Collaboration and Complicity
One sentence in a speech by FBI Director James Comey at the Museum’s annual dinner on April 15 has triggered a wide-ranging debate about complicity in Poland and Hungary during the Holocaust. Although scholarship continues to illuminate these important questions, much has been clarified in the past 70 years of research.
During World War II, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million Jews as the Germans sought the domination of Europe and the destruction of European Jewry. As the war proceeded and Germany occupied or allied with almost every European state, it depended on other governments at the national level as well as organizations and individuals at the local level to help carry out what it called “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”
Although there was some level of resistance to Nazi Germany in many countries, it was rarely directed at helping Jews. And although some individuals risked their lives to save Jews, they constituted a very small minority. The Germans were relentless in pursuing their goal, but without widespread collaboration the murder of six million Jews and millions of others in just four years would not have been possible.
Poland
Prior to World War II, antisemitism in Poland had been growing, and Polish authorities had taken various measures to exclude Jews from key sectors of society. Some Polish politicians pressed for the mass emigration of Poland’s Jewish population.
Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the country was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. Then in 1941, after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, all of Poland came under German control.
Poland was brutally occupied by the Germans. The Nazis viewed Poles as racially inferior and targeted Poland’s leadership for destruction, killing tens of thousands of Catholic priests, intellectuals, teachers, and political leaders. Over 1.5 million Poles were deported as forced laborers. In total, at least 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish civilians and soldiers perished.
With the occupation of all of Poland, Germany now had more than three million Polish Jews under its control. The Germans established close to 700 ghettos throughout occupied Poland where tens of thousands of Jews died due to harsh conditions of starvation, overcrowding, and disease.
After killing in mass shootings almost 1.5 million Jews in hundreds of locations in occupied Soviet territories, the Germans decided to construct stationary killing centers in occupied Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau being the most well known. The ghettos became “holding pens” for Jews before deportation to a killing center.
As German forces implemented the killing, they drew upon some Polish agencies, such as Polish police forces and railroad personnel, in the guarding of ghettos and the deportation of Jews to the killing centers. Individual Poles often helped in the identification, denunciation, and hunting down of Jews in hiding, often profiting from the associated blackmail, and actively participated in the plunder of Jewish property.
https://www.ushmm.org/information/pr...-the-holocaust
“If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.”
— Golda Meir
Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.
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