.
Any particular numbers? Dozens? Hundreds? More?
I misspoke from faulty memory. I don’t know about Jewish emigration from Israel. This was based on Jewish census figures from 1989 to 2000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Polish_history_(1989_present).
I’ve been finding comments from long-time participants in the spam filter and am liberating them as discovered.
My father’s division (104th ID) was first assigned to the Canadian Corps under the British Army, Monty, to fight in Holland. Among other things, it meant the officers got the traditional liquor ration, a perk Terrible Terry Allen managed to have continued when the division was under a US Army. Third, I think.
At one point, assaulting a Dutch town, the Infantry were supported by a battalion of Polish tanks, assigned from the Brits. The fields were soggy and the dike roads broken, so the tanks supported by fire.
Once the Infantry were in the town and the tanks were supposed to lift fire, the Poles didn’t simply take a break. They got their individual weapons out and went in as Infantry themselves. Was hell keeping them away from the German POWs.
When you figure what these guys went through to get out and get a chance to fight, there were any number of places the tentative could have quit. These were the motivated ones.
Since the topic is Poland and the Holocost I’d be interested to know the opinions of the “more-well-read-than-I” members of BC community (which is probably most of you) on the graphic novel “Maus.”
For those not familliar with it an American-Jewish author/illustrator tells the story of his Polish-Jewish parents experiences in coming through the holocaust. It was lent to me a few months ago by a friend and it was so engaging that I devoured both volumes in a day.
The story is told with flash backs between the present, the war years and the post war years. One novel element is that the characters are all “animalized” according to their ethnic origin. The jews are all mice (hence the title), the germans are all cats, the poles are pigs and the one french girl in the story is a frog (there are no americans or brits in the story that I can recall). Its not a fantasization though (this isn’t wind in the willows) the story is told straight, it’s just a visual style.
Anyway I’d be interested to know if any of the more serious history buffs here have ever read it and how well it matches up with the flavor and details of the events that are recorded in other more scholarly works. Reason being, I’m thinking about getting a copy of my own and using it to supplement the study of the period for my kids (my oldest will be highschool age soon). Maus was definately engaging/gripping as edu-tainment for me as an adult, and if its not far off on facts then it could make good material for more mature kids (the subject matter is obviously pretty heavy and it seems to be told without any punches pulled), if its drivel from an historical perspective though then I won’t want to bother and will look for something else instead.
Regards.
I was partners with an architect, now retired to Mexico, who was born during WWII in Poland to a Jewish Mother and a Roman Catholic father. They hid during the occupation in the countryside and were sheltered by Polish (Catholic?) peasants.
His brother was born in London after the war, the family emigrated to New York after that and the parents, both of whom and been intelligentsia in Poland, operated a deli and invested in real estate.
My partner and his wife came to San Francisco, California, raised two daughters, then divorced and went their separate ways, his to Mexico, hers to LA.
Only one of millions of stories.
My father, once the assault beach master at Utah Beach, always spoke well of the Poles he served with during WWII. Purely anecdotal: he also admired the courage of the Germans and, later, the Japanese, although he did not think much of their other qualities.
Forty five years ago today, Lyndon Baines Johnson made me an officer and a gentleman. Probably not the worst move he ever made, but I have retired from both occupations.
God Bless Us Everyone.
c @ 57: I dunno, that article claims there were 50k Jews in Poland as of 2000, and frankly I doubt it. I recall some stories of a few returnees back some years ago, but never anything that would add up to tens of thousands. Not that my ignorance is proof of anything, I’m just saying.
eh @ 60: “Maus.”
I dunno. Read it, or it was put in front of me, as a kid, and in no way did it stick with me. My vague recollection was an impression that it seemed to both trivialize and grovel in the actual events, a bad combination. A lot of Holocaust literature strikes me that way. It’s a hard thing to capture in words, and ugly as sin if you do.
To a large extent both the Greatest Generation and their children were told a fiction; a fairy story about what caused and happened during the Second World War. We were told, for example that it was over. And in that spirit I happily watched Sergeant Saunders and Lieutenant Hanley slog their way through TV France in my childhood; laughed as Daffy Duck impersonated Hitler. I was living in the dawn; the time after the night. There was nothing to fear. In retrospect I didn’t know a damn thing.
I didn’t know, for example, that the color of hats was a lot less distinct in reality and the ending not so clear cut. The Nazis died out; though many of them survived to live out their lives in postwar Europe. But one of the great tyrannies — the Soviet Union — survived intact. And it had admirers aplenty in the West; nor were the opportunists gone among the Western Allies. Too much that was shabby, complicit and tyrannical in tendency survived to start new projects: the UN, the EU and much else even as the Rat Patrol flew across the black and white screens of 1960s TV.
Perhaps future historians will decide that the Cold War was in the end more important than the Second World War, and not simply because America “won” but because it let a lot of the former malignancy peter out between 1945 and 1990 from the sheer passage of time. In that interval the Soviet Union killed itself; almost literally in the case of its purges, until it was seemingly buried with a big assist by Ronald Reagan.
It now seems manifest that in that in that interval, as if by unspoken but shared consciousness, the political and cultural elites of the Western Europe buried all that they could find of what they believed to be the sources of infection, be it European Christianity, nationalism, even the nations themselves, as if they were terrified of the return of the monstrous malignancy.
