In 1990 Polish Intelligence was asked by the CIA to assist in pulling out of Iraq 3 CIA operatives who were stranded within the country. At the same time the Iraqis had arrested a son of a retired Polish intelligence officer who then went to Iraq to help his son. In a ruthless manner, the Polish Intelligence leaked to the Iraqis that it was him who was trying to rescue the Americans, using him as a decoy. A gripping story, sometimes complicated, as real life sometimes tends to be.
IT CAME AS A SURPRISE to many when the U.S. postwar plans for Iraq were finally revealed. Like Gaul, Iraq would be divided into three parts: an American zone, a British zone, and a Polish zone. But what role did Poland play during the war? It turns out a very important one--albeit one that was kept mostly secret.
One of the primary objectives during the early stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom was the port at Umm Qasr. Without it, delivering adequate humanitarian aid to the rest of Iraq would have been nearly impossible for the coalition. Not long after the start of the war, the port was secured--in large part thanks to GROM, Poland's elite commandos.
Who even knew Poland had special forces? For a while, not many. The Polish government waited three years before publicly disclosing GROM's existence. Standing for Grupa Reagowania Operacyjno Mobilnego (Operational Mobile Response Group), the name actually stems from a special-forces commander, Gromoslaw Czempinski, who, during the first Gulf War, led a Polish unit into Western Iraq to rescue a group of CIA operatives. One of the other men on that secret mission was Slawomir Petelicki--the father of GROM.
"GROM was my idea," General Petelicki says in his husky, accented voice. "I presented it to the new democratic government" in 1991 "and because I liked to give honor to the commander of my unit, I named it after Gromoslaw." (Grom also means thunder in Polish.) Petelicki, now retired from the military, spoke from Warsaw where he is now
an independent consultant for, among others, Ernst & Young. It's quite a change of pace for a man once described in Jane's Intelligence Review as "his country's James Bond and Rambo wrapped neatly into one daunting package." (Petelicki also serves as chairman of the Special Forces Foundation. "I try to help former commandos and discourage them from going into organized crime--where there are many lucrative offers for work.")
Petelicki tried selling his idea of an elite Polish commando group much earlier, "but those Russians didn't like to have real special forces operating in Poland--they feared we could start training in guerrilla warfare against them." But the need did arise in 1990, following Operation Bridge, in which Poland helped Soviet Jews enter Israel. Intelligence reports indicated that Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were planning reprisals inside the Polish border. Then-Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki recognized the threat and approved of Petelicki's plan for a new counter-terror force.
"I had a lot of candidates at first" says the general. "That first team I assembled from people I knew well. They were all in their 30s. Now the age of recruits is about 26." According to Jane's Intelligence Review, "GROM candidates were first subjected to a grueling psychological examination meant to search for confident and innovative soldiers as well as those who, though they might be lacking in physical strength, possessed the rare gift of internal iron will." The candidates then undergo back-breaking training deep in the Carpathian Mountains.
Only 1 to 5 percent of these candidates actually get into GROM. But once they are in, the real training begins: GROM operators practice "killing house" entries (with commanders often serving as hostages), storm hijacked commercial airliners complete with mannequin terrorists and bullet traps, and lead raids onto ships and offshore platforms. All of this is done with live ammunition. The commandos are trained in paramedics and demolitions and many are SCUBA experts. They mostly work in four to six-man assault teams except for the snipers who are separate because, as Petelicki explains, "that is a job for special people and they are very hard to replace."
Radek Sikorski, Poland's former deputy minister of defense and now executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative, recently told me he witnessed the snipers at their best during a training exercise in 1999. "The GROM operators were working alongside the Delta Force and were tasked with rescuing the chairman of the National Bank of Poland. He was being held hostage by terrorists in possession of a nuclear device." Sikorski says the snipers waited for days in complete disguise. "They just followed the terrorists' routines and then started to pick them off one by one."
GROM operators are said to be martial arts experts and capable of "cold killing." "We created our own style of martial arts," says Petelicki. "I have an old friend who is a master of karate and jujitsu and is a sixth degree black belt. He created the style with other specialists--it is most similar to what the Israelis do."
And what about "cold killing"? Asked if the ominous term refers to garrotes or piano wire, Petelicki replies "Yes." Pausing to choose his words carefully, he explains, "Many things. For instance, we can create a weapon from . . . well . . . many things." The weapon used most by GROM is the MP5 submachine gun. They also get to choose their own sidearm--most choose either the Glock Model 19 or the SIG-Sauer P228.
PETELICKI says that GROM is a mixture of the Delta Force, SAS, and the Navy SEALs. "We took what we found best from each group."
(GROM trainers have been to Fort Bragg as well as Hereford--home of the SAS.)
For the past twelve years, GROM operators have engaged in numerous operations, including peacekeeping in the Balkans and Haiti. In 1997, they successfully captured Slavko Dokmanovic, aka, "the Butcher of Vukovar" who was held responsible for the murder of 260 Croats. Despite being well-protected by Serb commandos, Dokmanovic was successfully captured alive (his bodyguards didn't fare so well).
So what was the significance in having 56 commandos from the 300-member GROM take part in Operation Iraqi Freedom? "This war saved GROM," says Petelicki. "Without it, it would have been broken up between the army and navy. But now everyone knows about GROM in Poland and they are proud of them."
Radek Sikorski observes that "It was wise for the United States to show countries who backed it in this war that they are appreciated. This will probably pave the way for more 'coalitions of the willing.' Poland took a lot of risks supporting America. It also took a beating from some of its European friends." Sikorski thinks this could be the beginning of a special relationship with the United States, akin to the one shared by Great Britain, but warns "it is still in the very early stages and much will also depend on America's staying power in the region, its willingness to remain interested in Central Europe. One thing the Americans could do is move their bases out of Germany and into Poland, which has less population density and greater space to conduct exercises."
Since GROM's creation 12 years ago, only 4 commandos have been killed in operations. I asked General Petelicki if, during those years, there is one mission that stands out. "Although 70 percent of our operations are still top secret, the one operation I liked best was this last one at Umm Qasr. That was definitely my favorite. [He sighs.] I was jealous I could not be there instead of Colonel Polko [the current commander of GROM]. Umm Qasr was a very risky operation--a lot of explosives were used--but there were no casualties for us." He adds, "I liked it because we were able to help our friends, the Americans, who helped us create GROM. It was a real masterpiece."
by Dr. Edmund Walendowski
Introduction
Poland's Operational Maneuver Reconnaissance Group (GROM) (also referred to as Thunderbolt) is the nation's elite Special Forces (SF) unit. Created 10 years ago to combat terrorist threats, the GROM is Poland's equivalent to the U.S. Delta Force and the British Special Air Service (SAS). GROM personnel undergo rigorous training and have gained international recognition through their participation in several multinational operations.
The Polish GROM
Almost a decade ago, Polish intelligence sources notified the government that the country faced threats from terrorist organizations such as the Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command. These threats were prompted by Poland's role in the secret mass migration of Jews from the former Soviet Union to Israel. In response, former Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki issued a top secret directive creating a new Special Operations unit, and in 1990 the GROM was established with assistance from U.S. and British specialists. Subordinated directly to the Minister of Internal Affairs, the GROM became the first Polish military unit to cooperate with the U.S. Army.
It was not until 1994 that Poland disclosed the fact that such a unit existed in the country. In January 1999, the GROM was transformed into a special military formation to comply with NATO standards. Today it is considered to be the best commando unit among the newest members of NATO (i.e., Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic). The GROM traces its history to the CICHOCIEMNI ("dark and silent"), a Polish special operations unit during World War II.
While the GROM is modeled on the British SAS, more specific data about its size and organization are not publicly available. It is thought to consist of approximately 300 personnel, including women who gather intelligence. The unit operates in four-member teams. GROM soldiers must be prepared to perform tasks ranging from rescuing hostages to protecting dignitaries; such missions can take them anywhere in the world. GROM soldiers are free to choose their own combat weapons. The favorite weapon appears to be the 9-mm MP-5 machine pistol shown in figure 1. Sidearms include the Browning HP, the CZ-85 (see figure 2), the Glock Model 19, and the SIG-Sauer P228 (see figure 3). Another popular weapon is the 7.62-mm caliber AK. Snipers employ the PSG-1 7.62-mm caliber rifle (see figure 4).
Figure 1. MP-5 Machine Pistol
Figure 2. CZ-85 Pistol
Figure 3. SIG-Sauer P228 Pistol
Figure 4. PSG-1 7.62-mm Sniper Rifle
The GROM recruits individuals from all walks of life. In an effort to ensure responsible and experienced personnel, it seeks candidates who are around 30 years of age and have families; consequently, it does not accept younger recruits from active service. The unit looks for individuals who are intelligent and well-rounded (each member, for example, knows at least two foreign languages). GROM members tend to be somewhat independent in character; however, intellectuals are not sought because, according to a GROM psychologist, they prove to be too individualistic in an environment where team work is essential. The GROM attempts to use its operators for as long as possible, because their experience is difficult to replace. According to the unit's commander, General Slawomir Petelicki, there are officers aged 45 in this unit who are more fit than younger soldiers. Those who eventually leave the GROM often become instructors in military units.
