Collaboration in German-occupied Poland

Poland was, throughout World War II, a member of the coalition of Allied powers. During the German occupation of Poland, some Polish citizens of diverse ethnic backgrounds collaborated with the occupying Germans. Estimates of the number of collaborators vary from several thousand to about a million. During and after the war, the Polish State and resistance movement judicially executed collaborators.

Background

Main articles: History of Poland (1939–1945) and Invasion of Poland

Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Hitler sought to establish Poland as a client state, proposing a multilateral territorial exchange and an extension of the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact. The Polish government, fearing subjugation to Germany, instead chose to form an alliance with Britain (and later with France). In response, Germany withdrew from the non-aggression pact and, shortly before invading Poland, signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Russia, safeguarding Germany against retaliation if it invaded Poland, and prospectively dividing Poland between the two powers.

On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, capturing the western half of the country. On 17 September the Soviet Union invaded, conquering the eastern half, along with the Baltic states and parts of Finland. Some 140,000 Polish soldiers and airmen escaped to Romania and Hungary, many soon joining the reconstituted Polish Armed Forces in France. Poland's government crossed over into Romania, was reconstituted in France and, after Germany's conquest of France, moved to London. Two days before Germany attacked Poland to start World War II, on 30 August 1939, the Polish Navy's three destroyers ORP Błyskawica, ORP Grom, and ORP Burza sailed for Britain to prosecute the impending war.

Germany annexed the westernmost parts of Poland and the former Free City of Danzig, and placed the remaining German-occupied territory under the administration of the newly-formed General Government. The Soviet Union annexed the rest of Poland, incorporating its territories into the Belarusian and Ukrainian republics.

Germany's primary aim in eastern Europe was the expansion of the German "lebensraum" ("living space"), which necessitated according to Nazi views the elimination or deportation of all non-Germanic ethnicities, including the Poles; the areas controlled by the General Government were to become "free" of Poles within 15-20 years. This resulted in harsh policies targeting the Polish population, in addition to the explicit goal of exterminating Europe's Jewry, which was carried out in part in the occupied Polish territories.

Individual collaboration

German recruitment poster—"Let's do agricultural work in Germany: report immediately to your Vogt"

Historian Leszek Gondek describe Polish collaboration as having been marginal, and Connelly writes that "only a relatively small percentage of the Polish population engaged in activities that may be described as collaboration, when seen against the backdrop of European and world history."

Prewar Poland had a population of some 35 million, including over 3 million Polish Jews. Connelly, citing research by Polish historian Leszek Gondek on death sentences for treason by Special Courts of the Polish Underground State, gives Gondek's estimate of Polish collaborators as about 17,000. The courts heard at least 5,000 collaboration cases and sentenced between 3,500 and over 10,000 persons to death for collaboration offenses. Postwar statistics of the Israeli War Crimes Commission gave the number of Polish collaborators as about 7,000.

The higher collaborator estimates include workers in labor camps (Baudienst), low-ranking Polish bureaucrats, the Polish Blue Police, Poland's prewar German minority and former Polish citizens who declared themselves of German ethnicity (Volksdeutsche), and even all of Poland's peasants, whose produce fed the German military and administration. Such occupations to greater or lesser degree supported the murderous German military and civilian presence. Polish labor-camp workers were sometimes used in rounding up Jews for transportation to ghettos, or to dig graves for massacre victims; evasion of such service was punishable by death, and the individual's family could suffer reprisals. Varying interpretations of what constitutes collaboration account for the broad range of estimates of Poles' collaboration with the Germans in World War II.

Ethnographic groups

Wacław Krzeptowski, prominent Goralenvolk collaborator, visits German governor Hans Frank during celebration of Hitler's birthday

The Germans also singled out two specific ethnic groups in Poland, which had some limited separatist interest, with aim to get members of said minorities to collaborate with the Germans. This scheme was directed towards the northern Kashubians and the southern Gorals minorities. The German attempt to reach out to Kashubians was described as a "complete failure", but in the south the Germans met with limited success, and the resulting Goralenvolk movement has even been called by Katarzyna Szurmiak "the most extensive case of collaboration in Poland during the Second World War". Nonetheless, Szurmiak also states that "when talking about numbers, the attempt to create Goralenvolk was a failure... a mere 18 percent of the population took up Goralian IDs... Goralian schools had been consistently boycotted, and the attempts to create Goralian police or a Goralian Waffen-SS Legion had failed miserably".

