Poland on Trial: Postwar Courts, Sovietization, and the Holocaust, 1944-1956
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Poland on Trial: Postwar Courts, Sovietization, and the Holocaust, 1944-1956 By Andrew Wei-Yuan Kornbluth A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor John Connelly, chair Professor Yuri Slezkine Professor Jason Wittenberg Spring 2016 Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Wei-Yuan Kornbluth All Rights Reserved. Abstract Poland on Trial: Postwar Courts, Sovietization, and the Holocaust, 1944-1956 by Andrew Wei-Yuan Kornbluth Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor John Connelly, Chair This dissertation addresses the quandary of how the law can serve many different purposes and yet not the one we most closely associate it with – justice. Specifically, it examines how Poland, renowned as Europe’s only occupied country “without a Quisling,” confronted the paradox of otherwise upstanding citizens who betrayed, robbed, and murdered tens of thousands of their Jewish neighbors in hiding during the Nazi occupation. Far from being a footnote, the machinations over the fate of the defendants – in Poland and throughout Europe – were central to the negotiation of a new social contract in the wake of the war’s ethnic cleansing and property transfer. As a rare venue not corrupted by the Stalinization overtaking Poland, the judicial system held the trials in accordance with high European standards. But with the public awaiting absolution, the hated Soviet-backed government hoping to win a degree of legitimacy, and the few surviving Jewish voices marginalized by resurgent anti-Semitism, debates over the law gradually became vehicles for the expression of colonial anxieties and the establishment of a hierarchy of victimhood. Within the judiciary, the Right exploited the law’s weaknesses as a means of resistance, while the Left, fearful of undermining the rule of law, worked to restrict its ambit. In this atmosphere of cross-purposes, legality gradually gave way to the performance of legality, eclipsing the issue of justice for victims and survivors. Although held under a dictatorial communist regime, the Polish trials ultimately experienced many of the same problems as their democratic analogues across Europe; the widespread inability to come to grips with native Holocaust perpetrators amounted to a tacit acknowledgment of the desirability of societies rendered ethnically homogeneous by war and genocide. Their example serves as a dystopian prefiguring of European unity and a lesson in the limitations of transitional justice at a time when, alongside the constant invocation of human rights, more and more people are looking to the supposed universality of justice, both international and domestic, to compensate for the failures of the political order in a world that seems frighteningly anarchic and de-centered. 1 Table of Contents Introduction 1-9 Chapter One 10-27 Chapter Two 28-56 Chapter Three 57-78 Chapter Four 79-99 Chapter Five 100-119 Chapter Six 120-151 Chapter Seven 152-173 Chapter Eight 174-191 Chapter Nine 192-201 Chapter Ten 202-208 Conclusion 209-213 i INTRODUCTION In 1851, shortly after the coup d’état which overthrew the French Second Republic and inaugurated his personal dictatorship, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte famously justified his actions by insisting that it had been necessary to “depart from legality in order to return to justice” [il faut sortir de la légalité pour rentrer dans le droit]. The play on words explicitly contrasted the legalism [légalité] of the dissolved National Assembly, which had refused to alter the constitution to allow him to run for a second term as president, with the broader right [droit], or justice of the soon-to-be Emperor’s popular mandate, which had just been confirmed ten-to- one in a plebiscite based on universal suffrage. Ninety-five years later, Antoni Landau, a veteran left-leaning lawyer appointed to Poland’s Supreme Court by the new Soviet-backed government, sarcastically quoted Louis-Napoléon in an article highly critical of the laws and institutions that that same government had recently adopted to punish Nazi war criminals and Poles who had collaborated with the occupiers. “Necessity,” he grumbled, “has dictated a return to the principle of retribution, long ago consigned to the dustbin of history, but now resurrected.”1 Landau was upset because he felt that the ends did not justify the means, namely circumventing certain legal protections and creating special venues, however temporary, for these cases. But his indignation laid bare the dilemma facing the adjudication and administration of war crimes and collaboration in not just Poland, but all over Europe; law and “justice” did not always overlap, nor could they always be reconciled. Indeed, the two concepts themselves consist of separate and sometimes contradictory imperatives: the law is a product of political negotiation and prioritization that nonetheless aspires to a certain baseline of