Poles blamed for wartime massacre

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Piotr Kapuscinski
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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#46

Post by Piotr Kapuscinski » 12 Dec 2010, 12:31

Michael:
which is that the large-scale massacre of Jews began in the summer of 1941
Read about German anti-Jewish violence in invaded and occupied Poland long before that.

Also against Polish-Jewish POWs in German captivity.
an organised program of mass-destruction of human life.
Polish participation in Jedwabne was certainly also not "an organised program of mass-destruction".

BTW, definition of pogrom = "collective, brutal act of violence, usually connected with destruction of property".

So clearly the Crystal Night was a Jewish pogrom.
The German Jews detained in concentration camps in late 1938 were released
Except for 2,500 who were murdered or died there during 3 months - which is almost 10% of all imprisoned.

Jan-Hendrik:
So there was no strict anti-jewisch policy during the sanacja-regime?
No. But what you call sanacja lasted only until the death of Pilsudski. "Classic" sanacja at least.

And Pilsudski always supported the idea of multinational Poland.

After the death of Pilsudski, since 1937, OZON (Camp of National Consolidation) took power in Poland.

Several articles:

http://www.badacz.org/izrael/zydzi_w_po ... olita.html

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ob%C3%B3z_ ... Narodowego

http://forum.historia.org.pl/index.php? ... entry96000

http://swobodnadyskusja.myfreeforum.org ... t_315.html
No intentions to get "rid of the jews"?
I don't read in minds so I don't know what were their intentions. Their policy shows no signs of such intention, on the other hand it shows intentions to weaken Jewish economic and political position in Poland by implementing different kinds of legal acts which attempted to discriminate Jews in public and economic live of Poland. I'm of course talking about OZON now, because during sanacja rules and before there was no such inequality of Jews by law.

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#47

Post by Artur Szulc » 12 Dec 2010, 13:54

I will again repeat one basic fact.

The Germans took Jedwabne on the 23 of July 1941. Christian Poles had every opportunity to instantly engage in bloody massacres of Jews but they didnt. Measures where taken against soviet collaborators, the absolute majority of those reveange acts where directed against other Christians. Polish Jews in Jedwabne where left unharmed. For nearly two weeks!

Thus Michael Mills writes rubbish when he is describing the willingness of Christian Poles in killing Jews.


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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#48

Post by Jan-Hendrik » 12 Dec 2010, 17:23

Well. there were many, many who willingly participated in Holocaust...

Jan-Hendrik

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#49

Post by Artur Szulc » 12 Dec 2010, 20:18

Well. there were many, many who willingly participated in Holocaust...
Indeed.

But without Germans - the masterminds behind it all - no Holocaust.

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#50

Post by ToKu » 12 Dec 2010, 20:21

Of course there were many. But it is more about human nature than some features characteristic for christian Poles.

If Germans had declared that raping a woman is no longer a crime and is in fact activity desired by the occupation authorities then there would be many, many who have willingly participated in such activities.

As simple as that IMO.

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#51

Post by Piotr Kapuscinski » 12 Dec 2010, 20:30

There were even many Jews who willingly collaborated with the Nazis and participated in Holocaust.

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#52

Post by jola » 12 Dec 2010, 20:59

Coming back to Jedwabne:

Excerpt from CyprianIwo Pogonowski's "Presented at the Panel “Jedwabne – A Scientific Analysis”
Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Inc.
Annual Meeting, June 8, 2002

Georgetown University, Washington DC
The Tragedy of Jedwabne Explained by the Evidence of Two Graves and German Archives



Thus, on July 10, 1941 German executioners collected Jews of Jedwabne in the town square and drove them by physical violence to the site of their murder. First they shot some 50 Jews and then burned alive 250 others (not 1600 or 1800 as inaccurately reported in the American press on the basis of false information published by J. T. Gross who ignored Soviet and other sources as well as German archives in his book Neighbors).