Political collaboration

Unlike in most of occupied Europe, Poland did not have a collaborationist government. Nazi racial policies, along with its intentions for the future of the conquered territories (see above), meant the Germans were generally uninterested in Polish governmental collaboration. Accordingly, the German army was prepared for a military administration of the occupied territories, while civil authorities were working towards a civilian one, with the prospects of a future annexation to Germany.

Nevertheless, some Polish leaders were contacted by the Germans with offers to collaborate, but the harsh policies enacted by the German authorities meant they were generally unwilling to do so. Wincenty Witos, peasant leader and former Prime Minister of Poland, refused several offers to lead a puppet government, as did Janusz Radziwiłł

The Germans received offers from several prominent right-wing politicians: Andrzej Świetlicki, along with a group of pro-German politicians, formed the "National Revolutionary Camp" (Narodowy Obóz Rewolucji, or NOR), later joined by Władysław Studnicki, anti-Soviet scholar who preached for a German-Polish collaboration against the Soviet Union., as did Kozlowski. Leon Kozłowski, prominent scholar and former Prime Minister, offered his cooperation as well. However, all of them were either ignored or rebuffed by the German authorities.

Finally, around April 1940 Hitler forbade talks with Poles about any semblance of autonomy.

Security forces

A German General Government poster requiring former Polish Police officers (Blue Police) to report for duty under the German Ordnungspolizei, or face "severe" punishment.

In October 1939 the Nazi authorities ordered mobilization of the pre-war Polish police to the service of the German occupation, thus creating the "Blue Police". The policemen were to report for duty by 10 November 1939 or face death. At its peak in May 1944, the Blue Police numbered some 17,000 men. Their primary task was to act as a regular police force and deal with criminal activities, but they were also used by the Germans in combating smuggling and resistance, in roundups of random civilians (łapanka), in patrolling for Jewish escapees from ghettos, and in support of some military operations against the Polish resistance.

The German General Government also tried to create additional Polish auxilary police—Schutzmannschaft Battalion 202 in 1942 and Schutzmannschaft Battalion 107 in 1943. Very few people volunteered and the Germans were forced to forcefully conscript them to fill up the ranks. Subsequently, most of the men deserted, and the two units were disbanded. Schutzmannschaft Battalion 107 mutinied against its German officers, disarmed them, and joined the Home Army resistance.

In 1944 the General Government tried to recruit 12,000 Polish volunteers to "join the fight against Bolshevism". The campaign failed: only 699 men were recruited, 209 of whom either deserted or were disqualified for health reasons..

Poles in the Wehrmacht

Main article: Poles in the Wehrmacht

Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, many former citizens of the Second Polish Republic from across the Polish territories annexed by Nazi Germany were forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht army in Upper Silesia and in Pomerania. They were declared citizens of the Third Reich by law and therefore subject to drumhead court-martial in case of draft evasion. Professor Ryszard Kaczmarek of the University of Silesia in Katowice, author of a monograph titled Polacy w Wehrmachcie (“Poles in the Wehrmacht") noted that the scale of this phenomenon was much larger than previously assumed, because 90% of the inhabitants of these two westernmost regions of prewar Poland were ordered to register on the German People's List (Volkslist) regardless of will. The exact number of the conscripts is not known; data do not exist beyond 1943.

In June 1946, the British Secretary of State for War reported to Parliament that, of the pre-war Polish citizens who had involuntarily signed the Volksliste, and subsequently served in the German Wehrmacht, a total of 68,693 men were captured or surrendered to the Allies in northwest Europe. The overwhelming majority, 53,630, later enlisted in the Polish Army in the West and fought against Germany to the end of World War II.

Polish resistance and collaboration

See also: Polish resistance in World War II

The main Polish resistance organization was the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK), numbering some 400,000 Poles, including Polish Jews. It actively fought the Germans. In one instance however, in 1944, the Germans clandestinely armed a few AK units operating in the Wilno area in the hope that they would act against local Soviet partisans; soon, during Operation Ostra Brama, the AK turned these weapons against the Germans. Such arrangements were purely tactical and did not evince the kind of ideological collaboration shown by France's Vichy regime or Norway's Quisling regime. The Poles' main motive was to gain intelligence on German morale and preparedness and to acquire much-needed equipment. There were no known joint German-AK operations, and the Germans were unsuccessful in getting the Poles to fight exclusively the Soviet partisans. Further, most such collaboration by local commanders with the Germans was condemned by AK headquarters. Tadeusz Piotrowski quotes Joseph Rothschild as saying that "The Polish Home Army was by and large untainted by collaboration" and adds that "the honor of the AK as a whole [was] beyond reproach."

