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

Europe Against the Jews: 1880-1945, by Gotz Aly. 2020. Metropolitan Books, New York

Recognized German Fault for Polish Acts Against Jews

This book centers on European anti-Semitism in the decades preceding the Third Reich. This tends towards diluting German guilt for the Holocaust by relativizing and conflating the German-Austrian murder of 6 million Jews with unremarkable European anti-Semitism. It folds everything into the Holocaust, which effectively trivializes the Holocaust.

I instead focus on some worthwhile information.

SUPREME GERMAN FAULT: GERMANY CAUSED THE HOLOCAUST

In view of the customary dilution of German guilt, and the gross overemphasis on collaboration, the following statements by Gotz Aly cannot be said often enough, “The deportations and murders of the Holocaust were the result of German initiative. Germans controlled the bureaucratic operations, detaining people, sending them to ghettos, and confiscating their possessions. Germans developed the technology of the genocide. They organized the mass executions and death camps. They unleashed the violence against the Jews in the states that were occupied by Nazi Germany or allied with it. There is no question that the ultimate culpability rests with the Hitler regime.” (p. 4).

He adds that, “Nazi Germany radicalized the methods of classifying human beings to an unprecedented and previously unimaginable extent. German bureaucrats and population experts decided on the welfare and misery, life and death, of millions of people.” (p. 104). In other words, Nazism was a radical movement, and was not only radical on the Jewish question.

NON-GERMAN ACTS AGAINST JEWS WERE THEMSELVES CAUSED BY GERMAN ACTIONS!

Recurrent accusations of “Polish complicity in the Holocaust”, whatever its meaning, occur in a Judeocentric contextual vacuum. In contrast, historian Gotz Aly endorses what Poles had long been saying. He comes close to admitting that German occupation policies were responsible not only for direct acts against Jews, but also for occasional Polish acts against Jews. He candidly writes, “When documenting the behavior of the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarussian populations during the war, we need to keep in mind the boundless terror to which people were subjected.” (p. 274). Hear that, Jewish Polonophobes?

Aly makes his point about German fault even stronger, “The Wehrmacht’s pitiless, homicidal campaigns in Eastern Europe, the main area of Jewish settlement, dragged tens of millions of people into a vortex of privation, terror, and death. It made civilians into profiteers of the victims–and often enough into victims themselves. The demise of normal political structures of governance and organization, an end intentionally pursued by German occupiers, set the scene for plunder and murder.” (p. 324. Emphasis added). They certainly did. So much for the Judeocentric myth of Poles as bystanders–a grotesque, Orwellian term that implies that Poles were untouched by German terror.

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POLISH TREATMENT OF JEWS IN PREWAR POLAND: JEWS PROVOKED IT

Most books on this subject automatically blame everything by the Poles. The author is a little different. He focuses on the views of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, a Polish freethinker and intellectual who opposed acts of violence and discrimination against Jews. Gotz Aly points out that Courtenay realized that Jews were partly at fault. He comments, “De Courtenay advised Zionist leaders and those who insisted on a legally protected, semiautonomous Jewish community in Poland to moderate their demands. He thought that claims to ‘national-personal and cultural autonomy’ went too far because they insisted upon ‘autonomous institutions and administrative separation from the rest of the population.’ He argued that Jews had to accept the Second Republic’s constitutional institutions, civil and criminal legal codes, as well as the state’s right to raise taxes.” (p. 205). This is Poland, not Judeopolonia!

In other words, Jews must accept some of the blame. They must stop strutting around and acting as if they were a separate nation on Polish soil before they insist that Polish attitudes towards Jews improve. Is this too much to ask?