GROM personnel are highly trained and motivated. General Petelicki, for example, is an expert in intelligence operations, long-range reconnaissance, and diversionary activities. It takes a minimum of 3 years and costs about 1 million dollars to train a GROM operator. All training is conducted with live ammunition. Candidates undergo long and complicated psychological testing. An operator's reactions must be quick but composed under stressful situations. In a typical training session, a soldier is placed in a dark room full of figures representing terrorists and hostages. He must then choose the proper silhouette at which to shoot. In another exercise, he is shown a photograph of a target, after which he must burst into a room filled with post-explosion smoke, select the proper target among the many present in the room, and then shoot at it.
The GROM is also trained in other operations. It is responsible for protecting strategic state reserves, such as oil drilling platforms in the Baltic Sea. Members take part in open-sea rescue operations. They must learn to dive in various conditions and use underwater equipment that does not leave traces on the water surface. GROM operators are the only soldiers in the Polish armed forces to perform free-fall jumps in winter. The GROM must also be prepared to conduct protection, evacuation, and rescue operations outside the country. In fact, its missions outside of Poland have earned it international recognition.
In autumn, 1994, Poland was prepared to deploy 51 members of the GROM to Haiti 6 hours after the Polish government decided to assist the UN mission on the island. The unit was tasked to protect international dignitaries sent to Haiti to implement the democracy restoration program. These dignitaries included UN Secretary General Butrus-Ghali, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry, UN Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi, and several U.S. senators and high-ranking military officials. In 1997, the GROM became the first unit in the former Yugoslavia (Slavonia) to arrest a suspected war criminal. Slavko Dokmanovic, known as the "Butcher of Vukovar," was apprehended without a shot being fired, despite the presence of his security service. More recently, the GROM protected the chief of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission, Ambassador William G. Walker, on his visit to Kosovo. It is said that Ambassador Walker personally asked for GROM soldiers to serve as his bodyguards. This choice could have been influenced by the fact that the Poles understand Serbian and Croatian. Apparently, the GROM has participated in other operations as well, but details have not been revealed due to security concerns.
Presently, the GROM is the subject of intense debate within the Polish government. The issue revolves around which branch of the government should exercise control over this unit. Some argue that since the GROM is a military unit, it should be transferred from the Ministry of Interior Affairs to the Defense Ministry. Some go farther and state that, once the GROM is transferred to the Defense Ministry, it should have a separate budget and be subject to the government Anticrisis Center and be at the disposal of the Prime Minister. In either case, it appears that the decision to deploy the GROM on missions will not be made subject to public debate. This is to keep in line with the unit's purpose—to act in surprise during crises.
Summary
There is no doubt that the GROM will continue to be the most elite unit in the Polish military for years to come. It has served Poland well in the past and remains an important component of the armed forces. In its short history, the GROM has evolved from an antiterrorist organization to an SF unit capable of accomplishing different missions. Thus, not only does the GROM contribute to the overall readiness of Polish forces to act in an emergency, but it also serves to bolster the number of SF units within the NATO alliance.
Unit Profile #2
Although a new unit, (created in 1991) Poland's GROM has worked hard and diligently at becoming a first class CT unit. GROM operators are pulled from Poland's special warfare community, both army and naval forces. It is known that GROM operates in four-person teams, each team being a highly proficient and cohesive unit. Women are also present in GROM, but due to security reasons, their functions are unknown (although it is believed they are routinely involved in intelligence gathering and stakeouts). All members of a team are fully trained as combat assault personnel. It is interesting to note that fully 75 percent of GROM operators are certified paramedics or male nurses. In addition, there are several Medical doctors attached to the unit. These doctors also act as combat assault personnel, carrying their medical kits along with their assault ones.
GROM also has fully functioning support teams, ranging from technicians and analysts to EOD (Explosives Ordinance Disposal) personnel. Many of the people running these support teams are former operators themselves, either too old to participate in the assaults or unfit due to an injury. These former operators bring and maintain experience and skills. In addition, each GROM operator is expected to know at least two languages. Because Poland's terrain is so diverse, operators train in different settings and locations. Urban as well as alpine and mountainous settings are used. In addition, because of Poland's many ports, GROM personnel are trained in maritime operations and are fully SCUBA qualified. Because of their dedication and skill (particularly in the VIP protection arena) GROM was selected in 1994 to take part in Operation Restore Democracy, the American led invasion of Haiti. Initially they were sent to train with members of the US 3rd Special Forces Group in Puerto Rice. There, they were educated in Haitian politics and social systems ad allowed to acclimate to the climate. Upon deployment to Haiti, GROM operators provided security for several important VIPs, including former UN General Secretary Butros Butros Ghali and former US Secretary of Defense William Perry.
Today GROM is preparing to protect another US official, Ambassador William Walker, head of the 2000-strong Kosovo verification team. "We are especially happy if we can cooperate with and support our American allies," says Gen. Slowomir Petelicki, GROM's commander. "They helped us create this unit."
Official date of born for GROM is 13 july 1990.
First CO:
- Col Petelicki (now he's a retired general). He was born in 1946 in Warsaw. In 1969 he finished University of Warsaw as a lawyer. From 1969 to 1990 he was an Intelligence Officer (10 years in foreign ops). In 1990 -1995 he was a CO of GROM. In this time he received Krzyz Zaslugi Za Dzielnosc (Cross for Bravery?), Krzyz Oficerski i Komandorski Orderu Odrodzenia Polski (Officer's and Commandor's Cross of Reborn of Poland ?), US medals - For Military Merit and Army Commendation Medal (for operation Restoration of Democracy - Haiti,by US ARMY general major David C. Mead). Gen. Petelicki is also a honorary member of 5th and 10th Special Forces Group (Green Berets) and he's after a full training in this units. After a short break , from 6th December 1997 he became GROM's CO again.
Polish Special Unit GROM has a new commander:
plk. (col.)Roman Polko. He's a former CO of the 18th AirAssaultBattalion/6th AAB. He was also CO of the Polish-Nordic Bat. in KFOR/ Kosovo. Few years ago he finished Ranger Course and Pathfinder Course in USA.
GROM is a fully professional unit. GROM members are former soldiers and officers of:
-6th Air Assault Bde
-1st Ind. Special Regiment
-Special Companies (canceled in early 90's - one of strange decissions of polish gov.)
-UDT from Polish Navy
- AT squads from Police, UOP and similar units
-Intelligence
In GROM there are women as a soldiers, also. Probably few of these girls served during Restoration of Democracy (Haiti).GROM soldiers always train with sharp ammo with GROM commanders as hostages. They train also in time of police actions against real "bad guys" (we have in Poland strong organized crime groups. Few weeks ago "polish FBI" and UOP was smash one of the dangerous group named "Pruszkow"). It's not a secret that GROM in his first steps on warfare arena received help from British SAS, US Special Ops like Navy SEALs and Delta.
Equipment, tactics and training systems are also similar f.e.: - Pro-Tec helmets
- gear
- boots (HiTec?)
- guns: P-8 H&K USP,Glock, SigSauer, Browning HP
- pm's:H&K MP-5 SD
- sniper rifles: Mauser 86 7,62 mm , PSG-1, Remington
- shotguns: Remington Wingmaster
Search the entire Special Operations.Com website for the specific information you are looking for.
Just type in your search terms in the white box provided below, then select "Search".
This is no way to treat this country's most loyal ally. That's right - most loyal ally. While some claim Great Britain deserves that title, remember, when President Bush traveled to London in November, it took 14,000 Bobbies to keep the Brits away from him. He was heckled by protesters and attacked in the British press.
When Bush visited Krakow in May, Poles welcomed him with open arms. As a result, French President Jacques Chirac threatened to block Poland's entry into the European Union.
Like Britain, Poland also sent troops to Iraq. Poland sent its elite commando unit, GROM, which means thunder. It helped secure the port at Umm Qasr, which was vital to delivering aid to Iraq. The unit also secured nearby oil platforms before they could be sabotaged. In this new phase of the war, Iraq has been divided into three zones: American, British and Polish. GROM and regular Polish units helped in the search for Saddam and his loyalists.
The Polish troops receive high marks from American military officers. One U.S. special forces commander was quoted in Jane's Intelligence Review saying that GROM's founder, Gen. Slawomir Petelicki, was a cross between "James Bond and Rambo wrapped neatly into one daunting package".
In the first Gulf War, Polish intelligence officers snuck into Iraq to rescue a group of CIA operatives trapped behind enemy lines. Poland's secret agents disguised CIA agents as Polish construction workers and smuggled them out of Baghdad
England's Poles in the Game: WWII Intelligence Cooperation
By Marek Jan Chodakiewicz
Posted: Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Intelligencer (Washington)
Publication Date: Fall 2006-Spring 2007
The Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies, vol. 15, no. 2 (Fall 2006-Winter 2007): 98-100.
England’s Poles in the Game
The Cold War retarded and even, in some cases, prevented research into intelligence activities of the Allied nations between 1939 and 1945. First, the Soviet threat assured that many historical records pertaining to the Second World War, including the struggle against Nazi Germany, would remain classified. And this went well beyond the usual procedures dictating that all intelligence agencies jealously guard their secrets. Second, there was no academic freedom behind the Iron Curtain. Hence, captive historians put out hardly anything uncensored.
