Plight of the Jews in Poland During Ww2

Meghan Gossage
112737739
Lecture: Maurice Cronin
Tutor: Jason Douglas
First Arts History
Anti-semitism from enlightenment to holocaust HI1001/HI1124

This essay will attempt to address the plight of the Jews in Poland during the Second World War by looking at questions such as, why did so many Jews die in Poland? How much responsibility, if any, can be placed on different factions and contributing factors to the Jews struggle? And how did these factions and major events aid the Nazis in following the path to Auschwitz, Treblinka and the other concentration camps?
Poland had a long history of tolerance towards the Jews and had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. This is not to say that anti-Semitism was unheard of in Poland, it was a growing problem there as much as it was for the rest of Europe. Boleslaw the Pious had awarded the Jews in Poland unprecedented legal rights with the Statute of Kalisz in 1264 and this tolerance continued throughout the following centuries.
This vast amount of European Jewry in Poland, combined with the Nazis need for lebensraum (living space for the Aryan race) meant that Poland became the prime location for many of the atrocities committed against the Jews. In his book, Ronnie S. Landau claims that as the Germans conquered Poland and forcibly expelled the Poles and Jews into the General Government “an atmosphere of general barbarity and isolation” was created. He states that this atmosphere in turn, developed into “the physical and emotional conditions which would make possible the radicalization of the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign. Extreme condition’s demanded extreme solutions”
The general unrest and upheaval was not the only contributing factor to the plight of the Jews in Poland. Poland was a predominantly catholic country at the time and this only added to the anti-Semitic feeling. One cardinal maintained that the Jews staying in Poland was a problem. He said that the people should not harm the Jews but that their shops should be boycotted.
Some historians such as Daniel Goldhagen argue that the number of Jews killed in Poland and other countries outside of Germany was so high because the German soldiers were “willing executioners” in the holocaust due to a lethal “eliminationist anti-Semitism” in the German people. He contends that these German soldiers chose to kill Jews and enjoyed it “and they took them (photographs) obviously, not to indict themselves but rather to memorialisze their deeds. In one police battalion the photographs were hung in the headquarters, and anyone could order copies”
Other authors such as Christopher Browning suggest that the plight of the Jews in countries such as Poland, and the heinous crimes committed against them was magnified because of peer pressure and indoctrination. He believed that it was group behaviour and the reality of war that allowed the war crimes to happen. Perhaps the fact the German soldiers were out of their home country, where their people could not see what they were doing, and the laws and morals that governed them had no control over them anymore, resulted in their behaviour towards the Jews being severe and brutal.
Anti-Semitism grew throughout Poland. Stark evidence of this can be seen in the Jedwabne pogrom. During the Jedwabne pogrom the local Jewish community were attacked and beaten, a group of them were then led to a barn and killed and buried and the remaining Jews of the village were brought to the barn and burnt within it. This pogrom is a perfect example of how the situation of the Jews in Poland during the Second World War was exasperated and worsened by the anti-Semitic activity in the country at the time. The pogrom was not carried out by German soldiers but by Poles from the region. The author of the book ‘neighbours’, Jan Tomasz Gross says “it is simply not true that Jews were murdered in Poland during the war solely by the Germans, occasionally assisted in the execution of their gruesome task by some auxiliary police formations”
The point Gross is trying to prove is that the German soldiers were not the only people to blame for the horrendous acts inflicted upon the Jews at the time. He wanted to shed light on “how polish neighbours mistreated Jewish cocitizens” Other instances of this debasement and desecration of the Jewish people at the hands of their polish countrymen are the szmalcowiks, these were the racketeers who blackmailed the Jews who were in hiding and the poles who protected them. It must be noted, however, that many poles did try to help the Jews and they were ruthlessly punished for it. This all added to the hardships that the Jews faced. Nowhere was safe in Poland for them and the threat was no longer only from the Nazis.
The Jewish councils or Judenrate is the topic of much controversy. Were they collaborators or did they truly have no choice? And how much accountability can be put on the leaders of the Jewish councils when looking at the plight of the Jews in Poland? Ronnie S. Landau describes the precarious and diffident Jewish councils “vital to the preservation of life and order – but, as Heydrich clearly intended, they also served the real German purpose.” Landau goes on to describe what he believes are the four main objectives of the Councils in the eyes of the Nazis. Firstly they were to help with the management of keeping the “final solution machine ticking over”, secondly they became corrupt and so the Jews often aimed their anger and resentment towards to the councils rather than the Nazis. Thirdly, they tried to keep some semblance of normality in everyday life which helped to shut out the “overall reality”. This only served to lull them into a false sense of security in the face of the unspeakable horrors they were to come up against. Finally the Jewish councils were accountable for the Jewish police.
Isaiah Trunk has said that “the councils had to serve only one purpose – to execute Nazi orders regarding the Jewish population” Essentially the Jewish councils were made by the Germans for their own uses, some authors such as Hannah Arendt believed that if the Jewish Councils had never existed that life in the ghettos would have been miserable but the millions that died would have been spared, she believes that it was the organisation of the councils that aided the mass murder. However, many of the Jewish councils at the time assumed the approach of “rescue through labour” . It can be argued that one instance of the “rescue through labour” can be seen in the Lodz ghetto, under the council of Rumkowski. Dan Dine has stated in his book that he believes that “had the soviets not stopped their advance that very month, had they begun it again earlier than January 1945, the 70,000 Jews remaining in the ghetto would certainly have remained alive thanks to “rescue through labour”
The Jewish councils were blamed for the creation of the Jewish police and are tarred with controversy over the role they played. The Jewish police or Judischer Ordnungsdienst collected the Jews from the ghettos and were responsible for having them deported to the concentration camps. “There was often misconduct and corruption among the police, and they were regarded with apprehension by the ghetto community.” The police were usually young and fit men who were relatively unknown in the area and could have been used to form a resistance for the Jewish community. They are often damned for their “participation in the actual Jewish self-destruction process”
Between contributing and aggravating factors, such as the Nazis, gestapo, anti-Semitic poles and the Jewish councils themselves, the plight of the Jews in Poland during the Second World War was worsened. The Jews situation in Poland culminated in the concentration and death camps, six of which were set up in Poland. Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. These camps were all connected to the rail line to make transporting the immense quantities of people easier. The majority of the Jews who arrived in these camps were killed almost immediately. They were sent to the gas chambers, shot, beaten or worked to death doing manual labour or extensive exercise. Many died from the brutal realities and diseases of camp life and meagre rations. Auschwitz was to be the largest camp for the destruction of the Jews, and was part of the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ many of these Jews were assessed by the camp doctors and put to death as they were deemed unfit for work. These camp doctors paid little attention to the medical needs of the prisoners. Many medical experiments were carried out here, ranging from sterilisation to research into twins and dwarfism. The majority of children who were sent to Auschwitz were killed straight away, a select few of them were deemed capable of work and a number of them were selected from the Jewish transports to become subjects in medical experiments. Many of the infants who were born within the camp were instantly put to death. The plight of the Jews did not end with the evacuation of the camps, the Nazis, in an attempt to hide the atrocities they had committed in these camps, marched the Jews to death. When the camps were finally liberated in January 1945, only a few thousand people were found remaining in Auschwitz.
The plight of the Jews in Poland may never be fully understood and its criminals, victims and other participants came in many different shapes and forms. But all had a part to play in the murder and misery of millions and through the “unrelenting scourge of racial, religious and national bigotry” they have shown “man’s potential cruelty, arrogance and abuse of power.”