The executioners of the Einsatztrupen enlisted help of several ethnic Germans (the "Volksdeutche" known as traitors and spies), and a group of primitive and illiterate criminals, both local and from out of town, as well as possibly a few "avengers." The latter must have believed that they and their relatives had suffered murderous persecution by Soviet security officers and deportation to the Gulag because of the betrayal by some of the Jews living in Jedwabne. German executioners forced an additional number of Poles, at gunpoint, with blows of rifle butts, and with threats, to help bring Jewish victims to the town square (the marketplace) ostensibly to clean the pavement.

According to eyewitnesses still living today, uniformed Germans committed this wartime atrocity. They forced some 300 Jews to march in a mock-funeral procession while carrying a concrete head of Lenin that had been removed from a monument.

The Germans of the Einsatzgrupen divided the marchers into two groups. The first group consisted of some 50 Jews, men strong enough to put up a fight. The second group was formed from the approximately 250 remaining Jews, mostly old people, women, and children.

While the second group was held back, the first group was directed into a 62.4 by 23 feet wooden barn. The keys to the barn were confiscated a day earlier by uniformed Germans, who removed agricultural machinery from it and prepared it for the execution of the Jews next day. (The daughter of the owner of the barn repeatedly testified about this facts, most recently on the CBS "60 minutes" on March 24, 2002.)

The 50 Jewish men were ordered to dig a large grave inside the barn, ostensibly for burying Lenin's concrete head. (J. T. Gross wants his readers to believe that the head of Lenin was buried in the Jewish cemetery.) As the diggers stood near the grave, the Germans shot them and then ordered several Poles to drag into the shallow grave the bodies of the Jews, some slain and some wounded but possibly still alive. Lenin's concrete head was placed on top of the victims in the grave #1. The German executioners then ordered the second, more defenseless, group into the barn, which moments later would be turned into a gigantic funeral pyre.

Stefan Boczkowski, Roman Chojnowski and five other eyewitnesses reported seeing the following: A small German military truck loaded with soldiers and gasoline canisters quickly pulled up to the barn crowded with Jews. Some of the soldiers jumped down from the truck, and those soldiers staying in the truck handed them the canisters, whose contents they poured on all outer walls of the barn. The flames engulfed the barn at once. Pyrotechnic analysis indicates that the Germans used approximately 100 gallons (over 400 liters) of gasoline to soak some 1000 square ft. of walls of the barn in order to engulf all of it with fire, burn it and in process suffocate the victims (by inhalation of the hot smoke). Later (reportedly the next day) the Germans ordered Poles at gunpoint to bury the partly burned bodies emanating a horrible odor. Remains of about 250 victims were buried in the grave #2 located along the barn (the high content of water in human bodies requires temperature of some 800 degrees Centigrade for more than thirty minutes in order to obtain a complete cremation).

At that time there was no gasoline available to the local population of Jedwabne (only a small amount of hydrocarbons in form of kerosene for lamps was available to the rural population). Such small amounts of kerosene (as mentioned by J. T. Gross) with its flashpoint of about 50 degrees Centigrade could not produce a sudden fire to engulf the entire barn at once.

In the 2001 investigation by the Polish government bodies of the victims of the July 10, 1941 massacre were found buried in the graves #1 and #2. Thorough search and drilling some 170 test cores in the vicinity found no other graves of the 1941 massacre of the Jews in Jedwabne; however, at the request of an Orthodox Rabbi who objected, rigorous forensic studies and full exhumation of all victims and the determination by autopsy of causes of death of every one of them was prematurely terminated. Thus, only an approximate number of victims could be estimated by the size of the two graves. Unfortunately these unanswered questions inevitably discredit the veracity of the final report of the official investigation by the Polish government's agency, the Institute of National Memory (IPN).

The veracity of Grosses book and the film Neighbors is further compromised by a baseless, non-corroborated claim that a cut off head of a Jewish female was kicked around in Jedwabne. Jerzy Robert Nowak, the author of the book 100 Lies By Gross (published in Poland) claims that after its publication he determined additional factual errors in Neighbors.