Third, even in the free West, however, there was certain reluctance to pursue research in the field of intelligence. Some of it had to do with the fact that, embarrassingly, the USSR conducted anti-Western operations before, during, and after Moscow’s alliance with Berlin (August 1939-June 1941).Last but not least, responsible Western historians were cautious about publishing some of their revelations lest they cause adverse repercussions behind the Iron Curtain. Namely, by identifying war-time, anti-Nazi Western assets in the East, one exposed them to Communist terror. This impacted the Poles in particular.
Poland was virtually the only nation in East Central Europe to join the Western coalition from the outset of the war in 1939. Poland had also the unfortunate distinction of having been invaded by both the Third Reich and the USSR at the same time. The Poles saw two enemies, Hitler and Stalin. Western Allies pretended that only the former was a threat to freedom and democracy.
Nonetheless, the Poles trusted the West. Consequently, as reflected in the recent findings of a joint Anglo-Polish Historical Committee, the contribution of the Polish intelligence to the victory over Hitler was second to none. According to the records of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “between 3 September 1939 and 8 May 1945, the total was 45,770 [intelligence] reports – 22,047 of which were received from Polish sources” (p. 560). In fact, the Poles supplied more “than 80,000 reports” to the Brits (p. 17). At the conclusion of the war, Commander Wilfred Dunderdale, the Prime Minister’s liaison with the intelligence community, stated that “the Polish agents have worked unceasingly and well in Europe during the last five years, and that they have provide, often at great danger to themselves and to their relatives, a vast amount of material of all kinds on a wide range of subjects. The Polish IS [intelligence service] has made an invaluable contribution to the planning and the successful execution of the invasion of France, and to the ultimate victory of the Allied forces in Europe” (p. 560)
The Brits were in a unique position to know. The Poles resolved to share their secrets and assets with the British from the outset. Although the Polish intelligence remained subordinated to the Polish constitutional authorities, its operations, infrastructure, and finances were to a certain extent intertwined with the British secret services. This was especially true at the spy center in Great Britain, where the hosts controlled virtually all incoming and outgoing radio and courier communications of the Poles.
Geographically, the intelligence activities of Poland literarily spanned the globe. The Polish net covered all of Europe, including Nazi-controlled territories, German satellite nations, neutral countries, and the Third Reich itself; north Africa, both free and Axis-dominated; Asia, including Japanese-occupied territory in China; Latin America; and North America.
In terms of the personnel, most operatives were ethnic Polish Christians of all political orientations, except the Communists. There were naturally a few persons of Jewish origin. Perhaps the most intrepid of them, the colorful Countess Krystyna Skarbek hiked the Carpathians to infiltrate into Nazi-occupied Poland, escaped from the Nazis in Budapest in a trunk of a car, and parachuted into France right before the invasion. But even Skarbek, her Jewish background nothwithstanding, was of Christian faith and Polish culture.
The exception to the mono-cultural rule was the Polish intelligence set-up in France, where, by mid-1944, the majority of agents were French nationals. However, even there the iron Polish rule applied: no mercenaries. All operatives were highly motivated individuals who carried out their activities for idealistic reasons. They loved freedom. They hated Nazism and Communism. Most did not draw any salaries. Scarce funds provided to the network by the Polish Government-in-Exile (and by the British and Americans) barely covered the operational costs. But the price most commonly paid by the agents was blood. The losses among the assets were enormous. In a single case, in 1942, 500 operatives were arrested and executed after the Gestapo destroyed a Polish underground net which had conducted espionage and sabotage deep inside the Reich (including bombing attacks on the Berlin railway network). But the Poles kept fighting because their ultimate reward was to be a free Poland.
Aside from idealism, perhaps the most salient characteristics of the Polish operations were their sheer pragmatism, audacity, and forethought. The Poles not only diligently spied on Nazi Germany and its confederates, but also vigilantly kept a watchful eye on the Soviet Union. For example, Poland’s secret operatives in the United States tracked down Nazi and Communist sympathizers in the so-called ethnic communities, Slavs and others from Eastern Europe. Further, the Polish intelligence took advantage of its pre-war ties to its Japanese counterpart to milk it for secrets on the Nazis. In fact, Polish intelligence officers, usually under the cover of White Russian émigrés, worked out of Japanese diplomatic missions in Kaunas, Stockholm, Bucharest, and Berlin itself. The Poles swapped with the Japanese news about the Soviet Union for intelligence on the Third Reich.
Anti-Communism also allowed the Poles to operate much more suavely than the Anglo-Americans in Hitler’s European satellites and in neutral countries, Spain and Portugal in particular. The Polish even exchanged intelligence with the Finns and the Swedes. From 1940 at least Poland’s secret services worked hard to wean Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria from the Axis. At the same time, they supplied the Western Allies with crucial intelligence, for example facilitating US Air Force bombing raids against the Rumanian oil fields and refineries.
Of course, the greatest Polish gift to defeating the Nazis was the cracking of the Enigma code by Polish mathematicians working for military intelligence. That happened already before the Second World War. Still more, on the eve of the war, in August 1939, the Poles presented the French and the British with a working model of the Enigma machine, reconstructed from the scratch in Poland. Carried on by the Poles and the British, the decrypting project, code-named Ultra, provided the Allies with the most valuable intelligence which, ultimately, greatly expedited the victory over Hitler.
Other Polish contributions, both major and minor, are quite notable, if obscure. The Polish intelligence located and penetrated the Penemünde V-1 rocket factory, which, ultimately, resulted in its utter destruction by the Allied bombers. The Poles also stole an intact V-2 rocket, which was passed on to the Brits. Next, the British authorities received periodic, weekly and monthly, reports on industrial espionage, troop movement, target spotting, and the effects of the Allied bombing on Germany’s infrastructure and civilian morale.
Further, the Poles supplied the British with the Nazi plans to invade the USSR. The reports included the details of the German troop deployment. From the fall of 1941, the Polish underground Home Army, or, more specifically, its commando units led by Polish special service officers parachuted from Great Britain, carried out a sustained and massive sabotage campaign against German transport and personnel behind the Eastern Front. The intelligence teams reached as far east as Moscow. However, the epicenter of the sabotage undertaking was in occupied Poland, the Nazi transportation hub. Sustained assaults seriously retarded and, occasionally, halted the rail-based movement of the German troops.
The Poles prepared the grounds for the Allied landing in north Africa, so-called operation “Torch”. According to an American military attaché in the region, “the Polish network… were by all odds the most efficient and professional in their field, supplying the Allies with a wealth of valuable and proven information” (p. 36). Polish operatives also set up the stage for the invasion of Normandy. Polish agents served as decoys. By staging sabotage acts elsewhere, they lured the German forces away from Allied landing zones. Cases of supreme sacrifice and exemplary devotion to the cause can be multiplied virtually ad infinitum.
The achievements of the Polish intelligence were simply stunning. The Allies appreciated the high quality of their Polish network and frequently poached agents from the Poles. For example, the UK’s most valued “Agent no. 1” aka “Athos”, responsible for numerous acts of sabotage in Nazi-occupied Greece, including blown up oil depots, cargo ships, and submarines, was really Poland’s water-polo Olympian Jerzy Iwanow-Szajnowicz. Further, the British frequently passed on to the Americans numerous Polish intelligence reports either without attributing them or as their own. But Washington received the very same copies directly from the source by a separate special arrangement with the Poles. The US appreciated the contributions of the Polish ally.
Deputy Chief of American military intelligence General Hayes A. Kroner commented that “the Polish Army has the best intelligence in the world. Its value for us is beyond compare. Regretfully there is little we can offer in return” (p. 90). John Colville, Private Secretary to Winston Churchill, concurred: “Probably the best all-round players in the [intelligence] game were the Poles” (p. 37). A British scholar of intelligence, Hugh Skillen, dedicated his work “to the Poles who gave so much and received so little” (p. 472).
And what did the Poles receive? Well, Poland was sold to Stalin at Yalta. Most Polish intelligence operatives were abandoned to the Soviets. In one classic case of British naiveté, after the Soviet capture of Rumania, London asked Moscow to help evacuate Polish military intelligence officers undercover in Bucharest and elsewhere. Upon receiving from the British their names, characteristics, and general whereabouts, Stalin’s secret police proceeded to arrest the Poles. Some were killed; others shipped off to the Gulag.
London also did next to nothing to protect its Polish allies from Soviet infiltration. For example, MI5 dispatched Anthony Blunt to keep an eye on the Polish-government-in-exile. Blunt was, of course, an agent of the Kremlin, not uncovered until the 1960s. Moscow deployed against the Poles also the notorious double agents Kim Philby and John Cairncross. His Majesty’s Government was too busy fawning to Stalin to take the simplest security precautions against his assets in the UK.
In all fairness, a few Polish officers outside of the reach of Moscow were assisted moderately by the British. However, the Americans were much more generous than the Brits. More than a few Poles were employed in undercover work during the Cold War. For example, Captain Jerzy Niezbrzycki aka Ryszard Wraga served as the CIA’s top counterintelligence consultant. Niezbrzycki began his struggle against the totalitarians in 1917. He and a few of his comrades-in-arms lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their stories can now be told, a Polish continuity in the struggle for freedom.
Tadeusz Dubicki, Daria Nałęcz, and Tessa Sterling, eds., Intelligence Co-Operation Between Poland and Great Britain During World War II, vol. 1: The Report of the Anglo-Polish Historical Committee (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005).