Bibliography * Bourke, Joanna; An Intimate History of Killing; Granta Books; 1999 * Browning, Christopher R; Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers; Cambridge University Press; 2000 * Browning, Christopher R; Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; Penguin; 2001 * Browning, Christopher R; Remembering Survival, Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp; W.W. Norton and Company Inc; 2010 * Burleigh, Micheal; The Third Reich A New History; Pan Books; 2001 * Dine, Dan; Beyond the Conceivable studies of Germany, Nazism and the Holocaust; University of California; 2000 * (edited by) Gigliotti, Simone and Lang, Berel; The Holocaust A Reader; Blackwell Publishing; 2005 * Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah; Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust; Knopf; 1996 * Gross, Jan Tomasz; neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland; Princeton University Press; 2001 * Landau, Ronnie S; The Nazi Holocaust; Ivan R Dee; 1992 * Lindemann, Albert S; Esau’s Tears, Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews; Cambridge University Press; 1997 * (edited by) Deborah Dwork; Voices and Views a History of the Holocaust; the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous; 2002 * en.auschwitz.org * www.yadvashem.org * www.holocaustsurvivors.org * www.polishjews.org * www.ushmm.org (specifically ‘transcripts for “give me your children” voices from the Lodz ghetto’) * Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Maurice Wohlgelernter; Hitlers Willing Executioners, society; vol. 34, no. 2 (January/February 1997)

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[ 1 ]. www.polishjews.org
[ 2 ]. Ronnie S. Landau; The Nazi Holocaust; Ivan R Dee; Chicago; 1992
[ 3 ]. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen; Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust; Knopf
[ 4 ]. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Maurice Wohlgelernter; Hitlers Willing Executioners, society; vol. 34, no. 2 (January/February 1997)
[ 5 ]. Christopher R. Browning; Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; Penguin
[ 6 ]. Ibid
[ 7 ]. Jan Tomasz Gross; Neighbors: the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland; Princeton University Press; pg. 138
[ 8 ]. Gross; Neighbors; pg. 21
[ 9 ]. Landau; The Nazi Holocaust; pg. 156
[ 10 ]. Ibid
[ 11 ]. Isaiah Trunk; voices and views a history of the holocaust; chap: the jewish councils
[ 12 ]. Landau; The Nazi Holocaust; pg 57
[ 13 ]. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005265
[ 14 ]. Dan Dine; beyond the conceivable studies of Germany, Nazism and the holocaust; University of California; 2000; chapter 6; page 125
[ 15 ]. http://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/data.show.php?di=record&da=encyclopedia&ke=65
[ 16 ]. Landau; the nazi holocaust
[ 17 ]. http://en.auschwitz.org
[ 18 ]. Landau; the nazi holocaust
[ 19 ]. ibid