Patterns of Cooperation, Collaboration and Betrayal: Jews, Germans and Poles in Occupied Poland During World War II1
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July 2008 Patterns of Cooperation, Collaboration and Betrayal: Jews, Germans and Poles in Occupied Poland during World War II1 Mark Paul Collaboration with the Germans in occupied Poland is a topic that has not been adequately explored by historians.2 Holocaust literature has dwelled almost exclusively on the conduct of Poles toward Jews and has often arrived at sweeping and unjustified conclusions. At the same time, with a few notable exceptions such as Isaiah Trunk3 and Raul Hilberg,4 whose findings confirmed what Hannah Arendt had written about 1 This is a much expanded work in progress which builds on a brief overview that appeared in the collective work The Story of Two Shtetls, Brańsk and Ejszyszki: An Overview of Polish-Jewish Relations in Northeastern Poland during World War II (Toronto and Chicago: The Polish Educational Foundation in North America, 1998), Part Two, 231–40. The examples cited are far from exhaustive and represent only a selection of documentary sources in the author’s possession. 2 Tadeusz Piotrowski has done some pioneering work in this area in his Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces, and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1998). Chapters 3 and 4 of this important study deal with Jewish and Polish collaboration respectively. Piotrowski’s methodology, which looks at the behaviour of the various nationalities inhabiting interwar Poland, rather than focusing on just one of them of the isolation, provides context that is sorely lacking in other works. For an earlier treatment see Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939–1944 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986), chapter 4. For a popular, but somewhat shoddy and uneven, overview of some Polish sources see Jacek Wilamowski, Srebrniki Judasza: Zdrada i kolaboracja. Konfidenci niemieckich władz bezpieczeństwa w okupowanej Polsce 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Agencja Wydawnicza CB Andrzej Zasieczny, 2004). Wilamowski canvasses some of the older literature on this topic such as Włodzimierz Borodziej, Terror i polityka: Policja niemiecka a polski ruch oporu w GG 1939–1944 (Warsaw: Pax, 1985), chapter 3; Józef Bratko, Gestapowcy: Kontrwywiad–konfidenci–konspiratorzy, Second expanded edition (Kraków: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1990); Leszek Gondek, Polska karząca 1939–1945: Polski podziemny wymiar sprawiedliwości w okresie okupacji niemieckiej (Warsaw: Pax, 1988); Adam Hempel, Pogrobowcy klęski: Rzecz o policji “granatowej” w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1990). For more recent literature see: Tomasz Strzembosz, Rzeczpospolita podziemna: Społeczeństwo polskie a państwo podziemne 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Krupski i S-ka, 2000); Tomasz Szarota, U progu Zagłady: Zajścia antyżydowskie i pogromy w okupowanej Europie (Warsaw: Sic!, 2000); Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Polacy i Żydzi 1918–1955: Współistnienie, Zagłada, komunizm (Warsaw: Fronda, 2000); Barbara Engelking, “Szanowny Panie Gistapo”: Donosy do władz niemieckich w Warszawie i okolicach w latach 1940–1941 (Warsaw: IFiS PAN, 2003); Jan Grabowski, “Ja tego Żyda znam!”: Szantażowanie Żydow w Warszawie, 1939–1943 (Warsaw: IFiS PAN, 2004); Teresa Baluk-Ulewiczowa, Wyzwolić się z błędnego koła: Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit w świetle dokumentów Armii Krajowej i materiałów zachowanych w Polsce (Kraków: Arcana, 2004); Andrzej Żbikowski, ed., Polacy i Żydzi pod okupacją niemiecką 1939–1945: Studia i materiały (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej–Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, 2006). On the so-called reptile press and behaviour of some literary figures see Krzysztof Woźniakowski, W kręgu jawnego piśmiennictwa literackiego Generalnego Gubernatorstwa (1939–1945) (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe WSP, 1997); Krzysztof Woźniakowski, Polskojęzyczna prasa gadzinowa w tzw. Starej Rzeszy (1939–1945) (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Pedagogicznej, 2001). One of the emerging “experts” on the subject of Polish “collaboration” in the West is German historian Karl-Peter Friedrich, whose blatantly biased writings have, not surprisingly, attracted followers among some German historians (such as Dieter Pohl) and, fortunately, also some harsh critics. Friedrich’s dubious claims were given undue publicity in the Winter 2005 issue (vol. 64, no. 4, pp.711– 46) of Slavic Review, albeit with some effort by other historians (notably John Connelly, “Why the Poles Collaborated So Little—And Why That Is No Reason for Nationalist Hubris”, pp. 771–81) to distance themselves from his sweeping and ill-founded conclusions, if not his “facts.” Friedrich’s skewed focus has served to validate the comparative and contextual approach advocated by Tadeusz Piotrowski. 