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz
30 October 2006, Washington, DC
www.iwp.edu
The Truth About Polish Espionage
17 czerwiec 2001
Unknown documents that trace Polish-American intelligence cooperation during World War II were recently discovered in the National Archives in Washington DC.
Polish historian Dr. Rafał Wnuk, a researcher with the Political Studies Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), uncovered the documents. On Foreign Minister initiative, in cooperation with the United States government, a special scientific program was launched several months ago to search archives in the United States for documents from Polish intelligence proving its cooperation with the Allies in 1939-1945. The first phase of the program has already uncovered over 200 documents that confirmed earlier information from historians that American military intelligence to a large extent used Polish intelligence networks in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.
Polish intelligence operated in Germany, all the occupied European countries, the Balkans, North Africa and the Middle East. In 1942-1945, it transferred a total of several thousand reports containing critical information to the United States. However, finding them is not easy, mainly due to the principles guiding the storage of such materials in the United States-they are classified in archives according to subject, not source. Moreover, some of the recently discovered Polish intelligence documents bear notes stating that they were provided by British intelligence.
U.S. intelligence utilized Polish cooperation to verify news and data obtained from the German Enigma coding machine, whose code, incidentally, was broken with the assistance of Polish deciphering experts.
Polish intelligence also provided information about the effect of Allied bombings on the structure of German fortifications, the German arms industry and the construction of new arms, among other things. Military and economic data from the occupied territories of Poland and the Soviet Union were also important, as this area was the direct backdrop of the German eastern front. Polish agents also informed the Allies about the mood and morale of German society and the occupied countries.
"Poles are excellent at obtaining intelligence information. They are always the first ones to learn abut something," read one note, discovered by Wnuk, by one of the heads of U.S. strategic intelligence. "The Americans highly appreciated the efficiency of Polish intelligence. They even thought that the Polish network in occupied France was better than the French one," said Wnuk.
Polish intelligence also provided information about the tragic situation of Jews and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Polish emigre government in London gave the Allies similar information.
Final Farewells To A Polish Patriot Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, 1930-2004
Here in this Maryland suburb just north of Washington, D.C., on the chilly and overcast forenoon of March 31, 2004, a memorial mass was celebrated for the late Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski by Ks. Klemens Dabrowski. Coincidently, the rustic, stone, Our Lady Queen of Poland Parish Church, surrounded by stately trees, was very reminiscent of churches found dotting the Polish countryside. Ryszard Jerzy Kuklinski, who was born near Warsaw, Poland on June 13, 1930, passed away on February 11, 2004, at the age of 73, in Florida. The mass was attended by members of the Kuklinski family, including the widowed Joanna Kuklinska, Polish Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Boguslaw Winid, Military Attache Janusz Bojarski, Embassy Secretaries, many friends, and a large, wide cross section of local and regional Polonia. The National Polish Legion of American Veterans (PLAV) Color Guard, bearing the national and military flags of both Poland and the United States, was led by Major Filip Pawlisz, Commander. Internationally known soprano Alina Kozinska was the lead cantor at the mass. Tadeusz Mirecki, President of the Polish American Congress (PAC), Washington Metropolitan Area Division, organized the funeral mass, with the support of his wife Irena, under the auspices and sponsorship of the PAC Division.
Col. Kuklinski was fondly remembered and fittingly eulogized by three knowledgeable speakers: Pan Roman Barszcz, a childhood and life-long friend of Ryszard Kuklinski, gave a eulogy titled- "Farewell to the Colonel", subtitled: "Dear Friend From The Playground ? Dear Rysiu The Dreamer," and "Dear Colonel Richard, The Realist." Then followed- "A Colonel?s Farewell," delivered by Dr. Jan Parys, Poland's former Minister of Defense, who set the stage for Poland's entry into NATO, following along the then solitary and perilous path first blazed by Col. Kuklinski. Cmdr. Eugene Pawlikowski, PLAV, SSgt. Jagiello Post 191, provided the American perspective of Col. Kuklinski's brave accomplishments. The mood in the church was somber, and yet very uplifting, as the selfless life and many personal and professional sacrifices of the Colonel were recounted by the speakers.
Following on the same day, at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington, D.C., there was held "A Remembrance Evening Commemorating the Late Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski."
Ambassador Przemyslaw Grudzinski presided over the event and delivered welcoming and preliminary remarks to the Kuklinski family, dignitaries and guests. The Ambassador especially recognized Mrs. Joanna Kuklinska for her equally strong patriotism, great courage, and role in unconditionally supporting and sustaining her husband during the dangerous period the family weathered in Poland.
an Karski, a Georgetown University professor emeritus and bona fide World War II hero, died July 13 at age 86. I consider myself fortunate to have been among those he taught.
Tall, thin, and dressed in a crisp gray suit even in August, Karski lectured to me and my fellow college seniors on the Theory of Communism back in the fall semester of 1985. As the Cold War continued its chill, many of us yearned to fathom what made the Kremlin tick. Yet, having heard murmurs about his earlier activities, we begged him near semester’s end to skip the dialectics and answer one question: “What did you do during the war?”
Professor Karski hesitated at first but then began recounting his remarkable wartime story in his thick accent and sometimes high-pitched voice.
Karski and the Polish Underground
In the prewar years, Karski served as a Polish diplomat in Berlin, Geneva, and London. Just before the war erupted, he became an officer in the Polish army. At 5:05 a.m. on September 1, 1939, Lieutenant Karski’s shave was interrupted by Luftwaffe bombs. His cavalry unit proved no match for the Blitzkrieg; its artillery pieces no longer could be hauled by horses too frightened to fight.
Within weeks, Karski was captured by the Red Army after it invaded Poland under the notorious Hitler-Stalin Pact. Passing himself off as a private, Karski talked his way out of a camp in the Ukraine and into a prisoner exchange, thus avoiding the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn Forest. Karski later jumped from a German train that was carrying POWs to a Nazi forced labor facility.
Returning to Warsaw, he joined the Polish underground as a courier. Code-named “Witold,” Karski employed his photographic memory, familiarity with Europe’s terrain, and fluency in English, French, and German to spirit secret messages between Warsaw and the exiled Polish government in Paris.
Traversing Slovakia on his third mission in June 1940, Karski was caught by the Gestapo carrying a clandestine roll of film. Suffering from truncheon wounds, broken ribs, and missing teeth after three days of torture, Karski feared he might crack under further abuse. “I have little tolerance for pain,” he told us through his still-gaunt cheeks. So Karski reached into a secret compartment in his heel, extracted a razor blade, and slit his wrists.
He awoke in a Polish hospital, having failed at suicide. While confessing to a Catholic priest, he revealed his identity and asked the cleric to alert a member of the underground. Karski’s contact arrived the next day, disguised as a nun. “Go down the hallway at midnight,” Karski remembered Zofia Rysiowna whispering. “Leave your clothes behind. Jump out the window.” As two bribed guards feigned sleep, underground agents from a resistance cell of the Polish Socialist Party took Karski to safety.
After recuperating and being quarantined to ensure that he had not been brainwashed into Nazism, “Witold” resumed his service in the underground.
His biggest mission began in the fall of 1942. Clad in rags, he was smuggled twice into the Warsaw Ghetto, “a haze of disease and death,” as he described it. “Remember this,” Jewish resistance leader Leon Feiner pleaded as they absorbed the Ghetto’s horrors. “Remember this.”
Wearing a Ukrainian guard’s uniform, Karski later gathered information at Izbica—a “sorting point,” as he called it, for the Belzec extermination camp, where the Nazis murdered 600,000 Jews and other individuals.
Karski escaped Poland and crossed occupied Europe on a Nazi passenger train. An injection from a sympathetic dentist swelled his mouth and allowed him to conceal his telltale Polish accent by posing as a volunteer French migrant laborer suffering from gum disease.
He eventually reached Gibraltar and, in the care of Allied intelligence operatives, flew to England in the cargo bay of a Royal Air Force military transport. He conferred in London with British officials, including Foreign Minister Anthony Eden. In Washington, Karski briefed Secretary of State Cordell Hull and others. Alas, skepticism greeted Karski’s warnings about Jews being herded behind barbed wire and dying in cattle cars. “I am unable to believe you,” Jewish Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter told him. Karski also met President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House in July 1943 but recalled FDR being unmoved by his news.
“I saw too much indifference, self-interest, self-controlled ignorance, and self-imposed disbelief in Allied nations,” Karski told Washingtonian magazine in July 1988. “The idea that Allied leaders did not know is nothing more than a myth.”
Karski planned to parachute back into Poland in September 1943 to rejoin the underground. However, an exiled Polish officer told him that a Radio Germany propaganda broadcast had denounced him as a “Bolshevik agent in the service of American Jewry.” Karski quietly replied, “I’ve been deciphered.” Unmasked and unable to return to Poland, Karski stayed in America. He discussed what he saw in some 200 public lectures and wrote Story of a Secret State, about the Polish underground, a best-seller in 1944.
After the war, Karski began his doctoral studies at Georgetown and taught international affairs from 1952 to 1995. He also discussed communism versus the American way of life in 21 African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations during two lecture tours sponsored by the U.S. Information Service in 1955 and 1966.
As he concluded his reminiscence, we stunned college kids gave Jan Karski a spontaneous and lengthy standing ovation. The world he helped keep free owes him its eternal appreciation as he rests in peace.
