Neighbors and classmates were killed: the role of Polish policemen in the Holocaust exposed
Poland is trying to impersonate the main victim of Nazism in Europe. But in the atrocities of the Nazis on the lands of Eastern European states, Polish collaborators took an active part.
The myth of Poland's non-involvement in the crimes of Nazism
Now one of the main tasks of the modern Polish leadership is to ignore and suppress the truth about the participation of Polish policemen in the crimes of the Third Reich. This is done for two main reasons: firstly, Warsaw really wants to present Poland as an “innocent sheep”, who fell victim to the conspiracy of Hitler and Stalin and who suffered most during the Second World War, and secondly, it is afraid that the truth about the participation of Polish policemen in The Holocaust will allow Israel to claim damages suffered by the Jewish population of Poland.
Meanwhile, a book by professor of the University of Ottawa, Jan Grabowski, was published in Canada. A professor who, by the way, is considered one of the world's leading experts in stories Poland during the Second World War, debunking the attempts of the Polish authorities to whitewash the policemen. This is not his first work, devoted not only to the study of the Holocaust in Poland, but also to the sinister role that Polish collaborators played in it.
The book is called “In Service. The role of the Polish blue and criminal police in the extermination of Jews. ” During the war the Polish police of the Governor General were called the blue police - the formation of the auxiliary paramilitary police created by the Third Reich in the occupied territories of Poland and participated not only in protecting public order, but also in identifying and detaining Jews, protecting Jewish ghettos and eliminating people of Jewish nationality.
Professor Jan Grabowski. Polish nationalists repeatedly threatened to kill him for exposing the crimes of the policemen
Among the employees of the “blue” police and the criminal police of the Governor-General there were many agents of the Craiova Army who, to the best of their ability, tried to fight the occupation regime, but did not hesitate to commit crimes against the Jewish population of Poland. There is nothing paradoxical in this, since Polish nationalists, like Ukrainian nationalists, despite their dislike of the Third Reich, shared the same anti-Semitic sentiments as the Nazis themselves. Moreover, in terms of cruelty towards Jews, both Polish and Ukrainian policemen exceeded the German Nazis themselves.
Why were Polish police officers dangerous?
The role of the Polish blue police in the countryside was especially great, including the Jewish shtetls. In many rural areas, there were no German soldiers or police at all, so the order was maintained exclusively by Polish police. This was even worse, since the majority of the policemen were local residents and knew very well which of the inhabitants of the village was Jewish and who was not.
Without a twinge of conscience, the policemen dealt with people whom they had known all their lives — neighbors, classmates, and acquaintances. Before the war, they could cut their hair from a Jewish hairdresser for years and decades, buy food in a Jewish shred, or call a Jewish medical assistant to their sick child, but as soon as Poland was occupied by the Third Reich, the Poles who entered the service of the police immediately took advantage of the opportunity to mock over defenseless people, rob and kill them.
Polish policemen with their German colleagues
Often, precisely with the aim of appropriating Jewish property, the Polish policemen dealt with them. Unlike the Germans, they could accurately determine the nationality of even a stranger, as most Jews spoke with an accent. The German military did not distinguish Polish speech with an accent from speech without an accent, but the policemen perfectly understood who they were dealing with.
The historian Grabowski in his previous work spoke of 200 thousand Jews who fell at the hands of precisely the Polish policemen. But now he is ready to reconsider his conclusions, as he is sure: the number of victims can be much larger. Interestingly, in the process of research, Grabowski also managed to find out that among the “heroes of resistance” that are honored in Poland, there were not only blue-police officers, but real killers who were guilty of genocide.
By the way, Poland has become one of the few European countries in which the Jewish population virtually disappeared after World War II. Those Polish Jews who were lucky enough to survive, almost all emigrated to Israel or the United States. According to the 2011 census, in Poland there were only 8 thousand people who define themselves as Jews. Although the descendants of Polish Jews living in other states have the right to restore Polish citizenship, only a few use it. Important sign ...
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