And why not? The Western Left broadly defined believed that it, not the United States or the Soviet Union, had won History. The world was their to remake through education, pop culture and politics. But since they themselves were not innocent, since they were part of the disease, simply the heirs of the other great evil that smug project brings with it a terrible realization that half the evil that roamed between 1939 and 1945 was now in the culture, embedded even in the deepest myths of the continent, in the narratives of our understanding unnoticed in broad day. Surely much of it has survived to this day, via the Left, their legal parties, their clandestine cells, their tacit whispers; how of much other evil too — has survived in this same way through the culture one can only guess.
Perhaps that malignancy lost its virulence during the Cold War, during which period it must have quieted, dulled by welfare and triviality. Maybe this was the plan all along. To build Europe by killing the old Europe; to demolish the continent and stupefy it. Barroso et al may really mean it when they say they kept the peace of post war Europe with their ridiculous EU, not as against the external threats but as against the demons within. Anything to keep the unnamable from rising from the grave.
But I am not so sure it has entirely perished. We are always told to look out for a Nazi revival and our eyes are led to some pathetic group of potbellied wannabees without the education to write a sentence. But it hardly likely that such poor creatures are where the danger lies. I think that if we peer hard enough we will see the faces of the old demons etched in the monuments of the institutions around us; in our public attitudes; and in our elitist memes and in what we call PC. The terrifying features of the old monsters are distinctly visible under the plaster, though softened by the denials they exist.
And then I think to myself: ‘you are just imagining things’. These old hoary evils cannot come back to life after three generations. They are dead under that plaster.What survived World War 2 must have killed itself off in the cellars of the Eastern European secret police; or died and grew old during the long Cold War. What remains of it today can only be inert. Or so I hope.
Or perhaps they’re awaiting a new summons; a new source of energy. Oil money in place of Nazi gold; a new economic collapse in the place of Great Depression. Camus once wrote that the plague never dies. For once I hope he’s wrong.
Supposedly, according to the now-closed (again) Soviet archives, Stalin intended to carry out a “final solution” of his own for Soviet Jewry post-WWII. What the nature of this “solution” was intended to be, I have no idea, but we can imagine that it was not going to be pleasant. Stalin died before this could be carried out, and the plan died with him.
“In apologizing for a slur against Asians, former Mayor Marion Barry mentioned “Polacks.” A clever GOP operative would bombard Polish-American neighborhoods with ads tying the two gaffes together.”
With a 99% Black electorate it would be a waste of time and resources.
63. wretchard
“until it was seemingly buried with a big assist by Ronald Reagan.”
Whereas Mitterrand was a great contribuator too
“When historians sort out the reasons for the end of the Cold War, perhaps Farewell will receive a footnote. It would be deserved.”
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/96unclass/farewell.htm#author
“The story of L’Affaire Farewell, how a French mole in the KGB leaked information so devastating that it hastened the implosion of the Soviet Union, is comparatively little known in Britain or even in France.”
“[The] Farewell dossier… led to the collapse of a crucial [KGB spying] programme at just the time the Soviet military needed it… Along with the US defence build-up and an already floundering Soviet economy, the USSR could no longer compete.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/how-the-cold-war-was-won-by-the-french-1788720.html
sure the crisis is exacerbating nationalism, nd the losers this time are the Greeks
I wonder how Arabians like having T.E. Lawrence accredited to them. He was, after all, Lawrence of the British Royal Air Force, even there having joined under a pseudonym.
Wretchard,
The Soviet Union may be dead, but the Gramscian “culture wars” intensify.
I’m currently reading Kozak (Czech commi party central committee member and official historian)’s manual “and not a shot is fired”
It’s only about 50 pages, and a quick google will find a free .pdf copy.
It sheds a chilling light on what otherwise may appear as unintelligable acts by governments.
Also, have you watched Edvins Snori’s “Soviet story” which documents the links between the Soviet and Nazi leaderships and their forces during the suppression of Poland.
It’s up on Vimeo, and runs for about 90 minutes.
Apparently an invitation to the White House is only offered to those who aren’t too “political” or in other words, have fought against socialism (oh, semantics…). Seeing that Lech Walesa successfully led Poland’s revolt against Soviet communism, I guess that puts him on the blacklist.
All this, of course, comes off the heels of the president’s “Polish death camp” gaffe, which caused a firestorm of outrage in Poland and was met by a less than sincere response from the administration.
Via Rory Cooper on NRO:
“According to the Wall Street Journal, Polish officials requested that Walesa accept the Medal of Freedom on behalf of Jan Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who was being honored posthumously this week. The request makes sense. Walesa and Karski shared a burning desire to rid Poland of tyrannical subjugation. But President Obama said no.”
But why the rebuff? Administration officials told the Journal it was just that Walesa is too “political.” Considering President Obama recently awarded the Medal to the honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Dolores Huerta – interpret as you will.
Cooper speculates:
“The likelihood is that President Obama didn’t want Walesa in the White House because Walesa has made critical remarks toward the president’s policies and in 2010 warned that the United States was slipping toward socialism. But rather than taking the mature and diplomatic path and respecting Walesa’s right to have a differing perspective, Obama chose to shun his lifetime of achievements.”