British Doubt Reports of Mass Murder of Polish Jews
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The British and Polish governments have published intelligence records from World War II that indicate William Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the main coordinator of intelligence, did not believe reports about German atrocities were credible and, this is one reason Winston Churchill was not aware of the scale of the Holocaust at a time when action might have been taken to prevent the genocide.
Jan Karski, a liaison officer of the Polish underground, came to London in November 1942 and told Cavendish-Bentinck about the mass murder of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Belzec concentration camp. Another Polish witness, Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, reported in December 1943 that 3.3 million Polish Jews had been murdered and that “the Germans used troops, tanks and artillery to liquidate the ghetto in Warsaw.”
Doubt was cast on reports of atrocities by Roger Allen, a high-ranking Foreign Office official who worked closely with Cavendish-Bentinck during the war. Allen didn’t believe stories about the use of gas chambers in Poland. Allen wrote in August 1943 that he could “never understand what the advantage of a gas chamber over a simple machine gun or over starving people would be.” He also questioned the reliability of the reports of gas chambers because they were “very general and tended to come from Jewish sources.”
Cavendish-Bentinck had access to the decrypted German police and SS reports which also mentioned the persecution and genocide of the Jews on the territories held by the Germans. Nevertheless, he said in August 1943, the Poles and Jews were exaggerating the German atrocities to try to stiffen British resolve.
British officials also withheld information about the treatment of the Jews from the War Cabinet and Churchill. When he reported on Karski’s visit, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden deleted all references to Jews being murdered. He also refused to let Karski report personally to Churchill because he felt it was “his duty to protect the elderly and overworked Prime Minister from too many petitioners.”
"Irek" was his code name. But most people knew him as Tadeusz Borowski. Only the Polish resistance fighters knew him by his pseudonym, "Irek". As 2nd Lieutenant in the Polish Home Army, (Armia Krajowa), Irek was responsible for men with names like: "Szczur", "Ludwik", "Jurek", and "Chawcki". He took his orders from "Waligora", a.k.a. Major Jan Tarnowski, commander of "Wola" Region in Warsaw.
Irek From the Underground
by: Terese Pencak Schwartz
Wearing either stolen German uniforms or just plain street clothes, these homemade soldiers were the Polish Underground -- the resistance fighters of Nazi-occupied Poland. Fathers, grandfathers and young boys fought side by side with only red and white armbands for identification. They came together to defend, as best as they could, their beloved homeland. They fought with Polish pistols and German "shmyzers", automatic sub-machine guns, which they either stole or bought from the Nazis. They concealed their precious cache in cemeteries and hospital grounds.
The city sewers became their staging area, their Headquarters and their passage ways. The younger ones -- teenagers worked as liaisons, running through the sewers smuggling supplies and passing cryptic messages and orders.
"One night," says Borowski, "we got the order that our armbands must be switched before dawn from our left arms to our right arms." The Germans had infiltrated their ranks. "In the morning we were instructed to shoot anyone wearing an armband on their left arm."
Through the wet stinking sewers they moved like rats in sewage that was sometimes chest high. "We would have to dismantle our weapons," says Borowski, "and carry them along with our ammunition over our heads so they would not get wet."
In one almost comic military operation, Borowski, who speaks perfect German, dressed himself in a stolen Tirolean mountaineer's outfit -- complete with a feathered hat. With the help of three of his men, who followed discreetly in a "borrowed" German automobile, Borowski befriended three Nazi police officers. The charlatan then coyly maneuvered the German officers into a quiet cull-de-sac where his three partners were waiting.
By day Borowski worked within the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto as an engineer at the Tyton Fabryka at Dzeilna 62. Taking advantage of his freedom to pass through the well-guarded gates without suspicion, Borowski smuggled weapons, ammunition and forged documents inside for the Jewish Underground. He also worked with the Jewish Underground secretly preparing selected Jewish men and boys for combat.
"Zegota" was the cryptic code-name that became the word for the Polish Council of Assistance to the Jews (Rada Pomocy Zdom) established with the approval of several Polish organizations on December 4, 1942. Headquartered in Warsaw, Zegota had branches in several cities and major villages throughout Poland. Zegota aided the Jews both inside and outside the ghettos by providing forged documents, food, lodging, medicine and financial support.
Tadeusz Ireneusz Borowski, Sr. was only one of several thousand Polish resistance fighters.
With his ability to speak four languages fluently and his cunning talent for the art of war, he became a hero many times over. For his active participation in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and for his part in smuggling arms into the Ghetto, Borowski was awarded the Cross of Valour and The Cross of Merit with Sword. In 1948, he received the highest medal of honor to be bestowed on a Polish soldier, the Virtuti Militari Class V. Even 40 years later, Borowski flew to Warsaw where he was, again decorated with medals, including one inscribed, "To the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto 1940 - 1943."
Borowski's heroism was also humanitarian. There is a Jewish woman alive today in a coastal town in California because she was rescued by "Irek" when she was five years old. He placed the young Jewish girl with a Polish Catholic family who also had a young daughter. Each month he sent money to the family for her support. The two girls lived and played together as sisters until the Catholic girl, Basha, was killed during a Soviet air attack in June 1942. Basha's parents gave the Jewish girl their daughter's identity. This new name and paperwork enabled the new "Basha" to elude the Nazis.
Pursued by the Soviet Political Police, (NKVD), even after the war, Borowski left Poland in 1950. He emigrated to the United States with his wife, Helena, who had worked as a double agent in a German submarine base for the Polish Intelligence. They raised three children while Mr. Borowski worked as a design engineer for Lockheed. Today, Borowski, now a widower, lives in Southern California with his dog, "Lady". A true Polish patriot even in his 80's, Borowski is still active in Scouting and the Polish community.
He is unabashedly proud of his wartime accomplishments but his feelings of pride are clouded by criticism of occupied Poland and the Polish people during the Holocaust.
"I risked my life to save lives," says Borowski, in a proper Eastern European accent. "I'm not looking for glory. I just want people to know the truth [about] what happened."
Subject: Karski
Here's a little info about my recently published book KARSKI: HOW ONE MAN
TRIED TO STOP THE HOLOCAUST. It's the story of Jan Karski, a
Polish-born Roman Catholic who has been made an honorary citizen
of Israel in recognition of his wartime efforts to tell the world
about the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe.
The book is published worldwide by John Wiley and Sons. In
the U.S., it can be ordered by mail through the toll-free
telephone number 800-225-5945.
Here's what some publications and leading public figures
have said about the book and the man:
"Karski's is a fantastic story -- and the authors tell it
well. This is a riveting as well as a harrowing read."
-- The Times (London)
"His engrossing biography is valuable, for it tempers the
widespread contention that Gentile Poland was indifferent to the
plight of the Jews."
-- Publishers Weekly
"A real page-turner, with drama woven into every scene."
-- Kirkus Reviews
"A record of extreme courage, desperate survival and moral
heroism that is also a burning and all-too-relevant indictment of
the world's ability to avert its eyes.... Read it."
-- The Good Book Guide (England)
"Well-researched and unfailingly interesting."
-- The American Spectator
"A gripping documentary, which expresses the complexity of
Polish politics under the Nazi regime and the dilemma of one of
Poland's great heroes."
-- Jewish Chronicle (London)
"A must for anyone interested in the history of the
Holocaust and World War II."
-- Jewish Telegraph (England)
"This is a book you just can't put down."
-- Lancashire Evening Post
"You might have expected a worthy but dull book. It is not.
It reads like a spy thriller."
-- Church of England Newspaper
"Absolutely absorbing."
-- Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Winston Churchill
"A significant account of personal heroism-- not only
dramatic as a story but also a compelling moral message regarding
the human condition.... A superb read."
-- Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Adviser
"Karski is a true adventure, a story of incredible valor, a
story of personal courage and uncommon determination to bring to
Allied leaders the awful truth about the mass murder of the Jews
of Europe. The inspiring story of Jan Karski is moving and
thought-provoking-- a must read."
-- Miles Lerman, chairman, United States Holocaust Memorial
Council
"As a courier, at the risk of his life, Karski carried
information of great political and military importance. He
survived arrest and imprisonment. He did not break down in spite
of savage torture. He escaped from his torturers and fulfilled
his missions as before. And in November 1942, he delivered to the
West documentation of Hitler's crime-- the total extermination of
the Jews."
-- Lech Waþþsa, President of Poland
"The mission which Dr. Karski endeavored to carry out with
extraordinary faith and courage during World War II still has a
message for us today. It calls upon us to remember the lessons of
the Holocaust; in addition it challenges us to reach out in a
spirit of justice and charity in order to eliminate from our
community, our nation and our world every vestige of hatred and
bigotry."
-- James Cardinal Hickey, Archbishop of Washington, D.C.
"A great man is one who stands head and shoulders above his
people, a man who, when surrounded by overpowering evil and blind
hatred, does all in his power to stem the tide. Karski ranks high
in the all-too-brief list of such great and unique personalities
who stood out in the darkest age of Jewish history."
-- Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister of Israel
"Here is the stirring tale of a stirring life. Through this
well-written book, I came to know the real Jan Karski for the
first time. I will never forget his courage, nor will any
reader."
-- Ken Adelman, syndicated columnist
"Jan Karski emerges from these pages as truly one of 'the
righteous among the nations.' It is the shame of history that few
would believe his eyewitness accounts of the Nazi atrocities
against Polish Jews and that none of the leaders of the free
world would heed his call for help. This story is a must read."