equal protection – of property and person, for example – while justice can imply either the fulfillment of the will of the majority or the redress of wrongs done to individuals. But what happens when the political authors of the law are alienated from the majority, or the majority, itself wronged, is in turn implicated in wrongdoing against minorities? Two Wars Alone among the nations of Europe, Poland fought the Germans in the West and the East from the war’s first day to its last. Alone among the occupied nations of Europe, Poland never had a collaborationist government or a collaborationist military formation. Never capitulating, the government went into exile and an underground para-state, complete with its own university system, press office, and “Home Army,” continued functioning inside the country in its stead. The costs of this uncompromising resistance were staggering: almost three million ethnic Poles dead, the country’s intellectual, military, and political elite decimated, the capital city razed to the ground, sixty percent of industrial capacity destroyed.2 To a certain extent, the 1 Antoni Landau, „Omówienia.” Demokratyczny Przegląd Prawniczy (DPP), II.3-4 (1946): pp. 92-93. 2 2.7 ethnic Polish civilians and 160000 soldiers fighting on the Western and Eastern fronts as well as in the Underground. See: Mirosław Maciorowski, „Ile milionów zginęło? Ofiary II wojny światowej.” Gazeta Wyborcza: 1 Poles did not have much choice in the matter; their government’s refusal to cede to German demands in 1939 had been taken as an unforgivable insult by Hitler, who slated them for extraordinarily brutal treatment. Nevertheless, the breadth and depth of Polish resistance was without parallel in wartime Europe.3 Small wonder then that many felt that collaboration had been an incidental and therefore forgivable phenomenon. A letter sent in early 1947 to one of Poland’s main daily newspapers, written by a communist sympathizer who claimed to have spent a considerable amount of time among fellow Poles in Displaced Persons camps abroad, called on the responsible authorities to do more to dispel the confusion and misinformation surrounding Poland’s laws providing for the pursuit of suspected collaborators. Anticommunist agitators were scaring potential returnees, many of them former forced laborers, with the spectre of the “Lublin law” – the first capital of the Soviet-backed government had been the eastern city of Lublin – which they claimed provided for the arrest “at any moment, of any person” who had worked in any capacity for the Germans or under their command, as a “Hitlerite fascist.” Clarification, the author underlined, was necessary not only to curb hysteria, but also to clear an air poisoned by the mutual recrimination and suspicion of the war years: Maybe finally people would begin to respect one another more and those incidents would be relegated to the past where one neighbor denounces another (often only out of hatred for his democratic work) for ‘collaboration with the occupier’– that he ‘drank with Germans’ or ‘pointed out’ a horse to the Germans and so on – after which it turns out that in the first case the accused was ordered to give a German soldier a cup, and in the second, that he was only responding to the question of some civilians, ‘where is the house of Józef so-and-so’... Noting the proliferation of “similar incidents of careless accusation,” the author, who signed the letter with an English pseudonym, “Home,” concluded that they had to be avoided, “since we all want very much to maintain the honorable opinion of us at home and in the world that among us there was never a Quisling...”4 But some other Polish citizens remembered collaboration very differently. Seventeen years after Home’s letter, Oscar Pinkus, a Jew who survived the war as a teenager by renting a hiding place under a manure heap in the barn of a Polish farmer, where he had lived in constant danger of denunciation, capture, or murder by the farmer, his neighbors, and nationalist partisans, published his memoirs, in which he had the following comment about the role of the local Polish population in the Nazi extermination of the Jews: Many hoped for help from the farmers or, if not for their help, at least their neutrality. For it was never active support that we expected of individual Poles. We needed it, but could not ask for it, since there was the death penalty for hiding us. What we did ask for was their inactivity – absence of hostility. This they were unwilling to give. Just as we never expected individual Germans to disobey orders. Their record is fatal because, above and Ale Historia, 4 May 2015, online at http://wyborcza.pl/alehistoria/1,144823,17844725,Ile_milionow_zginelo__Ofiary_II_wojny_swiatowej.html 3 John Connelly, “Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice.” Central European History, 32.1 (1999): 13, 31. 4 Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwości w Warszawie (MS), Uregułowanie prawne wymiaru kary dla faszystowsko-hitlerowskich zbrodniarzy..., syg.