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

Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941-44, by Martin Dean. 2000. St Martin’s Press, NY

Do Not Mystify Antisemitism. Some Belarussians Chose to Help the Germans Kill Jews

Nowadays, some Belarussians moralize about Romuald Rajs “Bury”, a Polish freedom fighter of the ZOLNIERZE WYKLECI, and accuse him of doing genocide on Belarussians. How absurd to insinuate that killing a handful of Belarussians, assuming that it actually happened and was unjustified, was an act of genocide!  This gratuitous finger-pointing, directed against the ZOLNIERZE WYKLECI (Indomitable Soldiers), forces us to examine Belarussian conduct during WWII. My review does this.

BELARUSSIANS KILLED JEWS, FOR GERMANS, BY CHOICE. POLES DID NOT

Martin Dean describes the situation in German-occupied Belarussian SSR, “Who were the local collaborators who actively implemented Nazi genocide in the east? In the areas under German civil administration, the active participants came mainly from more than 25,000 men who volunteered for local police service during the first months of the occupation.” (p. 162. Emphasis added).

He elaborates, “Recruitment to the militias had initially taken place by the Germans asking for volunteers…The majority of policemen were recruited from among the rural population in the villages: ‘Within one or two weeks of the Germans occupying Mir, they established a police unit made up of local Belarussian men. All the men in the police unit were volunteers.” (p. 65. Emphasis added).

Notice that this is completely different from the Polish Blue Police (Policja Granatowa) in German-occupied Poland, and in which service was mandatory from the beginning of the German occupation! Furthermore, not only did the Germans rely on Belarussian volunteers to kill Jews, but they did not even begin to conscript men to serve in the local Belarussian police forces until the summer of 1942. (p. 66, 162). This was a year after they had occupied the area.

Dean contrasts the earlier voluntary service in the German-serving Belarussian police forces with the later conscripted service in the same, “Certainly it is fair to make a distinction between the early volunteers who had thrown in their lot with the Germans from the start, and the later conscripts who were generally less enthusiastic, especially once they began to doubt the certainty of German victory. The volunteer leaders of the Schutzmannschaft committed themselves to the Germans from a combination of anti-Communism and personal ambition. Many of these men took an active part in the murderous actions against the Jews and partisan families. The majority of conscripted policemen, however, only took their oaths in the autumn of 1942 (that is, following the main actions against the Jews).” (p. 71).

DO NOT MYSTIFY ANTISEMITISM AND DO NOT TRY TO FOLD EVERY JEWISH-UNFRIENDLY ACT INTO ANTISEMITISM

Martin Dean moves beyond the standard Judeocentric contextual vacuum that exists whenever service to the Nazi Germans, of whatever kind, is discussed. He comments, “The role of antisemitism amongst the active policemen and in the remainder of the population is difficult to assess…It remains doubtful, however, that those who participated in Nazi atrocities acted purely from motives of racial hatred. A similar bloodthirstiness and indifference to human life was applied by the local police towards many victims who were not Jews. Gypsies, POWs, partisan families and even Russians (‘easterners’) all suffered similar treatment from local police units as ‘hostile elements’ identified by German policy.” (pp. 162-163).

He makes his conclusion even stronger as he writes, “The generalized characterization of the Order Police as consisting of ‘willing executioners’ motivated primarily by anti-Semitism does not in my view suffice to explain the full range of behavior patterns to be found in the evidence.” (pp. 75-76).

JEWISH-NAZI COLLABORATION IS A TABOO TOPIC

Dean nevertheless shows his strong Judeocentric bias. Throughout this book, he freely elaborates on Belarussian and Ukrainian collaboration, but treats Jewish collaboration as a forbidden phrase. In fact, when discussing Piotrowski and his Poland’s Holocaust, Dean name-calls Piotrowski a “nationalist”, and cites the ‘unfortunate treatment of the issue of ‘Jewish collaboration’. (p. 191). The standard double standard is once again in force.

The author also uses the mendacious phrase “Polish death camps”. (p. 101). This is not encouraging.

HOW MANY POLISH DEPORTEES TO SIBERIA?

Many historians uncritically accept Soviet archives and their tally of only 320,000 Polish deportees in the USSR in 1939-1941. They also automatically reject Polish émigré sources that speak of 1.2–1.6 million Polish deportees. Dean does not. He cites German scholar D. Pohl, who, in his Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, reconciles the two sources of information as follows, “He suggests that unaccounted population losses due to military conscription, labor recruitment and arrests may be responsible for some of this discrepancy.” (p. 174).

So, it appears that Soviet archives are unreliable not so much because they are untruthful but because they are fragmentary and incomplete. No one should automatically believe them. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/06/24/ruthless-communism-not-exterminatory-pioneering-forced-labor-happened/