-- Abraham H. Foxman, national director, Anti-Defamation League
of B'nai B'rith
"Jan Karski: a brave man? Better: a just man."
-- Elie Wiesel, writer, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize
The Karski story is the tale of a young Polish, Roman
Catholic diplomat turned cavalry officer who, at the outbreak of
World War II in 1939, joined the Polish underground movement
after escaping from a Soviet detention camp. Most of the Polish
officers held with him in the USSR were later executed. Karski
became a courier for the underground, crossing enemy lines to
serve as a liaison between occupied Poland and the free world.
In that capacity he brought perhaps the first detailed
eyewitness report of German abuses against Poland's Jews to the
West in February 1940. Captured by the Gestapo in June 1940, he
was savagely tortured. Worried that the Germans would extract
secrets from him, he slashed his wrists. But after the suicide
attempt failed, he was rescued from a hospital by an underground
commando team. The Germans executed over 30 Poles in retaliation
for the escape.
Karski took a keen interest in the plight of Poland's Jews
under Nazi domination. He had grown up with close Jewish friends.
(A happy by-product of the book's publication has been that he is
reunited with one of them whom he had not seen since 1938; the
man is now a retired physician in Corpus Christi, Texas.)
Karski's mother was a fierce Polish nationalist, but she also
preached and practiced tolerance toward the Jewish minority -- in
marked contrast to many of her neighbors.
When Karski was planning a trip to England in 1942, Jewish
leaders asked him to carry a desperate message to Allied leaders:
the news of Hitler's effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. In
order to present an eyewitness report, Karski agreed to tour the
Warsaw Ghetto in disguise. The suffering he saw there was only a
prelude to the atrocities he witnessed soon afterward in eastern
Poland, after he volunteered to be smuggled into a camp that was
part of the Nazi murder machine.
Carrying searing tales of inhumanity, Karski reached London
in late 1942 and set out to alert the world to the emerging
Holocaust. He met secretly with top Allied officials, including
British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, and with intellectuals
like H.G. Wells and Arthur Koestler. Some reacted viscerally to
his message. Others responded with disbelief or indifference. In
July 1943, Karski traveled secretly to Washington, where he
briefed President Roosevelt in a dramatic meeting.
After his cover was blown, ruining his plans to return to
Poland, Karski stayed in the United States. In 1944-45, he
devoted his efforts to raising public awareness of the Poles'
plight-- at the hands of both the Germans and the supposed Soviet
ally-- and the Jews' horrific fate.
Embittered by his failure to bring about decisive action on
behalf of the Jews-- and by the betrayal of Poland to communist
rule-- Karski fled from his past after the war. He broke his
silence only after being "discovered" in the late 1970s by writer
Elie Wiesel and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann.
Aside from Karski's own memoir, no fewer than 33 books have
discussed his efforts to alert the free world to the full horror
of the Nazi war against humanity. But I was amazed in 1986 to
find that there was no comprehensive account of his wartime
activities in print.
My family background is neither Jewish nor Polish. But
because of its sheer adventurousness, Karski's story stayed with
me. Every year or so, I would check to see whether a book about
him had appeared.
When, in 1991, I finally felt ready to take on the project
myself, I approached Jan Karski-- and soon learned why no such
book had been written. Professor Karski turned me down flat. For
over a decade, he said, he had been in the public eye, giving
lectures and granting interviews about his experiences. He was
tired of it now, and he wanted to be left alone.
He suggested I team up with Stanislaw M. Jankowski, a Polish
historian who had interviewed him extensively. "He knows more
about me than I know about myself," Karski said.
In November 1991, I met with Jankowski in Krakow and we
agreed to work together. Meanwhile, I had begun poking around in
various public and private archives, in search of documents
related to Karski's activities. The first place I looked-- the
recently declassified records of the U.S. Office of Strategic
Services (predecessor to the C.I.A.), at the National Archives--
yielded a major find. A series of memos chronicled the
intelligence agency's tracking of Karski while he was in England
and the U.S. from 1943 to 1945.
Professor Karski agreed to meet with me-- just for one
interview session-- early in 1992. I traveled to his modest home
in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., and he and his wife,
Pola Nirenska, received me cordially. But I sensed a certain
guardedness on his part-- until I showed him the O.S.S. materials
and other documents I had gathered that discussed his activities.
He leafed through the O.S.S. reports with an incredulous
smile on his face. "So, they were following me," he said, over
and over. Karski, the one-time Polish clandestine operative,
critiqued the work of his American counterparts-- "This agent is
not well-informed.... Ah, but this dispatch is accurate." By the
end of the visit, I knew his enthusiasm for the book idea was
building.
Professor Karski showed more and more interest in our work
in the ensuing months. He invited me to visit again in June 1992.
This time we sat for three straight days in his tiny study, its
walls totally covered with award plaques and honorary degrees,
its air thick with the constant pall of his filterless Lark
cigarettes. The tape rolled; I asked; Karski answered.
The former courier's amazingly photographic memory, a
subject of wonder to those who encountered him during the war,
remained acute. But while his recollections were a rich source of
detailed information, we supplemented those interviews with
considerable research.
Our investigation of Karski's activities took three years,
and covered seven nations. It took us to 12 different archives
that had significant information on Karski, and in the course of
our efforts we interviewed numerous people who interacted with
Karski during the war-- including a Polish Jew in Australia who
had served as one of his escorts during his Warsaw Ghetto tour in
August 1942, as well as members of the Polish commando team that
freed Karski from the Gestapo in July 1940.
Pola Nirenska's death in July 1992 appeared to spur
Professor Karski to deepen his involvement in our efforts.
Assisting us seemed to invigorate him, to put some distance
between him and the grief. At the same time, he and I had a clear
understanding regarding the independence of our work, and he
encouraged us at every turn to make the book a "warts and all"
chronicle of his activities.
In January 1993 I found a literary agent who shared my
enthusiasm for the project and guided me through the arcane world
of New York publishing. In March I quit my job as editor of Bank
Director magazine to work full time on the book. That decision
began to look disastrously premature within a month, as my agent
began collecting rejection letters from publishing houses--
several editors wrote that they personally wanted to take on the
book, but that their higher-ups were certain the public had no
great interest in the Holocaust.
This was about the same time Steven Spielberg was putting
the final touches on Schindler's List.
In John Wiley and Sons, we at last found a publisher that
shared our vision for the book. And in May 1993, I sat down to
write.
In writing the book, I was simultaneously fascinated by
Karski's efforts to warn the world about the Holocaust and
repelled by the study of the Holocaust itself. I do think it's
important that young people, for instance, learn about the
Holocaust, but I read and saw a lot of things that they should
not be exposed to. An acquaintence with the details of such
brutality is bound to leave psychic scars, even in an adult. I
had quite a few nightmares while I was immersed in that material.
So I was not drawn in by that element; I had to force myself into
it.
On the other hand, the tragic interplay of history that
afflicted Poland between 1939 and 1945 did fascinate me. It's a
history full of gray areas, with ample shares of folly on all
sides, and with a truly tragic sense of inevitability to it: Over
and over, it seemed that the Poles-- those who had not deluded
themselves-- knew they faced disaster at the hands of the Nazis
or the Soviets, but could not avoid it.
I have read criticism -- largely spurred by the mass success
of Schindler's List, I think -- to the effect that a focus on
"heroes of the Holocaust" is distracting from or demeaning to the
enormity of the event itself. I strenuously disagree. The fact
that the Holocaust happened degrades all of humanity by
demonstrating the depths to which a society can sink.
Not to bring to light those countervailing elements of human
goodness which emerged at the time is, I think, to distort the
image we have of ourselves and our own capabilities as
individuals. If our children learn of the Holocaust solely as an
indictment of humanity, they may never understand what positive
inner resources they have to do the right thing when they are
confronted with evil.
There is a vital purpose for all the work we put into
KARSKI: HOW ONE MAN TRIED TO STOP THE HOLOCAUST. The tale of Jan
Karski's wartime activities is much more than the story of one
man's adventures. It is a parable of human folly, urgently
relevant to the world we inhabit today.
Jan Karski witnessed, and tried desperately to avert or
mitigate, both the tragedy of Poland's betrayal by its western
allies and the monstrosity of the Holocaust. He came face to face
with the adherents of Realpolitik in the British and American
governments who argued for caution, argued for prudence, argued
for routine in both the democratic world's alliance with Stalin
and its struggle against Hitler. Karski argued for action.
His mission was a failure.
True, the risks Karski took to witness the Final Solution
firsthand and the mind-shattering reports he delivered about it
forced Allied leaders to confront the horror for the first time.
True, at the very outset of the Cold War, he tried to dispel
American illusions of a benign Soviet ally. True, when Karski
broke the taboos of his exiled government and began to speak out
about the fate of the Jews, he played a major role in shaping
public opinion in the free world. True, the head of the U.S. War
Refugee Board credited Karski with motivating Roosevelt to
establish his organization, which saved some tens of thousands of
Jewish lives in the last years of the war.
Nonetheless, his mission was a failure.
The sacrifices of Jan Karski, of the Poles who died to save
him from the Gestapo and of the Jews who died despite his efforts
can only be redeemed if we now come to understand Karski's
failure-- and learn not to let it happen again.