A single partisan unit of the Polish right-wing National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, or NSZ), the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade, numbering between 800 and 1,500 soldiers, decided to tacitly cooperate with the Germans in late 1944. It ceased hostile operations against the Germans for a few months, accepted logistical help, and—late in the war, with German approval, to avoid capture by the Soviets—withdrew from Poland into Czechoslovakia. Once there, the unit resumed hostilities against the Germans and on 5 May 1945 liberated the Holýšov concentration camp.

During and after the war, the Polish State and resistance movement judicially executed collaborators.

In some areas of eastern Poland, AK units skirmished with the communist Armia Ludowa (AL), which was a Polish partisan militia that included detachments of Jewish partisans.

Poles and the Holocaust

Part of core exhibition dedicated to Jedwabne pogrom at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw

See also: The Holocaust in Poland and Rescue of Jews by Poles in World War II

According to historian Gunnar S. Paulsson, in occupied Warsaw (a city of 1.3 million, including 350,000 Jews before the war) some 3,000–4,000 Poles functioned as blackmailers (szmalcownik) who exploited Jews and their Polish rescuers, or denounced both to the Germans. On the other hand, between 40,000 and 60,000 Poles rescued some 15,000 Jews.

In the eastern Polish territories occupied by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941, a substantial percentage of Polish Jews collaborated with the Soviets, implanting in the Polish collective memory the image of Jews as willing communist collaborators. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a hunt for Jewish collaborators, combined with the notion of Żydokomuna ("Judeo-Communism") and with German incitement of extreme antisemitism, in summer 1941 resulted in a number of massacres of Jews by Poles in Poland's northeast, the best-known being the Jedwabne massacre. Several other, similar incidents included the Wąsosz pogrom, the Szczuczyn pogrom, and the Tykocin pogrom.

Many Jews in hiding, sought by the Germans, received organized and individual help from the Poles despite the fact that it was dangerous to even talk to a Jew. Ethnic Poles' help ranged from acts of heroism to minor acts of kindness, involving hundreds of thousands of Polish helpers, often acting anonymously. This rescue effort occurred even though ethnic Poles were, from October 1941, subject to execution by the Germans if found offering any kind of help to a person of Jewish faith or origin. Poland was the only German-occupied country in Europe in which such a death penalty was imposed. On November 10, 1941, the death penalty was expanded by Hans Frank to apply to Poles who helped Jews "in any way: by taking them in for a night, giving them a lift in a vehicle of any sort" or "feeding runaway Jews or selling them foodstuffs." The law was made public by posters distributed in all major cities. Capital punishment, meted out to the entire family of any Pole who helped a Jew, was the most draconian penalty ever imposed anywhere in Europe by the Germans. Perhaps up to 50,000 ethnic Poles were executed by the Nazis for hiding Jews.

Szymon Datner, a Polish historian of Jewish descent, estimates that between 80,000 and 100,000 Jews were saved from the Holocaust thanks to assistance from "hundreds of thousands" of Poles who "risked their lives". Other estimates of the number of Poles who assisted Jews range between 160,000 and 360,000. Still other historians, such as Engel Ringelblum, estimate that, in Warsaw alone, 40,000–60,000 Poles were responsible for saving 15,000 Jews.

Regardless of the numbers of Poles who collaborated with the Germans or who helped the Jews, the vast majority of the ethnic-Polish population behaved with indifference. That indifference, or inaction, has been controversial. John Connelly writes that "Polish historiography has hesitated to view [complicity in the Jewish Holocaust} as collaboration." On the other hand, Klaus-Peter Friedrich writes that "most [Poles] adopted a policy of wait-and-see.... In the eyes of the Jewish population, [this] almost inevitably had to appear as silent approval of the [German] occupier's actions."

Collaboration by ethnic minorities

Germans used the divide and conquer method to create tensions within the Polish society, by targeting several non-Polish ethnic groups for preferential treatment (or the opposite, in clear case of the Jewish minority).

Ethnic Germans

Meeting of the German minority (Volksdeutsche) in occupied Warsaw, 1940

During the invasion of Poland in September 1939, members of the ethnic German minority in Poland assisted Nazi Germany in its war effort. They committed sabotage, diverted regular forces and committed numerous atrocities against civilian population.