"The book of Prof. Gross can not be considered as a serious scholarly work: it is rather a tendentious propagandistic pamphlet. He jumps to farfetched conclusions before examining the existing evidence." wrote to the New York Times M. K. Dziewanowski, Professor of History, author of: History of Soviet Russia, 5th edition, Prentice Hall, 1996.

As Alexander B. Rossino, historian at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. writes in an article to be printed in Polin, Volume 16, 2003:

"The evidence collected by the West Germans, including the positive identification of [Hauptsturmfuehrer Herman] Schaper by witnesses from Łomża, Tykocin, and Radziłów, suggested that it was indeed Schaper's men who carried out the killings in those locations. Investigators also suspected, based on the similarity of the methods used to destroy the Jewish communities of Radziłów, Tykocin, Rutki, Zambrów, Jedwabne, Piątnica, and Wizna between July and September 1941 that Schaper's men were the perpetrators... The method used to kill the Jews of Jedwabne was exactly the same that had been employed by the Gestapo [Einsatsgrupen] to kill the Jews of Radzilow only three days earlier."

During the initial investigation of 1964, German investigator Opitz in Ludwigsburg, Germany, concluded that Hauptsturmfuerer Hermann Schaper's Einsatskommando conducted the mass execution of Jews in Jedwabne. Nonetheless, Schaper gave conflicting answers to his interrogators. First, he lied that in 1941 he had been a truck driver and he used false names. Later he claimed to have been an administrative officer, and another time a hunter of double agents, when the Gestapo was busy finding and killing communist commissars and Jews.

Court documents at Ludwigsburg archives show that the chief of the German civilian administration in the Nazi occupied Łomża district, Count van der Groeben testified that Schaper conducted mass executions of Jews in his district, which included the town of Jedwabne. That notwithstanding, legal proceedings against Schaper were terminated Sept. 2, 1965 despite positive identification of the defendant by Jewish survivors of the execution in Radzilow and Tykocin.

In 1974 Schaper's case was reopened and in 1976 a German court in Giesen, Hessen, pronounced the then 68 year old Schaper guilty, together with four other members of the kommando SS Zichenau-Schroettersburg, of executions of Poles and Jews. Schaper was sentenced to a six-year prison, but was soon released for medical reasons. (The facts of Schaper's dossier are quoted from article by Thomas Urban, reporter of the Suddeutsche Zeitung; Polish text in Rzeczpospolita, Sept 1-2, 2001.)

To make any legal sense now in 2002 the Polish Government should have demanded either the extradition or deposition under oath of Schaper by a German court and not an interview which has no legal meaning and can not give legally binding information. However, the Polish government's agency IPN gave the press a report that "Hauptsturmfuehrer Hermann Schaper confirmed known facts."
In Jedwabne the local reaction to the current investigation of the crime is full of distrust. It is said that when the investigators dug up the first three skulls, they found in each of them a bullet hole. Apparently about at that point the investigators stopped the exhumation under the pretext that two Rabbis objected to further disturbance of the remains. Now it appears to many people in Jedwabne that bullet holes in these skulls were not what investigators were looking for. The decision to stop the exhumation and forensic studies disqualifies the entire investigation of this horrible crime. "The truth is, to be sure, sometimes hard to grasp, but it is never so illusive as when it is not wanted" (as remarked by Herman H. Dinsmore, All the News That Fits, Arlington House, 1969).

