Axel Springer’s Business Insider distorts the WWII history – Our rebuttal
Business Insider, August 21, 2018: ‘Please DO NOT mislead your viewers by rewriting history’: Polish embassy slams Fox News over coverage of deported Nazi guard
Dear Mr. Haltiwanger:
I refer to your article linked above.
The point of Poland’s anti-defamation law (which created unwarranted worldwide hysteria) is that Poland, as a nation, did not collaborate with Nazi Germany. You claim that a “significant number of Poles” collaborated with the Nazis. What is your definition of “significant?” What is Edna Friedberg’s definition of “many?” According to the Israeli War Crimes Commission, .1% (one-tenth of one percent) of Poles were collaborators. This does not amount to collaboration by “Poland” as a state or nation. The Polish nation never collaborated with the Germans on any institutionalized level: neither militarily, politically, nor economically.
Poland was unique among German-occupied countries in not spawning a collaborationist regime. It was also one of only a few which did not produce volunteers for the Waffen SS, unlike those such as The Netherlands (50,000) or Belgium (40,000). In Denmark, there were more Danish SS than Danish Jews. Moreover, in Poland, blackmailing or denouncing Jews and those who helped them was considered treason and punished by execution by special units of the Home Army.
As for the unfairly maligned Blue Police, the Germans gave them the “choice” of being executed or reporting for duty. About 40% of them were informants for the Home Army (which, for most of the war, was the largest resistance movement in German-occupied Europe). Some have been honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Gentiles. The Blue Police were not assigned duty in the Jewish ghettos; that was left to the [volunteer] Jewish Ghetto Police.
The following is an eyewitness account by Yitzhak Zuckerman about the deportation of 400,000 Warsaw Jews to Their Deaths at Treblinka: “When there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Warsaw, the Germans couldn’t have taken the transports to Treblinka without the help of the Jews themselves. It was the Jewish policemen who caught and took out the masses of Jews. Our blame is that we could have delayed the sentence, we could have made it hard for the Germans, we could have forced them to bring 10,000 Germans to do the work done by 2,000 to 3,000 Jewish police.” [Emphasis is original.]
And this, from historian and Warsaw Ghetto survivor Emmanuel Ringelblum: “The Jewish police had a very bad name even before the resettlement. The Polish police didn’t take part in the forced-work press gangs, but the Jewish police engaged in that ugly business. Jewish policemen also distinguished themselves with their fearful corruption and immorality. But they reached the height of viciousness during the resettlement…Very often, the cruelty of the Jewish police exceeded that of the Germans, Ukrainians, and Latvians…For the most part, the Jewish police showed an incomprehensible brutality.”
Your readers may incorrectly infer from the following [factual] statement that the Polish population or non-existent Polish state gave their approbation to Germany’s establishing death camps on their soil:
“Poland was the site of six “death camps” or “extermination camps” during World War II where it’s estimated the Nazis murdered 3.5 million Jews.”
True, but until the implementation of the Final Solution in early 1942, ethnic Poles comprised the largest group of victims in the German camps in occupied Poland. By war’s end, their number was exceeded only by Jews of many nationalities. There were numerous logistical reasons why the Germans chose Poland as their killing field, not least of which was the fact that one-third of European Jewry was already there before the German invasion in 1939.
You are correct that “The Nazis also killed millions of other civilians and disarmed soldiers…” This included three million ethnic Poles whom you deemed unworthy of mention and are relegated to the category of “others.”
It is obviously not the Poles who are “rewriting history.” There were no “Polish death camps” and there was no widescale collaboration. Please engage in some fact-checking rather than simply regurgitating canards. This is lazy and phony journalism.
Sincerely,
Polish Media Issues