3 Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York: Macmillan, 1972; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). 4 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Third edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, the Jewish Councils (Judenräte—Judenrat in the singular),5 Holocaust historians have shied away from the topic of Jewish collaboration with the Germans. With few exceptions, Holocaust survivors are also in denial about this phenomenon.6 This dark chapter of the wartime history of Jews is one that merits closer scrutiny. In this study the author has compiled examples illustrating the various forms of cooperation, collaboration and betrayal that turned Jews into a source of danger for fellow Jews, and less often for Poles, and facilitated the machinery of the Holocaust. By and large, it makes little sense to speak of economic collaboration in the context of occupied Poland, since that very term implies at least some degree of mutual profit, and that possibility was excluded for both Poles and Jews from the outset. This compilation, which is far from comprehensive, is not intended to demonstrate that such behaviour was somehow representative of the Jewish population, or that Jews (or Poles for that matter) had a particular propensity for such conduct. Rather it is meant to show that the actions of a tiny minority of the Jewish population were instrumental in inflicting significant, perhaps enormous, losses on the Jewish population. The actions of these individuals, often carried out in extreme conditions and under duress, facilitated the Holocaust much more than the activities of their Polish counterparts, which areall too frequently blown out of proportion, while the former are glossed over. Jews played an incomparably larger role than Poles in the 2003), 3 volumes. Hilberg arrives at the following conclusions about the detrimental role of the Jewish Councils: “From now on, their activities were going to be supplemented by another, quite different function: the transmission of German directives and orders to the Jewish population, the use of Jewish police (styled Ordnungsdienst) to enforce German will, the delivery of Jewish property, Jewish labor, and Jewish lives to the German enemy. The Jewish councils, in the exercise of their historic function, continued until the end to make desperate attempts to alleviate the suffering and to stop the mass dying in the ghettos. But, at the same time, the councils responded to German demands with automatic compliance and invoked German authority to compel the community’s obedience. Thus the Jewish leadership both saved and destroyed its people, saving some Jews and destroying others, saving Jews at one moment and destroying them at the next. … As time passed, the Jewish councils became increasingly impotent in their efforts to cope with the welfare portion of their task, but they made themselves felt all the more in their implementation of Nazi decrees. With the growth of the destructive function of the Judenräte, many Jewish leaders felt an almost irresistible urge to look like their German masters. … In short, the Jewish councils were assisting the Germans with their good qualities as well as their bad, and the very best accomplishments of a Jewish bureacracy were ultimately appropriated by the Germans for the all-consuming destruction process. … The Jews did not always have to be deceived, they were capable of deceiving themselves. … The Jewish repressive mechanism was largely self-administered, and it could operate automatically, without any misleading statements or promises by German functionaries or their non-German auxiliaries.” Ibid., vol. 1, 219 and vol. 3, 1112–15. Hilberg describes the sordid reality of ghetto life in these terms: “Patronage, favoritism, and outright corruption became inviting possibilities and soon enough were commonplace. … The Warsaw Ghetto, for example, had a formidable upper class composed of bureaucrats, traders, and speculators. These privileged groups were large enough to be conspicuous. They frequented nightclubs, ate in expensive restaurants, and rode in man-drawn rikshas.” Ibid., vol. 1, 232, 262. Hilberg also notes that, seeking salvation through labour, Jews became an important, dependable, and even irreplaceable labour reserve for the German war effort: “Gradually, however, the army emerged as the most important purchaser of ghetto products, crowding out other buyers. The ghettos thus became an integral part of the war economy, and this development was to cause considerable difficulty during the deportations. The Germans came to depend on the output of the Jewish labor force. … The zeal with which the Jews applied themselves to the German war effort accentuated