At the present time practically all the forensic evidence remains buried. Under these circumstances the only remedy is to complete the forensic exhumation of the two graves and the surrounding area in order to properly document the murders of Jedwabne as Dr. Moor-Jankowski explained in the preceding presentation.
http://www.pacwashmetrodiv.org/events/j ... i.text.htm

Another text to give some insight into this crime and why it has been getting such mileage:
http://users.rcn.com/salski/No28Folder/ ... ffairs.htm

Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, a survivor of 5 years of Gestapo prisons and Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, is the author of "Poland, an Illustrated History" (Hippocrene Books, New York, 2000), "Jews in Poland, a Documented History" (Hippocrene Books, New York, 1993), "Poland, a Historical Atlas" (Hippocrene Books, 1987).

michael mills
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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#53

Post by michael mills » 13 Dec 2010, 02:50

The executioners of the Einsatztrupen enlisted help of several ethnic Germans (the "Volksdeutche" known as traitors and spies), and a group of primitive and illiterate criminals, both local and from out of town, as well as possibly a few "avengers." The latter must have believed that they and their relatives had suffered murderous persecution by Soviet security officers and deportation to the Gulag because of the betrayal by some of the Jews living in Jedwabne. German executioners forced an additional number of Poles, at gunpoint, with blows of rifle butts, and with threats, to help bring Jewish victims to the town square (the marketplace) ostensibly to clean the pavement.
The above is quite different from the findings of the post-war trial of inhabitants of Jedwabne who were accused of the killings.

Of course, a post-war Polish Communist court cannot be considered an impartial body seeking to establish historical truth without fear or favour. On the other hand, a post-war Polish court had no reason to exonerate a group of Germans, if it had in fact been a group of Germans who had carried out the killings, with the Polish participants acting under duress.

It is true that the new Communist rulers of Poland routinely accused their rivals for power, the non-Communist underground movements such as the Armia Krajowa, of having killed Jews during the war, using that accusation as a justification for the arrest and suppression of non-Communists. However, the persons accused of the Jedwabne killings seem to have been simple peasants and not part of an anti-Communist organisation; there seems to have been no particular political reason to persecute them.

It is noteworthy that Pogonowski seems to be alleging a cover-up by the present Government of Poland and its agency the IPN, neither of which can reasonably be accused of wanting to protect the former Communist rulers of Poland by perpetuating their falsification of history.

Another dubious element in the account by Pogonowski is his allegation that the Germans recruited ethnic Germans to do the killing. Were there in fact ethnic Germans in that part of Poland? The ethnic German minority of Poland was concentrated in the western part of the country (which had been formerly German territory), and in some larger cities such as Lodz; it seems unlikely that there were ethnic Germans in small villages in the eastern part of Poland.

In fact, the terms used by Pogonowski, "the "Volksdeutsche" known as traitors and spies", are redolent of Polish chauvinist bias, rather than of sober, impartial research. It wasn't we Poles who did it, it was those ethnic German traitors!

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#54

Post by Piotr Kapuscinski » 13 Dec 2010, 02:58

On the other hand, a post-war Polish court had no reason to exonerate a group of Germans
One reason could be that those Germans were no longer alive or no longer in Poland in the post-war period.
Were there in fact ethnic Germans in that part of Poland?
Yes. In that voivodeship (Bialostockie) in 1921 there were Poles, Jews, Belarussians, Russians, but also 0,32% (4,117) Germans, 0,53% (6,872) Lithuanians and 0,11% other nationalities. In the census of 1931 they were counted - as well as Lithuanians - yet together with those "other nationalities" (1,76% in total - or 28,912).

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#55

Post by michael mills » 13 Dec 2010, 03:19

But without Germans - the masterminds behind it all - no Holocaust.
It is impossible to say what would have happened in Eastern Europe in the absence of either the Soviet or German occupations.

But in 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Sir James Headlam-Morley, advisor to the British delegation, commented to Lucien Wolff, a member of the official Jewish delegation to the Conference, that if the conflict between the Polish nationalists led by Roamn Dmowski and the Jewish nationalists led by Menachem Ussishkin could not be resolved, and in particular the Jewish nationalists prevailed upon to give up their demand for extra-territorial status in Poland, then the Jews 'would all be murdered". That comment by Headlam-Morley was recorded by Lucien Wolff in his peace Conference Diary.

What Headlam-Morley meant of course was that the Polish-Jewish conflict would eventually end in the Jews being murdered by the Polish nationalists. In 1919 germany was a defeated, powerless nation, and no-one imagined that it would rise again and once more conquer all of Eastern Europe, let alone kill the Jews living there.

