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

Destruction and Human Remains: Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence, by Elisabeth Anstett. 2016. Manchester University Press, Manchester

German Antipartisan Warfare? The German Genocidal Terror in the Polish Countryside in Graphic Detail

One common Holocaust supremacist talking point is the one asserting that, whereas Jews were targeted solely for being Jews, Poles and other Eastern Europeans were only targeted for “breaking German rules”. McConnell’s study, centered on present-day Belarus, and which I exclusively discuss, blows this myth away. It shows that, even when Germans were ostensibly conducting antipartisan warfare, they went far beyond targeting those who were resisting German rule. Poles were collectively killed simply for being Poles just as Jews were collectively killed simply for being Jews.

In other words, besides being racist, the German terror was indiscriminate, and included women and children as victims. Gratuitous cruelties accompanied the acts. Moreover, the German AKTION affected large geographic areas of Eastern Europe.  McConnell comments, “Unlike Nazi persecutions of ethnic minorities such as the Jews and Roma, the anti-partisan war struck the entire population of Eastern Europe.” (p. 71).

POLOKAUST AND HOLOCAUST: GENOCIDE AND MORE GENOCIDE

The Germans were not, at the time, in a position to exterminate all 30 million Poles the way they did the 6 out of 9 million accessible European Jews. So, the Germans targeted selected parts of the Polish people, notably the intelligentsia, and they targeted geographically selected parts of rural occupied Poland (for example, the Zamosc region).  As elaborated below, the German antipartisan warfare partook of the totality-of-destruction that is characteristic of genocide. Of course, the Germans did not totally eliminate the Poles in the targeted entities just as they did not totally eliminate all of the targeted European Jews.

STOP BLAMING POLES FOR OCCASIONALLY DENOUNCING OR KILLING FUGITIVE JEWS

In our Judeocentric world, few people grasp the magnitude of the German-Polish master-servant, terrorizer-terrorized relationship. McConnell’s study has unappreciated implications for Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. It is sometimes claimed that the Germans seldom actually killed Poles specifically for failing to denounce fugitive Jews. True or not, it does not matter. The overall savagery of German actions against the countryside, regardless of motive, and described below, was all-pervasive. This lucidly explains the obedient spirit of the peasanty in obeying German orders to denounce or kill fugitive Jews.

GERMAN ANTIPARTISAN WARFARE? A SAMPLING OF GERMAN GENOCIDAL TERROR AGAINST THE COUNTRYSIDE

Author McConnell makes some eye-opening statements about the German “pacification” of Eastern European villages. These obliterate the Holocaustspeak about Poles being mere bystanders to the Jewish catastrophe. Recall also that dehumanization is one of the stages of genocide. The Germans dehumanized the Slavs just as they dehumanized the Jews. McConnell writes:

“The corpses of the occupation’s victims played a key role in encouraging mass violence. As subhumans inhabiting the wilderness on the edge of Nazi empire, the dead of Eastern Europe were treated in ways which broke with European traditions regarding death and burial. Hung from trees or left to rot in the smoldering ruins of destroyed villages, the corpses were put on display, expressing the occupiers’ contempt and marking them as something other than human.” (McConnell, p. 71).

“The atrocities encouraged the desecration and defilement of the corpses of the victims. Standing outside the boundaries of European cultural affinity in the eyes of the Germans and demonized by racial dogma and the violent language of occupation, the dead bodies of civilians killed during anti-partisan sweeps were inscribed with the contempt of their killers, set on display or denied a proper burial, and simply left to lie where they fell.” (McConnell, p. 75).

“Soldiers gathered to watch the executions or to observe the bodies afterwards, posing with them for photographs, further dehumanizing the suspended victims as macabre trophies.” (McConnell, p. 77).

“The methods used by the Germans were also chosen to destroy their victims not only physically but also emotionally.” (McConnell, p. 77).

For more on “anti-partisan warfare” as a German pretext for doing genocide to villagers, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2025/04/05/odd-schindler-laborers-jedwabne-evil-stahlecker-old-anti-partisan-warfare/

GERMAN ANTIPARTISAN WARFARE? SECOND-GENERATION SURVIVORS OF THE GERMAN-CAUSED TERROR

Nowadays, we hear a lot about “second-generation Holocaust survivors” and the transgenerational transmission of trauma as a Jewish experience. It is seldom appreciated that non-Jewish victims also have this experience.

McConnell focuses on the totality of German genocidal barbarism and its lasting effects:

“After the war, the anti-partisan operations were remembered as an apocalypse made worse by the fact that the majority of the victims were denied proper burial…Other bodies lay exposed for weeks, often unrecognizable even to surviving family members. Likewise, those villagers who managed to escape returned to the smoldering ashes of their villages to find immolated corpses, which would disintegrate once they were moved, in some cases making the effort of recovering the body of a loved one a traumatizing act in itself…Through their very form, these atrocities denied a sense of closure and continued to terrorize the victims for decades after the event.” (McConnell, p. 77. Emphasis added).

For an example of a Pole (from Zamosc) who experiences second-generation survivor trauma, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/06/17/zamosc-trauma-poles-and-not-only-jews-had-the-trauma-of-second-generation-survivors-zamosc-operation-legacy-polish-death-camp-lie-scorned-planned-extermination-of-poles-janko/