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

Nazi Germany’s War Against the Jews, by Seymour Krieger. 1947. American Jewish Conference, New York

Nazis Equated Jews and Poles. Jewish Deaths Are No More Special Than Polish Deaths

This is one of the first books written by Jews about what eventually got its own special name–the Holocaust. It is free of later accretions. Blame is placed exactly where it belongs–on the Germans. No attempt is made to drag-in the Poles or to shift the blame upon Christianity. No statements are made that the Nazi German murder of 6 million Jews is above all the other genocides in history.

NO SPECIAL DEATH FOR JEWS: NAZI GERMANS MIXED JEWISH DEAD AND POLISH DEAD

Nowadays, there is a pervasive mystification of the Holocaust. No effort is spared to make the Holocaust out to be as distinctive and important as possible.  A big deal is made of gas chambers, and the unsuspecting layperson is misled to believe that the Nazis devoted a special method to murdering Jews. They did not. The Nazis murdered Jews by various methods just as they murdered non-Jews by various methods.

Furthermore, the Nazis did not have any special procedure for dealing with the bodies of targeted Jews any more than they did with the bodies of targeted Poles. In fact, at various times, and as elaborated below, the Nazi Germans actually mixed the bodies of Jewish and Polish victims!

Upon realizing that they would lose the war, the Nazis forced the mass exhumations of the bodies of earlier-shot Jews, with the mass cremation of these corpses in open-air pyres. Jewish survivor Szlomo Gol was a Jew from Vilnius, and was on a body-burning detail. He testified at Nuremberg (Document D-964): “We dug up altogether 68,000 graves. I knew this because two of the Jews in the pit with us were ordered by the Germans to keep count of the bodies: that was their sole job. The bodies were mixed: Jews, Polish priests, Russian Prisoners of War.” (p. III-14).

THE NAZIS REPEATEDLY EQUATED JEWS AND POLES, EVEN AFTER DECIDING TO DO THE HOLOCAUST

Nowadays, in an effort to make the Holocaust seem special, we hear a lot about so-called redemptive antisemitism and about Jews as existential enemies of the Third Reich. This has a prosaic explanation: Jews had international influence while Poles generally did not. Otherwise, and as illustrated below, the Nazis had no problem equating Poles and Jews in their discriminatory and condemnatory statements. At no time were Jews and Poles put by the Nazis, in their thinking, into two separate, watertight compartments! To the contrary.

Krieger introduces a Nazi German document that was written by Goering, Frick, and Lammers, “On December 4, 1941, a decree was adopted changing the criminal procedure against Poles and Jews in the Western Polish provinces annexed to Germany (Nuremberg Document 2746-PS)”. (p. I-28).

In it, the Nazi Germans almost seem to go out of their way to emphasize the similarities of Jews and Poles in Nazi policies! On several occasions, four of which I quote below, the Nazis explicitly mention Poles and Jews in the very same sentence:

“The death penalty shall be imposed on any Pole or Jew if he commits an act of violence against a German on account of his being of German blood.”

“Poles and Jews cannot challenge a German judge on account of alleged partiality.”

“Poles and Jews are not sworn in as witnesses in criminal proceedings.”

“Poles and Jews are not entitled to act as prosecutors either in a principal or a subsidiary capacity.”

Notice that the foregoing document was written in December of 1941, which is almost certainly after the Nazis had decided to exterminate Europe’s Jews. In any case, this document was written after months of systematic shootings of Jews by Einsatzgruppen units on the Eastern front (now known as the Holocaust by Bullets), and also after the first mass gassings of Jews (at Chelmno/Kolm). So, the Nazis were still mentioning Poles and Jews in the same statement even at this advanced stage of Nazi radicalization on the Jewish question!

The foregoing Nazi German document was no fluke. For more examples of Nazis actively juxtaposing and equating Jews and Poles, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/11/16/nuremberg-and-poles-holocaust-supremacists-debunked-the-nazi-german-genocide-of-poles-in-the-light-of-the-nuremberg-trials-existential-enemies-no-redemptive-antisemitism-usa-office/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/10/09/prejudicial-policies-not-only-jewish-star-letter-p-also-predated-nazi-germany-polish-forced-laborers-poles-and-not-only-jews-were-made-into-existential-enemies-and-scapegoats-herbert/

NO VALID DICHOTOMY BETWEEN JEWISH AND NON-JEWISH VICTIMS OF THE NAZIS

The author comments, “Extermination of the Jews enabled the Nazis to bring a practiced hand to similar measures against Poles, Serbs, and Greeks.” (p. II-22).

FAR FROM ALL EUROPEAN JEWS WERE EXTERMINATED

Krieger writes, “Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in Europe under Nazi domination, it is conservatively estimated that 5,700,000 have disappeared, most of them deliberately put to death by the Nazi conspirators.” (p. II-14). Today’s figure for Jews is 6,000,000.

Let us look at the foregoing numbers. If the Nazis were literally out to kill all of Europe’s Jews, as we incessantly hear, shouldn’t the Nazis have done better than 6.0 million out of 9.6 million Jews?