When Headlam-Morley exlaimed that the Jews would all be murdered, he was in no way thinking that it would be the Germans who would murder them. No, it was the Poles he was thinking of as the future perpetrators.

We also have the example of Romania, which in 1941 began its own anti-Jewish actions, quite independently of what the Germans were doing. It is quite conceivable that, if Poland in 1939 had opted to align itself with Germany rather than with Britain and France against Germany, and had joined Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union, it might well have joined the anti-Jewish actions, in the same way as Romania did.

Another straw in the wind. Toward the end of September 1938, the Polish Ambassador in Berlin, Jozef Lipski, had an interview with Hitler. In his report on the interview to Polish Foreign Minister Beck, Lipski stated that Hitler had suggested that Germany, Poland and Romania could cooperate in solving the Jewish problem in their respective countries. Lipski described how he had replied to Hitler that, if he, Hitler, succeeded in solving the Jewish problem in Poland, the Polish people in gratitude would erect a memorial to him in the most beautiful part of Warsaw.

That promise by Lipski (which has never been fulfilled, even though Hitler kept his side of the bargain) indicates how keen the Polish Government was to get rid of the Jews living on its territory.

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#56

Post by michael mills » 13 Dec 2010, 03:36

Yes. In that voivodeship (Bialostockie) in 1921 there were Poles, Jews, Belarussians, Russians, but also 0,32% (4,117) Germans, 0,53% (6,872) Lithuanians and 0,11% other nationalities. In the census of 1931 they were counted - as well as Lithuanians - yet together with those "other nationalities" (1,76% in total - or 28,912).
So in 1921 some 4,117 ethnic Germans were counted in the whole of Bialostok Voivodeship. But how many of them lived in the small village of Jedwabne?

And how many of 4,117 were still living in the Bialystok voivodeship in 1941? Between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, about one million ethnic Germans emigrated from Poland, so there may well have been no ethnic Germans at all left in that remote part of eastern Poland.

It is noteworthy that by 1931, ethnic Germans were not individually identified in the Bialystok voivodeship. The 28,912 "other nationalities" in the voivodeship may have included some ethnic Germans, but then again they may not. And if there were still ethnic Germans living in that area in 1941, is it likely that they were living in a small village rather than in the city of Bialystok itself?

It is a known fact that there was an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union that ethnic Germans living in the parts of Poland annexed by the latter country were to be repatriated to Germany, like the Baltic Germans. So it is entirely possible that whatever ethnic Germans were still living in the Bialystok voivodeship in 1939 (and there can have been only a handful of them) were transferred to german territory before 1941.

So Pogonowski's allegation that ethnic German "traitors" living in Jedwabne were recruited to do the killing still seems dodgy and based on bias rather than impartial scholarship.

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#57

Post by Piotr Kapuscinski » 13 Dec 2010, 03:52

It is noteworthy that by 1931, ethnic Germans were not individually identified in the Bialystok voivodeship.
So were the Lithuanians.

1921 - total of 1,305,284:

Poles - 76,9%;
Jews - 12,5%;
Belarussians - 9,1%;
Russians - 0,54%;
Lithuanians - 0,53%;
Germans - 0,32%;
Others - 0,11%

1921 - religion:

Catholic - 68,5%
Orthodox - 15,1%
Mosaic - 14,9%
Protestant - 1%
Old Believers - 0,36%

1931 - total of 1,646,844:

Poles - 71,79%;
Belarussians - 12,48%;
Jews - 11,84%;
Russians - 2,13%;
Others - 1,76%

As you can see in 1931 Lithuanians and Germans are simply included within "Others".

