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

The Polish Worker, by Feliks Gross. 1945. Roy Publishers, New York

Holocaust Question: Nazi German Officials Explicitly Juxtaposed Poles and Jews

The standard narrative in the media, educational system, and international politics, is dominated by Holocaust supremacy. Jews get nearly all the attention–as onetime targets of Nazi hate. In addition, we are told that the Nazi hatred for Jews was so singular and so absolute that no other peoples’ genocide can be compared with the Holocaust. That is part of the mystification of the Holocaust. It also has a Holocaustspeak term of its own: redemptive antisemitism. (Not surprisingly, we never hear of constructs such as “redemptive anti-Polonism” or “redemptive anti-ziganism”.)

Poles, if mentioned at all, are portrayed as merely some kind of nuisance that stood in the way of Nazi German imperialistic goals. This is far from the truth. Poles were in fact racial enemies of the Third Reich just as were Jews. The experiences of Poles and Jews overlapped considerably. At times, Nazi German officials even mentioned Poles and Jews in the same sentence! This is elaborated below.

REDEMPTIVE ANTISEMITISM? HARDLY. NAZIS CITED POLES AND JEWS IN THE SAME BREATH

Author Gross describes Robert Ley, a top Nazi official who was one of those in charge of the use of forced labor, “The leader of the Arbeitsfront, Dr. Ley, formulated the official labor policy in the temporarily conquered east along the same lines, in an article in the National Zeitung of Essen, No. 35, dated February 4, 1940, ‘Each nation must fight the good fight that will give its race the right to live. An inferior race needs less food and less culture than a superior race. Never can be the German man live in the same way as the Pole or the Jew.'” (p. 204. Emphasis added).

A few months later, as if to make sure that what he had said had not been forgotten or misunderstood, Dr. Ley again juxtaposed Poles and Jews. Gross comments, “He expressed this idea even more strongly in Cracow when he delivered a speech as Minister of the Reich and Reichsorganisationsleiter of the National Socialist Party, on November 9, 1940 (published in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung No. 340 on November 10, 1940): ‘The higher the racial quality of a nation, the higher must be its aspirations. The German must have more living space and a higher standard of living than the Pole or the Jew.'” (p. 204).

In other words, the Nazi ideological polarity was not just that of the German on one side and the Jew on the other. It was also the German on one side, and the Pole and Jew together on the other side. Will Poles ever get to share the mantle of victimhood with the Jews?

For other published instances of Nazi officials actively juxtaposing Poles and Jews, even in the same sentence, see, for example:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/10/09/polish-forced-laborers-jews-and-poles-equal-victims-poles-and-not-only-jews-were-nazi-scapegoats-homze/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/final-solution-did-include-poles-and-gypsies-noakes/

HOLOCAUST QUESTION. GERMAN STARVATION GENOCIDE OF POLES: PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

Now consider the Nazi German occupation of Poland (1939-1945). The systematic genocidal killings of Poles were bad enough, but there was also passive genocide employed. Gross highlights the severe hunger conditions that Germans had imposed upon all Poles, “We can realize how frightful is the starvation in Poland if we remember that the great majority of salaries in reality amount to only a fraction of the pre-war purchasing power and that ‘one can get with the ration cards, one-fourth of what used to be distributed to the convicts in the Polish state prisons’–according to an underground paper of June 20, 1941.” (p. 219).

The mass starvation of Poles makes it easier to see why many Poles were unwilling to share their meager feedstuffs with fugitive Jews, and often to require payment (especially continued payment) for any such help given. It is also easy to see why Poles sometimes denounced or killed fugitive Jews known or suspected to be stealing from them.