Hitler's campaign against the Jews was unique in history,
but it did not quench for all time the thirst for genocide among
tyrants. Given the opportunity by irresolute leaders and uncaring
peoples in free nations, other Hitlers and Stalins can continue
the work of those men. In any number of the world's tortured
nations, at any given moment, lone voices like Karski's are
crying out against institutionalized brutality.
We hope our book will help to ensure that such voices are
never again ignored.
I welcome any comments or inquiries from people online.
You can contact me by e-mail at the above address, or
write to me:
E. Thomas Wood
3801 Woodmont Lane
Nashville, Tennessee 37215
USA
Jan Karski, a silent messenger
Jack Fuchs
Jan Karski (1914-2000) Jan Karski was born on April 24, 1914, in Lodz, Poland and died on July 13, 2000 in Washington DC. He belonged to a Catholic family and his studies were in charge of Jesuits, he studied Law at the University of Lwow and embarked on the diplomatic career. He took charges at the Bucharest, Berlin, Geneva and London embassies. He enlisted in 1939 and was captured by the Soviet army and placed in a Stalinist detention camp, from where he could escape to go underground. His fluency in several languages and his prodigious memory favored his election for becoming a courier for the Polish underground during the Second World War.
In 1940 he was captured by the Gestapo in Slovakia. After he was savagely tortured he tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists, but the underground resistance could rescue him avoiding that any of the secrets he knew were revealed to the enemy. Between 1942 and 1943 he was the protagonist of a story that would mark him for the rest of his life: what he called 'my secret Jewish mission'. Karski was one of the first ones to transmit a detailed narration of the Nazi atrocities.
In October 1942 Karski, whose real name was Jan Kozielewsky, contacted two Jewish organizations: the Bund (Jewish socialist party) and a Zionist organization. Both of them asked him to inform the allies about what was going on with the Jewish communities in Poland.
Jan Karski Pretending to be a Jew, he got into the Warsaw ghetto twice in October 1942. And afterwards, to the extermination camp of Belzec. Karski´s secret visit to the camp only lasted for an hour, which was more than enough for what he had seen to remain in his memory forever.
In London he had a meeting with the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden; with Lord Cranbone, of the conservative party as well as with Hugh Dalton and Arthur Greenwood of the Labour party. They were all part of the British cabinet of war that in that moment was the political center of power in England. Eden answered that they could not do anything of what the Jewish leaders proposed because the allied strategy consisted in defeating Germany militarily, and that no 'secondary issue' had to interfere with the objective. Lord Cranborne, apparently a nice man, told him:
'Mr. Karski, you are a very bright man. Do you realize that the message you are giving us is untenable?'
Arthur Koestler, Jewish, passionate anti fascist and anti-Soviet whom Karski visited in London, is not favored in the messenger's narration. He describes him as a man so tied down to his personal interests, to his vanity of man of arts. Another writer, H.G. Wells, when he received his chronicle answered:
'there should be a study of what causes anti-Semitism to arise in every country where Jews live'.
The situation is not better in the USA. In the summer of 1943 he has a meeting with President Roosevelt, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, Cardinal Cicognani, Archbishop Spellman, the President of the Jewish-American Congress, Nahum Goldman, the Judge of the Supreme Court of Justice, Felix Frankfurter and with the director of the Herald Tribune, Ogden Reed. Roosevelt listened to him for four hours. He was especially interested in political issues and told him that Poland would receive a territorial compensation. Not a single comment about the Jews´ situation, not a single question that showed his worry about the ghetto chronicle and the extermination camps.
The dialogue with Felix Frankfurter, member of the Supreme Court, is equally clarifying. Frankfurter asked him: 'Mr. Karski, do you know who I am? ¿Do you know that I am Jewish?' After Karski´s narration of the facts, Frankfurter walks a few steps, thinks for a while and answers him categorically: 'A man like me has to be completely honest, so I tell you that I cannot believe what you are telling me'. Other Jewish leaders did not believe him either.
In 1944, a year before the war was over, Karski published the book The Secret State, that in a very short time sold 400 thousand copies, and he started lecturing in the USA, where he took as a Professor in Political theory at Georgetown University.
'After the war -he wrote in 1987- I read how leaders from the west, State men, militaries, intelligence services, ecclesiastical authorities and civil leaders were horrified by what had happened to the Jews. They declared not to know anything about the Holocaust because the genocide had been kept in secret. This version of facts still remains but it is just a myth. The extermination was not a secret to them.'
The State of Israel named him honorable citizen. This time he gave a thank you speech where he defined himself: 'I am Polish, American, Catholic and now I can also say that I am Jewish'. His testimony is probably one of the most touching registered on the movie Shoah by Claude Lanzmann.
For me, also born in Lodz, Jewish Polish, Jan Karski´s story is a reason of shudder and anguish: Why that man, that maybe I bumped into in the streets of my city, was not listened to? Why the testimony of an ordinary man had no effect, why that unbearable indifference?
On June 20, 2001 the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Argentina will remember the figure of Karski at the Embassy of Poland in Buenos Aires.
* By Jack Fuchs, Deported from the Lodzs ghetto to Auschwitz. He was found by the allies in Dachau at the end of the war. Member of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.
Auschwitz and the Exile Government of Poland According to the 'Polish Fortnightly Review' 1940-1945
Enrique Aynat
1. Motive and Genesis
For some time I have been interested in knowing how the Polish Government-in-Exile reacted to the enormous slaughter of Jews that supposedly took place in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.
Whatever may have occurred in Auschwitz, it was the concern of the Polish exile government, for Auschwitz was on the territory of the Polish Republic until September of 1939, and the Polish government that was installed in London beginning in June of 1940, recognizing none of the territorial annexations carried out by Germany, claimed jurisdiction over all of prewar Poland.
Accordingly, I have taken as my point of departure for this study the assumption that if a great slaughter of Jews had taken place in Auschwitz, the Polish Government-in-Exile would have known of it and in consequence manifested a reaction of some kind.
2. Purpose and Limits
The goal of this article is to determine whatin fact was published about Auschwitz by the Polish Fortnightly Review, the official organ of the Ministry of the Interior of the Polish government in London; and it is therefore limited to a study, based solely on those issues of the Polish Fortnightly Review published from 1940 to 1945, of what was known by the Polish Government-in-Exile with regard to the Auschwitz camp. Other questions, such as analysis of the documents relating to Auschwitz that were sent to London by the Polish resistance, or the study of the references to that camp in the Polish underground press, have not been touched on in this investigation.
The selection of the "Polish Fortnightly Review" was motivated principally by three things:
the fact that it was an official organ of the Polish Government-in-Exile (see document I);
the fact, as pointed out by the Israeli professor David Engel, that it was one of "the principal vehicles for disseminating Polish propaganda in the English language" and "a primary vehicle through which the government released information to the Western press"; [1] and
my incomprehension of the Polish sources, due to my still deficient understanding of that language; whereas the Polish Fortnightly Review, published in English, was accessible to me.
3. Bibliography
Bor-Komorowski, Tadeusz, The Secret Army, London: Victor Gollancz, 1950, 407 pp.
Buszko, Jozef, "Auschwitz, " in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, New York: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 114-115.
Czech, Danuta, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989, 1059 pp.
Duraczynski, Eugeniusz, "Armia Krajowa, " in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, New York: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 88-89.
Duraczynski, Eugeniusz, "Delegatura, " in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, New York: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 356-357.
Duraczynski, Eugeniusz, "Polish Government-in-Exile, "in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, New York: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 1177-1178.
Engel, David, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, xii [/3] 338 pp.
Garlinski, Jozef, Poland, SOE and the Allies, London: Allen and Unwin, 1969, 248 pp.
Garlinski, Jozef, Fighting Auschwitz: The Resistance Movement in the Concentration Camp, London: Friedmann, 1975, 327 pp.
Garcia Villadas S.I., Zacarias, Metodolog' y cr'tica históricas, Barcelona: Sucesores de Juan Gili, 1921.
Höss, Rudolf, Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989, 189 pp.
Jarosz, Barbara, "Le mouvement de la résistance à l'intérieur et à l'extérieur du camp," in Auschwitz camp hitlérien d'extermination, Warsaw: Interpress, 1986, pp. 141-165.
Karski, Jan, Story of a Secret State, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1945, 319 pp.
Klarsfeld, Serge, Le Mémorial de la déportation des juifs de France, Paris: Beate et Serge Klarsfeld, 1978, pages not numbered.
Klarsfeld, Serge and Steinberg, Maxime, Mémorialde la déportation des juifs de Belgique, Brussels-New York, no date, pages not numbered.
Langbein, Hermann, Hommes et femmes à Auschwitz, Fayard (place of publication not given, 1975, 527 pp.
Langlois, Charles-V. and Seignobos, Charles, Introducción a los estudios históricos, Buenos Aires: La Pélyade, 1972, 237 pp.
Laqueur, Walter: The Terrible Secret. Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's "Final Solution", Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, 262 pp.
Mattogno, Carlo, The First Gassing at Auschwitz: Genesis of a Myth, in The Journal of Historical Review, Torrance, 1989, pp. 193-222.
Nowak, Jan, Courier from Warsaw, London, Collins and Harvill, 1982, 477 pp.