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#58

Post by michael mills » 13 Dec 2010, 04:07

Here are some further claims by Pogonowski in the sites linked by Jola.
The Polish victory deprived Lenin of a chance for a worldwide revolution. The Soviets then retaliated with terror and eventually murdered more Polish nationals than did the Germans, during the World War II, in 1939-1941. In the Spring of 1940 alone the NKVD executed 21,857 members of Polish leadership community. About four-fifths of all victims were betrayed to the NKVD by local leftists mostly of Jewish background. [my emphasis]
President Reagan was right: Soviet Union was "an evil empire," with its communist party that ruled, among other places in the Soviet sphere of influence, Poland with an iron fist for half a century. Now, with a shiny new name of "the Leftist Democratic Union (SLD)," new apologists for the old communist past are starting to act like new emperors, blaming the nation for the crimes of their communist predecessors of the former evil empire. Let me proclaim: these new emperors have no clothes!

You see, Mr. Miller, like the current president of Poland, Mr. Kwasniewski, has an ax to grind. They are both former high officials of the communist party. Yes, this was the party of the same communists whose NKVD security forces, the mainstay of the Soviet terror apparatus, staged the Kielce pogrom in 1946.

At that time Ostap Dluski, the head of the department of foreign affairs of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (PPR), wrote on September 25, 1946 a personal letter to Stanislaw Skrzeszewski, the Polish communist ambassador in Paris, ordering him to carefully plan, organize, and finance with state funds a defamation campaign for the purpose of generating in France a wide- spread condemnation of the "Polish perpetrators" of the Kielce pogrom.

On one hand the NKVD was staging pogroms in all satellite states in order to drive out of East-Central some 700,000 Jews. Those that would arrive to Palestine were to abolish the British mandate there and to foment Jewish-Arab wars in order to interfere with the flow of oil to the west. On the other hand the communist propaganda used the accusation of Polish anti-Semitism to "justify" the need for a protracted stay of the Red Army in Poland long after the war was over. Similarly, the present Polish president and the prime minister distribute internationally the propaganda of the responsibility of the Polish nation for the crime of Jedwabne to obscure communist crimes in Poland.

Mr. Miller and Mr. Kwasniewski are apologists for, the same communists who persecuted Jews in Poland in 1968 under the orders of Jiri Andropov then the head of the Soviet terror apparatus. They are the same communists who oppressed the Polish people for half a century. And they managed to extend their dominance even today.
The World Jewish Restitution Organization collected huge sums from Germany and then obtained $1,250,000,000 from Swiss banks on the original claim valued at $32,000,000 by the Volker Commission. The huge size of the payment was partially a ransom paid by the Swiss banks under the threat of a boycott of all Swiss banks' activity in New York. More recently nearly one half of all the money from the German slave labor compensation fund was collected by Jewish organizations to the dismay of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish survivors of German slave labor. Now, in order to continue functioning, the movement for property claims must find other people guilty of the Holocaust. Poland is next in line as a new NATO partner on the verge of admission into the European Union.

Prewar Jewish properties in Polish real estate will soon be worth many times more than they are worth now. The acquisition by the World Jewish Restitution Organization of this fabulous wealth will be possible when under the international pressure the Polish parliament or the president, by a presidential agreement, would authorize these international Jewish organizations to find and take over all prewar Jewish properties in Poland. In support of these claims the Zionist lobby has already used threats by members of the US Congress, Senator Hilary Clinton prominent among them. Polish parliamentarians who wanted to place limits on the amount of compensation were accused by the World Jewish Congress of "anti-Americanism" - something that Poland can ill afford when it is so greatly dependent on American goodwill. Ironically, Poland is the most pro-American member of NATO at the present time as implied by President Bush, when recently he introduced Mr. Kwasniewski, the President of Poland.

