number of Polish collaborators

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teg
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number of Polish collaborators

#1

Post by teg » 24 Aug 2017, 21:04

Is there any statistic of the number of Poles who collaborated with Germans in 1939-1945 ( auxiliary police, administration etc.)?

GregSingh
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Re: number of Polish collaborators

#2

Post by GregSingh » 25 Aug 2017, 04:17

These numbers are difficult even to estimate, simply because not everyone working in police force or administration was a collaborator.

Working was compulsory under German rule, so everyone capable had to work - "Arbeitspflichtig ist, wer arbeitsfähig ist."
Whatever job you had before 1st of September 1939, in early October you had to show up at work.
If you were unemployed before, you were quickly given a job.

On the other hand Polish Home Army executed around 3-4 thousand people for collaboration (one or two actors, Gestapo informants, etc.)


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wm
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Re: number of Polish collaborators

#3

Post by wm » 25 Aug 2017, 14:05

Although those people weren't collaborators (as in "working with others for a common goal") they were mostly criminals, or traitors. They didn't have common political or military goals with the Nazis (like for example Quisling or Vlasov) - they were mostly motivated by personal gain.
And people working in police force or in administration aren't collaborators by definition (Section III of Hague IV, 1907) unless they personally declare political or military support for the occupant.
There was nothing wrong with working as a policeman or an official during the occupation as long as you didn't "overdo it". It was assumed they served the population no the occupant.

The one known collaborationist group was the NOR led Andrzej Świetlicki, it was active in 1939 and 1940. Its number of followers is unknown but it was a few hundred at best.
And anyway in 1940 Świetlicki and its other leaders were executed during the AB-Aktion as dangerous Polish nationalists.

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Steve
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Re: number of Polish collaborators

#4

Post by Steve » 27 Aug 2017, 04:20

Just a minor point. Vlasov's goals were not the same as the Nazis, he wanted an independent Russia.

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wm
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Re: number of Polish collaborators

#5

Post by wm » 30 Aug 2017, 00:42

Although the one most important common goal was the destruction of Bolshevism.
And really Hitler didn't mind an independent Russia - as long his Germany was separated from Russia by the great natural barrier of the Urals. So even in this case it could have been been a common goal.

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henryk
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Re: number of Polish collaborators

#6

Post by henryk » 30 Aug 2017, 20:01

From: Forgotten Holocaust, Richard c. Lukas, 2nd Paperback Printing, Revised Edition 2005;
One report suggested that in the period January 1943 to June1944, underground authorities pronounced 2 015 death sentences on informers and collaborators. Postwar statistics of the Israeli War Crime Commission indicated that only 7 000 Poles out of a population of over twenty million ethnic Poles collaborated with the Nazis.

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Steve
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Re: number of Polish collaborators

#7

Post by Steve » 31 Aug 2017, 04:21

The following are the last few lines of Vlasov’s Smolensk Manifesto issued 27 December 1942. “….Long may peace with Germany prevail! It will lay the basis for eternal friendship between the German and Russian nations! Long live the Russian people, equal partners in the family of nations of a new Europe!”

An equal partner is not what the Nazis were looking for which explains why they were always ambivalent about him. Vlasov was not a National Socialist and did not start collaborating for personal gain he thought of himself as a Russian patriot. From June 1943 till September 1944 his relationship with the German leadership was such that he did not do much collaborating.

Did the Israeli War Crimes Commision only count those who collaborated in Jewish persecution or did they count all collaborators as 7,000 seems very low.

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henryk
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Re: number of Polish collaborators

#8

Post by henryk » 31 Aug 2017, 20:53

Steve wrote:Did the Israeli War Crimes Commision only count those who collaborated in Jewish persecution or did they count all collaborators as 7,000 seems very low.
The source material is: Kusielewicz. "Some thoughts on the teaching of the Holocaust"
Eugene Kusielewicz is a Polish-American historian who maintained that portrayal of the Polish role in the holocaust was unfair. I have not found any other reference to the article.

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wm
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Re: number of Polish collaborators

#9

Post by wm » 18 Sep 2017, 20:58

The Israeli War Crime Commission is not a very reliable source, and at best a secondary one - especially that no definition of collaboration is given.
It was probably based on the number of people sentenced by the communist authorities according to their decree of August 31, 1944 pertaining to Nazi War Criminals ((the so-called Sierpniówka), written in a truly Stalinist language it targeted people who had acted against Poland, Polish legal persons, Poles, civilians, and prisoners of war.
Majority of those sentenced were Germans and Volksdeutsche (the people listed so diligently by assanta1976) and actually many innocent persons. After subtracting all of them probably we could arrive at 7000 but still calling them collaborators is inappropriate for the simple reason many of those sentences were meted out for criminal activities.

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