Shortly after the German invasion of Poland, an armed ethnic-German militia, the Selbstschutz, was formed, numbering 100,000 members.. It organized the Operation Tannenberg mass murder of Polish elites. At the beginning of 1940, the Selbstschutz was disbanded, and its members transferred to various units of SS, Gestapo, and German police. The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle organised large-scale looting of property, and redistributed goods to Volksdeutsche. They were given apartments, workshops, farms, furniture, and clothing confiscated from Jewish Poles and ethnic Poles.

During the German occupation of Poland, Nazi authorities established the German People's List (Deutsche Volksliste, DVL), whereby former Polish citizens of German ethnicity were registered as Volksdeutsche. The German authorities encouraged registration of ethnic Germans, and in many cases made it mandatory. Those who joined were given benefits, including better food and better social status. However, Volksdeutsche were required to perform military service for the Third Reich, and hundreds of thousands joined the German military, either willingly or under compulsion.

Collaboration by Ukrainians and Belorussians

Main articles: Byelorussian collaboration with Nazi Germany and Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany

While Second Polish Republic had significant Belorusian and Ukrainian minorities in the east, those territories were annexed by the Soviet Union following the Soviet invasion of Poland, which happened just weeks after the German invasion in September 1939. Two years later, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, some Belorussians and Ukrainians, including some that were citizens of Poland before the war, collaborated with the Germans.

Collaboration by Polish Jews

Two members of the Jewish Ghetto Police guarding the gates of the Warsaw Ghetto, June 1942

The Judenrat (Jewish council) was a Jewish-run governing body set up by the Germans in every ghetto and Jewish community across occupied Poland. The Judenrat functioned as a self-enforcing intermediary that was used by the Germans to control a ghetto's or Jewish community's inhabitants and to manage the ghetto's administration. A Judenrat collected information on the Jewish population and supervised the volunteer Jewish Ghetto Police (Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst) in helping the Germans collect Jews and load them onto transport trains bound for concentration camps. In some cases, Judenrat members exploited their positions to engage in bribery and other abuses. In the Łódź Ghetto, the reign of Judenrat head Chaim Rumkowski was particularly inhumane, as he was known to get rid of his political opponents by submitting their names for deportation to concentration camps, hoard food rations, and sexually abuse girls. Political theorist Hannah Arendt stated that without the assistance of the Judenrat, the Germans would have encountered considerable difficulties in drawing up detailed lists of the Jewish population, thus allowing for at least some Jews to avoid deportation.

The Jewish Ghetto Police were recruited from among Jews living within the ghettos who could be relied on to follow German orders. They were issued batons, official armbands, caps, and badges and were responsible for public order in the ghetto; they were used by the Germans for securing the deportation of other Jews to concentration camps. The numbers of Jewish police varied greatly depending on the location, with the Warsaw Ghetto numbering about 2,500, Łódź Ghetto 1,200 and smaller ghettos such as that at Lwów about 500. The Jewish ghetto police distinguished themselves by their shocking corruption and immorality. The Polish-Jewish historian and Warsaw Ghetto archivist Emanuel Ringelblum described the cruelty of the ghetto police as "at times greater than that of the Germans."

Group 13, a Jewish collaborationist organisation in the Warsaw Ghetto, which reported directly to the German Gestapo, 1941

Some Polish Jews, belonging to the collaborationist groups Żagiew and "Group 13", inflicted considerable damage on both the Jewish and Polish underground movements. These Jewish collaborators served the German Gestapo as informers on Polish resistance efforts to hide Jews, and engaged in racketeering, blackmail, and extortion in the Warsaw Ghetto. Similar Jewish group and individual collaborators of the Gestapo operated in other towns and cities across German-occupied Poland — Abraham Gancwajch and Alfred Nossig in Warsaw, Józef Diamand in Kraków, and Szama Grajer in Lublin. One of the Jewish collaborationist groups' baiting techniques was to send agents out as supposed ghetto escapees who would ask Polish families for help; if a family agreed to help, it was reported to the Germans, who—as a matter of announced policy—executed the entire family.

Another Jewish group that collaborated with the Germans was Jewish Social Self-Help (German: Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe), also known as the Jewish Social Assistance Society. It was funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which also supplied it with legal cover. The group was authorized to work in the General Gouvernment under Hans Frank; it eventually moved to Kraków, where Hans Frank had set up his headquarters in occupied Poland. Some Jewish Social Self-Help members were active in sending Warsaw Jews to death camps..

See also

• Collaboration with the Axis Powers during World War II
• Polish resistance movement in World War II