The wealth here under consideration represents some fifteen to twenty percent of the total Polish national wealth reaching more than one hundred billion dollars. This involves more units of property by far then there are surviving Jews living in Poland today. If it is centrally administered by the World Jewish Restitution Organization, it would became the strongest financial and political entity in Poland, capable of putting the country on the road of becoming a vassal state of Israel [my emphasis]. Thus, Poland is on the verge of becoming a victim of a shakedown. Probably, after Poland the next will be the other former Soviet satellites such as Hungary and Slovakia, and then Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia -- when these former Soviet republics recover economically (and some of them will be able to join NATO and the European Union).
A great uproar in the Polish media started when a fictional version of the events of July 10 in Jedwabne was promulgated by the supporters of the World Jewish Restitution Organization as a proof of Poland's national guilt in the Holocaust. This preposterous notion was rebutted by authentic witnesses of the events in Jedwabne and in neighboring towns. The net result of the recent "media battle of Jedwabne," to use the expression coined by Dr. Jozef Wieczynski in correspondence with me on that subject, was an enormous amount of free publicity for the Zionist property claims movement throughout the world (Dr. Wieczynski is a historian of Russia and Eastern Europe and chief editor of the fifty volume encyclopedia on Russian history).
Unfortunately in the present post-communist government of Poland, both the president and the prime minister, found it expedient to follow the lead of the Zionists of the World Jewish Restitution Organization. They were so eager to please the Zionists that they even used the "politics of apology and contrition" to blame the Polish people for such German crimes as that of Jedwabne where the locals played very secondary roles at most. However, it should not be forgotten that the national memory of all the postwar satellite states preserved a recollection of the central role, and disproportional representation, of the Jewish minority in Stalin's security apparatus [my emphasis], which used bloody terror and mass murders to enforce the communization of their native lands. This historical fact was acknowledged in print by no less of an authority than the world's most prestigious Jewish newspaper, the New York Times.
I do not say that the above claims by Pogonowski must be historically false.

However, they do show that he is a highly partisan publicist, not a person doing impartial research 'sine ira et studio'.

It seems to me that the version of history being propagated by Pogonowski can be reduced to two theses:

1. The Jews of Poland, or a large number of them, were guilty of crimes against the Polish people through their collaboration with Soviet oppression.

2. Nevertheless, the Polish people did not take revenge against the Jews, and if a very small number of Poles did commit crimes against the Jews, it was solely because they were forced to by the German occupiers.

By contrast, the Leftist version of that same history can be reduced to two contrary theses:

1. The Jews of Poland were entirely innocent of crimes against the Polish people during the Soviet occupations.

2. Nevertheless, a large number of Poles blamed the Jews for the crimes committed by the Soviet occupiers and committed crimes against Jews in revenge.

Of the four theses, the first one of Pogonowski and the second Leftist one contain elements of truth, whereas the second one of Pogonowski and the first Leftist one are apologetic distortions.

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Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#59

Post by Artur Szulc » 13 Dec 2010, 09:23

It is impossible to say what would have happened in Eastern Europe in the absence of either the Soviet or German occupations.
Indeed, it is impossible to say. Althought, we do not need to speculate since we are not deeling with alternative history.
But in 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Sir James Headlam-Morley, advisor to the British delegation, commented to Lucien Wolff, a member of the official Jewish delegation to the Conference, that if the conflict between the Polish nationalists led by Roamn Dmowski and the Jewish nationalists led by Menachem Ussishkin could not be resolved, and in particular the Jewish nationalists prevailed upon to give up their demand for extra-territorial status in Poland, then the Jews 'would all be murdered". That comment by Headlam-Morley was recorded by Lucien Wolff in his peace Conference Diary.

What Headlam-Morley meant of course was that the Polish-Jewish conflict would eventually end in the Jews being murdered by the Polish nationalists. In 1919 germany was a defeated, powerless nation, and no-one imagined that it would rise again and once more conquer all of Eastern Europe, let alone kill the Jews living there.

When Headlam-Morley exlaimed that the Jews would all be murdered, he was in no way thinking that it would be the Germans who would murder them. No, it was the Poles he was thinking of as the future perpetrators.
And James Headlam-Morley based this prophecy on what?
Well, it is all speculation, since the all the Jews in Poland were not murdered.
Another straw in the wind. Toward the end of September 1938, the Polish Ambassador in Berlin, Jozef Lipski, had an interview with Hitler. In his report on the interview to Polish Foreign Minister Beck, Lipski stated that Hitler had suggested that Germany, Poland and Romania could cooperate in solving the Jewish problem in their respective countries. Lipski described how he had replied to Hitler that, if he, Hitler, succeeded in solving the Jewish problem in Poland, the Polish people in gratitude would erect a memorial to him in the most beautiful part of Warsaw.
Can you please give a source for this?

