Henryk,
I suggest you read the 1977 book by Jan Tomasz Gross, "Polish Society under German Occupation", especially Chapter 5, "Collaboration and Cooperation".
I quote from pages 126-130:
"Sovereign" Poland.
One possible solution for the Polish problem envisaged in the early days of the occupation by the Germans was the creation of a "token Polish state", a Reststaat. Two groups in Polish society were queried about their willingness to help in such a project.
In March 1939 the Germans tried to get in touch with peasant leader Wincenty Witos, who at the time was in exile in Czechoslovakia after having lost his appeal in the Brzesc trial. Witos immediately informed the Polish authorities about htis incident and, partly as a result of German approaches, decided to come back to Poland, although he knew that he could be sent to prison on his return.
When the hostilities ended on October 1939, Witos was arrested shortly after being found by the Germans, along with many other Poles who had played prominent roles in public life before the war. The Gestapo sent him to prison at Rzeszow, where he was apparently approached again with an offer of collaboarion, which he refused. He also rejected a proposal that he write an "objective" history of the peasant movement, suspecting that such a work would primarily serve as a directory to ferret out all activists of the movement who had not been arrested thus far. In spite of his refusal to cooperate, the conditions of his confinement remained, to say the least, very liberal [after five months in prison in Rzeszow, and a further five weeks in prison in Berlin, he was sent to a sanatorium in Potsdam, and then to a health spa in Zakopane, where he cremained under Gestapo supervision]. In March 1941 he was permitted to return to his house at Wierzchoslawice, where he remained until the end of the war, with the authorities periodically checking on him. Although this treatment was highly unusual, we should not attribute too much significance to Witos's fate. His survival was due, in all probability, more to some lucky coinicidence than to a carefully designed policy. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that he was spared from death, the usual fate of members of the Polish leadership stratum and, indeed, of several other prominent leaders of the peasant movement itself.
It seems quite apparent - and Witos's fate is also indicative in this respect - that it was among the peasantry that the Germans were initially willing to look for collaborators. The Völkisch ethos naturally designated the peasants as virtually the only class uncontaminated with either bourgeois or revolutionary influences. Also, it was in the countryside that the German armies were received with the least hostility. German officials must have taken this attitude into consideration when they prepared the internal memorandum stating that only with the support of the peasantry would Germany be able to set up a collaborationist regime in Poland.
Another group approached by the Germans with propositions for collaboration were prominent patricians and aristocrats with openly conservative views and a political tradition of loyalty and collaboration with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy before the First World War. Professor Stanislaw Estreicher, the most prominet Stanczyk, was reported to have been contacted by the Germans. The names of Princes Zdzislaw Lubomirski and Janusz Radziwill and that of Count Adam Ronikier were mentioned as other candidates consulted after Estreicher's refusal.
Thus the Germans approached a representative of the Polish peasant movement, the least hostile, from their point of view, of the three main political movements alienated from the Second Republic [the other two being the National Democrats and the Socialists]. They also appealed to conservative aristocratic elements, and were justified in doing so on two grounds: first, this class had a tradition of collaboration: second, the traditional ethos of noblesse oblige stresses the responsibility of the aristocracy for "its people" when in need amd its obligation to protect them. One must take into account thsi attitude of the aristocracy in order to understand why Prince Janusz Radziwill, Counts Ronikier, Potocki, Plater-Zyberk, and Puslowski, Coutess Tarnowsk, and others participated in the formation and works of the Rada Glowna Opiekuncza (Main Welfare Council).
In a footnote on page 129, Gross says this:
However, it seems almost certain that in 1944 Ronikier was approached by the Gestapo and offered a safe-conduct pass out of the country in return for serving as a go-between to help to negotiate a formula of modus vivendi between Germany and the Polish government in London. He never left, however, because he did not secure permission for the journey from the Polish underground, where he was not viewed as a serious partner. But if the proposition had ever been made, he was logical choice for carrying it out as the former president of the Main Welfare Council from the time of the First World War (a position that he occupied agian during World War II), in the company of Estreicher and Prince Lubomirski, a former member of the Rada Regencyjna.
In a footnote on page 130, Gross gives further examples of German attempts to recruit collaborators.
Three more "attempts" to create a pro-German Polish government should be mentioned here in order to complete the record. The first, initiated by a declared Germanophile, Professor Wladyslaw Studnicki, has been very well described by Weinstein [Zeszyty Historyczne 11:3-91, Paris, 1967]. Documentation presented by him shows that the Germans did not take Studnicki's proposals seriously, knowing well that he could not muster enough significant support from any strata of Polish society to make his projects worth their consideration.
The second attempt was an alleged public declaration by a former Polish prime minister, Professor Leon Kozlowski, of readiness to create a pro-German government after he escaped from Russia in 1941. After his release from prison in 1941 he joined Anders's Army, in which he was given the prominent post of quartermaster general (Szef Intendentury). However, for reasons unknown ( he may still have feared the Russians), he fled to the German side of the front. He was taken to Berlin, where several officials talked to him, and he was permitted to grant an interview, entitled "De Samara à Berlin", to the Journal de Genève on December 20, 1941. After this, news travelled far that he had offered to join a pro-German Polish government. The rumor was false, however. The Germans must have used his defection in their anti-Bolshevik propaganda, but the whole affair was interpreted incorrectly in Polish circles as an abortive attempt to create a "Quisling" government. Kozlowski was sentenced to death for desertion by a Polish military court, but the sentence could not be carried out, as he died in Berlin in unknown circumstances, possibly during an Allied bombing. The whole affair still awaits full clarification.
The third and last "attempt" that I want to mention here is probably linked to the preparations of the July coup by the German army. It took place in Budapest, where Count Bem, a Hungarian citizen and a major in the Polish army, was approached by an acquaintance of his, "an eminent member of Russian emigration", who told Bem that, on instructions from the German military attache in Budapest, he was seeking contacts with the Polish government in London or with eminent members of the local Polish emigreas, preferably with officers. The Germans wanted to know under what preliminary conditions the Poles would agree to begin talks with them. Bem responded that in order to begin negotiations, Poles would emand restitution of Poland in its 1939 frontiers.
Two days later the Russian go-between told Bem that the German attaché had called Berlin in his presence and reported Bem's opinion to a certain "N". In response, he received instructions to get in touch, through Bem, with someone who could report to the Polish government the following offer: the German side was prepared to issue immediately a manifesto proclaiming Polish independence within 1939 frontiers; Poland would be linked in an anti-Bolshevik military alliance with Germany; Polish foreign policy would be coordinate with Berlin's, and the staffs of the armies of the two countries would be in permanent conmtact. "Germans consider the whole matter very urgent and request a response within three days". The incident took place at the beginning of March 1944.
Broszat (Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, 1939-1945, Frankfurt and Hamburg 1965, pp 18-19) also mentions some conversations held with Polish emigrés in Switzerland in October 1939 concerning the Reststaat.
Gross also shows that the great majority of Polish public servants continued to serve the German occupation administration in the GG, 280,000 compared with 385,000 before the war, despite the fact that the GG originally included only one-third of the fomer Polish territory with about 45 percent of its former population.
It needs to be borne in mind that in 1977 Gross was still writing from the Polish chauvinist point of view that was the norm among Polish exiles in the West. Accordingly, he would not have exaggerated the German attempts to create a pro-German Polish government, and if anything has minimised such attempts.
by michael mills on 29 Jul 2012 13:22 
