Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Narodowe Sily Zbrojne, by Piotr Szucki (ed.) 1992

A 50th-Anniversary Scholarly Study of the Polish-Guerrilla NSZ. Jewish Revolutionary Banditry Provoked the Occasional (Never Systematic) NSZ Killings of Fugitive Jews

THE NATIONAL ARMED FORCES is the title of this Polish-language anthology. It features articles by historians, notably by Leszek Zebrowski and Marek Chodakiewicz.

Contrary to the Communist portrayal of the NSZ as an army of landlords, 90% of NSZ guerrillas were village peasants. (Bohdan Szucki, p. 5). Several NSZ combat operations against the German occupants are described in some detail. (Zebrowski, pp. 48-49; Zaborski, pp. 226-229; Chodakiewicz, p. 248-on). This included the defense of Polish villages from the Germans and their pacification campaigns. In one described combat encounter, the NSZ lured a group of Germans into the forest and then attacked them from all sides, decimating them.

EARLY LEFTIST SMEARS OF POPE PIUS XII

The NSZ also emphasized intelligence gathering (Zebrowski, p. 50-on) and counter-propaganda. Interestingly, already during WWII, Communist propaganda had been painting Pope Pius XII as a Nazi-sympathizer and collaborator. (Zebrowski, p. 54). (This propaganda was, of course, subsequently absorbed and repeated by a large fraction of the usually-LEWAK western academics and Jews, and became the malicious myth of Hitler’s pope.)

REVOLUTIONARY BANDITRY BY THE LOCAL ZYDOKOMUNA

The Communist GL-AL bands in the Krakow-area, in late 1942, consisted of 29 Jews, 6 Poles, and 3 Russians. (Zebrowski, p. 16). The NSZ fought against the GL-AL bands and their “revolutionary banditry” in many different locations (for details see Zebrowski, pp. 15-20,49; Biedron, p. 121,127; Zaborski, pp. 230-234; Chodakiewicz, pp. 247-248). The killings of Communist Jews, as part of NSZ combat operations against the GL-AL, have been misrepresented, in many Communist and Jewish writings, as gratuitous killing by the NSZ of fugitive Jews.

CONTRARY TO STANDARD PROPAGANDA, THE NSZ WAS NOT A JEW-KILLING OUTFIT

Far from being anti-Jewish, the NSZ sometimes aided fugitive Jews, and included Jewish members. Its official policy, stated on August 8, 1943 in Walka (THE STRUGGLE), plainly stated: “If we are to shoot at Jews, it will be at the barricades, in the battle against the armed Red revolution being forced upon us.” (Zebrowski, pp. 56-57).

Far from being pro-Nazi, as Communist and Jewish writers have asserted, the NSZ was the exact opposite. Radziwilowicz cites an article from the NSZ’s SZANIEC (THE RAMPART): “We realize today that there is no such thing as a good German. They are all responsible for Hitlerism, which is, after all, nothing more than the clothing worn by the German spirit. So, now more than ever, a second Grunwald is necessary.” (p. 67). Apropos to this, a number of the studies mention the NSZ’s advocacy of the Oder-Neisse (Odra-Nysa) as the postwar Polish-German boundary.

FIGHTING THE UKRAINIAN OUN GENOCIDE OF POLES

The Ukrainian fascist-separatist OUN-UPA was conducting genocide against the Jews and Poles of prewar southeastern Poland. The genocidal character of OUN’s ideology is illustrated by some OUN writings cited by Zebrowski (p. 22). One of them speaks of the need to follow not a Christian nor socialist morality, but a “Ukrainian morality”. Another one speaks of the goal of a purely Ukrainian region, free of Poles and even Ukrainians who practice the Roman Catholic faith, even if no Ukrainian state emerges.

LASTING SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NSZ

Chodakiewicz assesses the significance of the NSZ as follows: “Without these guerrilla forces, the civilian population would have suffered more from the bandit bands and from the Germans, and it is possible that the Polish Communists would have gained a large following, as had their Yugoslavian counterparts. This would have consisted of the Polish masses radicalized by the privations of the Nazi occupation, and taken advantaged of because of their lack of political sophistication.” (p. 254).