I would say that your entire post is mere speculation, this could happen, if that happened and so on.

But the fact remains, without Hitler and his henchmen, No Holocaust. German Nazis planned, supervised and executed the Holocaust. (Earlier I wrote - Germans - but that is wrong according to me, it should be German Nazis).


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On Jedwabne.

The Jews in Jedwabne were left unharmed for more then two weeks, from the 23d of June to the 10th of July. And suddenly, Christian Polish - those supposedly hardcore antisemites - feelt a need to kill them all? It is unlogical.

jola
Member
Posts: 260
Joined: 15 Nov 2008, 14:02
Location: Warsaw

Re: Poles blamed for wartime massacre

#60

Post by jola » 13 Dec 2010, 09:45

It is impossible to say what would have happened in Eastern Europe in the absence of either the Soviet or German occupations.

But in 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Sir James Headlam-Morley, advisor to the British delegation, commented to Lucien Wolff, a member of the official Jewish delegation to the Conference, that if the conflict between the Polish nationalists led by Roamn Dmowski and the Jewish nationalists led by Menachem Ussishkin could not be resolved, and in particular the Jewish nationalists prevailed upon to give up their demand for extra-territorial status in Poland, then the Jews 'would all be murdered". That comment by Headlam-Morley was recorded by Lucien Wolff in his peace Conference Diary.
Let's look at year 1919 since you keep repeating yourself as the Polish-Jewish relations seem similar to the present Jedwabne case.
The below given report is a U.S. War Department investigation and evaluation of issues generated by Jewish power. It was compiled in August 1919 and given SECRET classification until 1973.

A hard copy of this document may be obtained from U.S. National Archives in Washington DC, - its number is 245-1.
http://www.papurec.org/fundamental/PowerAims1.html

This is the part that might interest us:
III. The various phases of the Polish question:

(a) Whether the Jewish anti-Polish propaganda in the United States has been based on actual widespread Jewish Pogroms in Poland, or

(b) Whether, on the contrary, the stories of pogroms have been greatly exaggerated as a part of a deliberate Zionist propaganda to get for the Jews in Poland minority rights which both factions of American Poles publicly denounce as amounting to the creation of a state within a state.
It picks up here:
III. THE POLISH QUESTION

(a) Has the Jewish anti-Polish propaganda in the United States been based on actual widespread Jewish pogroms ?

Louis Marshall, Judge Mack, Jacob Schiff, Israel Cohen, the British Zionist investigator, and other Jewish leaders all answer "yes".

Hugh Gibson, United States Minister to Poland on the other hand says the stories have been greatly exaggerated. For this statement he has been bitterly villified by Mr. Marshall and the American-Jewish News. Mr. Gibson also reported that many of the exaggerated pogroms stories were traceable to German propaganda sent out by way of Copenhagen. In this he is corroborated by the report of Colonel Mason of the Military Intelligence, General Staff, who spent a month in Poland during March and April.

The following quotation from Professor Askenazy, a Polish-Jewish educator and historian of Warsaw, appearing in the NEW YORK WORLD of July 2, 1919 and reprinted in FREE POLAND for July 16, 1919, would seem to present an accurate summary:

"The outside world is getting an entirely exaggerated idea, and I see my co-religionists in New York are acting on what was evidently unverified information coming from many sources. They have denounced Poland for things which never happened. With Poland young and struggling and beset with enemies it has enough trouble without having attacks from our people, who have always received better treatment from the Poles than from any other people in Eastern Europe.
The rest can be read here at the bottom of the page and continued:
http://www.papurec.org/fundamental/PowerAims3.html

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