For those who aren’t aware, FBI Director James Comey was making a speech at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. And in his speech he said the following:
This remark has caused an uproar in Poland. The Polish government has stated that Poland was a victim in World War II and bears no responsibility for the Holocaust. The Polish position is that Germany was solely responsible for the Holocaust.
My personal opinion is that it’s not as clear cut as that. I will certainly agree that Poland was a victim of German aggression. Germany invaded and occupied Poland in 1939. Poland was placed under direct German control; there was no local collaborationist regime. There was a sizable resistance to the German occupation and a huge number of Poles were killed during the occupation. So Poland was certainly a victim by any reasonable definition.
But…
My understanding is that there had been a lot of anti-semitism in Poland even before the war. And the Nazis encouraged this. So while many Poles opposed the German occupation, many other Poles worked with the Nazis against the Polish Jews. (And to clarify, I realize the Jews living in Poland were also Poles but for the sake of clarity, I’m using the term Poles to refer to non-Jewish Poles.) My understanding is that this went beyond doing what had to be done to survive; many Poles stepped forward and volunteered to assist the Nazis in their anti-Jewish program.
For what it’s worth, the total death rate for non-Jewish Poles during WWII was 20-25%. The total death rate for Jewish Poles during WWII was 90-95%.
Well, true, but James Comey didn’t. His comments could be construed to mean that Poland as a country/government was complicit in the Holocaust, especially since he put them together with Germany and Hungary which, as countries, were. In Hungary, the killing of the Jews started without any German occupation (although it definitely intensified when Germans occupied Hungary).
At the very end just before he committed suicide Hitler was guarded by the SS, the French SS. They were there because they had everything to lose too.
A national stain on honor is a huge deal, I don’t know what percentage of responsibility is required for the entire nation to be ashamed or how many requisite number of decades must pass before I, as a currently living citizen of the same nation, no longer feel obligated to be ashamed for my ancestors. I do think the Germans, as a people, have accepted the horror they have caused, I do not feel those that helped the Nazis necessarily have.
I don’t think Comey was accusing entire countries. He spoke of “the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary” which to me seems to be singling out the individuals in those countries who committed or assisted with the murders. But I’d rather focus on the larger issue rather than just what Comey said.
As for Hungary, I think its record is relatively clear. Hungary refused to deport its Jewish population to Germany during the war; so in that sense it actively resisted the Holocaust. Granted it wasn’t all flowers and sunshine. There were numerous anti-semitic laws passed and non-Hungarian Jews were deported to Germany. But it was only when Hungary was occupied by German troops in 1944 that the mass killings began.
If Hungary has any responsibility for the Holocaust it’s in the more general sense. Hungary was an ally of Germany and fought alongside Germany in the war until 1944. So while it wasn’t directly participating in the Holocaust, it was helping the Nazi regime to stay in power and carry out the Holocaust throughout the rest of Europe.
You are missing the point.
Which isn’t about who was more collaborationist during the war, but that shit like that can happen anywhere. It’s human nature. A warning to be on guard for it.
We are not immune just because you don’t wear a swastika.
Is that what you want to debate? Is it even contestable? Is it something unique to Poland? Antisemitism wasn’t some one-off thing in Germany in the 1930s. THey took it to an extreme, but it can’t be any surprise that you’d find people wiling to collaborate either out of a sense of agreement or a desire to survive. Same everywhere.
No problem with the analysis. The Hungarians were enthusiastic allies of the Germans. The Poles were too during the Sudetenland crises. The Germans found enough collaboraters in Poland during the war.
During the cold war Poland was described as one of the few parts of the world that had antisemitism without Jews. The Jewish community there, once large, was tiny during that era.
Some countries had better records of resisting the Nazi’s genocidal policy than others. Denmark is on one side of the spectrum. Poland is probably on the other. France was in between. If we can celebrate the heroes of the era, we can also shake our heads on those who didn’t step up to the plate or even participated in the atrocities.
First, keep in mind I’m talking about the Hungarian Jews. As I noted, the Hungarian government felt no need to protect foreign Jews who had sought refuge in Hungary. They were turned over to the Nazis. And they accounted for about a third of the sixty thousand you mentioned.
Many Jews were impressed in a government work force. And apparently forty thousand of them died from it. That’s harsh but it’s not genocide. Forty thousand deaths represents about five percent of Hungary’s Jewish population. Considering this death rate occurred while the Holocaust was going on throughout the rest of Europe, five percent is relatively low.
To put it in perspective, the treatment of Jews in Hungary before the occupation was comparable to the treatment of blacks in the United States. It was cruel and unfair and sometimes violent - but it wasn’t genocidal. Or to put it in another perspective, forty thousand Hungarian Jews were killed between 1939 and 1944. After the Germans occupied Hungary, over half a million Hungarian Jews were killed in the last year of the war.
Poland’s relationship to World War II is somewhat unique. They, more so than anyone else in Eastern Europe, remain extremely miffed at Roosevelt for giving them away to Stalin after the war. Their partially justified sense of perpetual victimhood prevents them from accepting any responsibility for the (extensive and well documented) phenomenon of Poles enthusiastically handing over Jews to the Germans, or for subsequent episodes of anti-Semitism during the Communist era. The official line is that Poland and every Pole was the saintly martyr of the world from 1939 to 1989, no exceptions.
I’d say that 60,000 is pretty “mass” however you look at it. It’s certainly less than the amount killed after Horthy was overthrown and roundups of Jews began in earnest, but it’s still a lot of people. I mean, we’re not talking about Finland here, or something, which turned over 8 Jewish refugees to Germany until pressure from the Lutheran church and the Socialists made them stop.
I disagree with most of this. If Comey meant individuals rather than countries he made a terrible choice of language, and the Polish government has a legitimate gripe. Comey should at least clarify what he meant to say. He may have meant the Polish government, the one cooperating with the Germans which was a forcibly installed puppet of the ccupying power, if one can even call that a government.
However, I can say with confidence that the Jewish survivors of the Polish camps blamed Poles as much or more as they blamed Germans. I’ve interviewed dozens of them and this kind of response was almost universal – “The Germans acted like they did because they were under orders. The Poles enjoyed it.” On an individual basis they had much more ager directed at Polish collaborators.
Hungary was an enthusiastic collaborator in ant-Jewish programs.
These “many” collaborationists of yours are not mentioned in articles by the Jewish Virtual Library and Wikipedia, as I think they would be if they were more than marginally numerous or marginally notable.
OP and the FBI Director’s comments serve no purpose but to dilute Nazi guilt by ascribing significance to insignificant players.
You have interviewed dozens? Is any of this online? I would sure like to read it because Wiki specifically mentions that there were no Polish guards at any of the concentration camps. I am aware from the Demjanjuk case that not all guards were German. However, that does not mean that the Nazis would have felt as at ease employing a Pole as employing a Ukrainian on Polish soil for any kind of work involving access to weapons.
And I really wonder how thorough these interviews could have been for you to come away with the impression that any survivor blamed the Poles as much or more as the Germans merely on account of personal demeanor.
You would be wrong. The Jews in the camps certainly noted a great deal of Polish collaboration with the Nazis. My only cite is personal experience, interviewing former prisoners at a Holocaust Survivor conference with 10 thousand attendees. There were about 20 of us collecting oral histories, and we collected hundreds, and in a debriefing after the even we were all surprised to learn virtually everyone we spoke to seemed agrier at Polish collaborators than German guards. We spoke to people from every camp.
I don’t know what happened to the tapes – these were recorded in the mid 80s. Last I heard they were being added to a Jewish history library in California, and I have no clue whether they were ever digitized and put on line.