4. Sources
Research was conducted at the end of April and beginning of May of 1991 using the collection of the Polish Fortnightly Review preserved in the Polish Library of the Polish Social and Cultural Association of London. The initial issue of the review was published on 15 July 1940 and the final one (number 119) on the 1 July 1945. I read through the collection issue by issue and page by page and noted that numbers 97 (1 August 1944), 101 to 106 (1 October to 15 December of 1944), and 116 to 119 (15 May to 1 July of 1945) were missing and so were not available for examination.
As for the documents cited in section 4.2 and in appendix 2, they come from the archives of the Polish Underground Movement (1939-1945) Study Trust (Studium Polski Podziemnej [SPP]) of London.
5. Method
This study was developed in the following manner:
I have endeavored to find out how the Polish government was able to know what was going on inside Auschwitz and specifically what channels of communication existed between the camp and London; and
I have made a special point of information about Auschwitz published in the Polish Fortnightly Review relating to the supposed extermination of Jews there, and in particular what it published in that regard, what it did not publish, and why.
It should be noted that, when referring to Auschwitz, the Polish Fortnightly Review always uses the Polish designation of Oswiecim.
Lastly, the abbreviations and acronyms used in this article are as follows:
ACPW: Akcja Cywilna Pomocy Wiezniom (Civil Action in Aid of the Prisoners)
AK: Armia Krajowa (Home Army)
BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation
BIP: Biuro Informacji i Propagandy (Office of Information and Propaganda)
PGE: Polish Government-in-Exile
PFR: Polish Fortnightly Review
PWCK: Pomoc Wiezniom Obozow Koncentracyjnych (Aid for Concentration Camp Prisoners)
RAF: Royal Air Force
SOE: Special Operations Executive
SS: Schutzstaffel (Protection Detachment)
ZWZ: Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej (Union for Armed Conflict)
1. POLISH INSTITUTIONS DURING THE WAR
1.1 The Polish Government-in-Exile
After the occupation of Poland by the Germans and Soviets in September of 1939, a Polish government was formed that was determined to continue the struggle for independence, sovereignty, liberty and the territorial integrity of the Polish Republic. This new government believed that these objectives could be achieved only after the crushing of the Third Reich and by means of an alliance with the Western powers.
The cabinet was sworn in on 1 October 1939 before the new president, Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz. General Wladyslaw Sikorski was the prime minister.
For obvious reasons the cabinet met in exile. First it set up in Paris. Later, in the face of the German advance, it moved to Angers, in the western part of France. Finally, after the sudden collapse of France in June of 1940, it fled to London.
The PGE was recognized by all the Allied nations, including (from July of 1941 to April of 1943) the Soviet Union. [2]
The PGE maintained contact with occupied Poland, though its contacts of course were carried out clandestinely. Instructions, orders, directives and in general all kinds of information destined for Poland were almost always transmitted by means of the Polish section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The SOE, whose political chief was the British Minister of Economic Warfare, was an organization charged with carrying the war to the territories occupied by Germany. The Polish section of the SOE cooperated closely with the Polish General Headquarters in London; it sent radio messages and frequently dropped agents by parachute. Starting in 1942, the dropping of agents became routine; and from 1944 on, even airplane landings were made on improvised airstrips. [3]
1.2 The Delegatura
The Delegatura, which operated from 1940 into 1945, embodied the PGE's clandestine representation inside Poland. It was headed by a delegate ( Delegat ) and three substitutes. The delegate was assisted by a committee made up of members of the political parties on which the PGE was based.
The Delegatura functioned as a shadow government and had numerous sections, corresponding to the ministries of a regular administration. The organization extended to the provinces, districts and townships and so was a broad underground network that covered all of Poland. In practice, the Delegatura directed a true alternative government, a secret state with its own educational system, its courts, its welfare organizations, its intelligence service and its own armed forces. [4]
1.3 The Armia Krajowa
Paralleling the Polish armed forces which fought the Germans openly under British command and which were made up of Poles who had managed to escape from Poland, there existed an actual secret army, the Armia Krajowa (Internal Army), which operated secretly within the bordersof prewar Poland.
The AK was formed in February of 1942 on the basis of a prior clandestine military organization, the Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej (Alliance for Armed Conflict). General Stefan Rowecki was its first commander. After the latter's detention by the Germans in 1943, General Bor-Komorowski was appointed to the post.
The AK was organized as a real army, with a general staff, professional officers, an intelligence service, a service corps, etc., and it was divided territorially in accordance with the administrative division of the prewar districts. Thus, for example, in the organization chart of the AK, the Auschwitz zone was part of the district of Silesia.
In terms of manpower, it is reckoned that in the first half of 1944 the AK numbered between 250, 000 and 350, 000 men, including more than 10, 000 officers. [5]
2. CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN AUSCHWITZ AND LONDON
2.0 Preliminary Considerations
Our immediate concern will be to find out whether the PGE in London could know what was going on in Auschwitz and, specifically, whether it could have had knowledge of a gigantic slaughter of Jews that had supposedly taken place in the camp.
In sum, this is a matter of determining the sources of information available to the PGE. For that it will be necessary first to establish whether in fact there were clandestine resistance organizations in the concentration camp, then whether or not they were able to obtain trustworthy information and get it out of the camp, and lastly whether they could get this information to London.
2.1 The Clandestine Resistance and Intelligence Organizations inside the Camp
A resistance organization existed in the concentration camp as early as October of 1940. It was founded by a Polish officer, Witold Pilecki, who had been arrested and sent to Auschwitz in September of 1940. About the same time, a resistance group of the Polish socialist party was also established; and later, in 1941, a rightist organization was formed under the direction of Jan Mosdorf. Finally, in May of 1943, an international resistance organization was created, the Kampfgruppe Auschwitz (Auschwitz Combat Group), which took in members of various nationalities, principally of socialist and communist ideology. [6]
The various organizations established contact with one another more or less frequently, depending upon their national or ideological affinities.
Among the objectives of the resistance was that of "gathering evidence relative to crimes committed by the SS and transmitting it abroad." [7]
As the concentration camp installations were expanded, the clandestine organizations grew proportionately. In Birkenau, an underground organization created by Colonel Jan Karcz was in existence by April of 1942. Karcz recruited a large number of members and created his own "apparatus, " the only way to direct clandestine operations in such a large camp. Some of Karcz's men were placed in blocks of Jews expressly to try to help alleviate their suffering. Contact between the Birkenau organization and that of the main Auschwitz camp was maintained on an almost daily basis by means of a liaison. Gathering information was one of the principal tasks of the Karcz group. [8]
In about the middle of 1943, a secret organization was established in the Birkenau women's camp. One of its activities was the passing of information about life in the camp. Contacts between this women's group and the main camp were effected by means of a "mailbox" where secret messages were delivered and received. [9]
The growth of the resistance organizations' membership, from the time of the camp's opening, was spectacular. By 1942, Pilecki's organization alone had around 1,000 members, divided between Auschwitz and Birkenau. Pilecki states that in just one month, March 1942, he personally recruited more than 100 persons for his group alone. The nationalist and socialist organizations grew as well. [10] In the same year, Colonel Kazimierz Rawicz, leader of a clandestine organization of prisoners, prepared a plan for a massive revolt in the camp and surrounding area, a plan which he sent to the commander of the AK so that he could set the date for initiating the action. [11]
The resistance groups were so strong by 1942 and 1943 that they had managed to introduce their tentacles into the nerve centers of camp life. Their members controlled the hospital, the work assignment office, and exercised vital functions in the central office, the kitchen, the construction office, the food and clothing warehouses, many of the prisoner work detachments (Kommandos) and even the political department. [12]
The clandestine groups had even gained the complicity of some members of the SS, mainly Volksdeutschen, [13] who had promised them assistance and access to the munitions depot in the event of an uprising. [14]
In view of the foregoing, several conclusions must be drawn:
that resistance organizations were already functioning by the end of 1940, scarcely more than a few months after the opening of the camp;
that these organizations had a considerable number of members and had spread throughout all sectors of the extensive prison complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau by at least the year 1942; and
that therefore, if there had been any systematic killing of Jews from 1942 on, the resistance organizations would have been in a position to know of it in detail.
2.2 The Resistance Organizations outside the Camp
Clandestine organizations also existed at anearly date in the area surrounding the concentration camp. In 1940 the ZWZ created the Oswiecim (Auschwitz) district, which formed part of the Bielsko "Inspectorate." In 1942, the ZWZ took the name of Armia Krajowa. [15]
The resistance was very active in the Oswiecim district. The Polish Fortnightly Review gives evidence of this. It mentions, for example, that several freight trains were derailed on the outskirts of Oswiecim in July of 1943. [16]
It was pointed out in the foregoing section that there were plans for an uprising in Auschwitz. These plans merited the attention of the general staff of the AK, which sent one of its men to the area to get a more precise idea of the situation. The officer in question was one Stefan Jasienski, who had arrived from England by parachute. Jasienski, a specialist in intelligence work, was sent from Warsaw to the immediate area of Auschwitz at the end of July of 1944. Given the importance of his mission, he was provided with all necessary contacts in the area and especially with means for secretly effecting liaison with the "military council" of the camp. [17]
Clandestine organizations were also created for the sole purpose of giving assistance to the prisoners of Auschwitz and maintaining contact with them. Thus, by the second half of 1940, a group called Akcja Cywilna Pomocy Wiezniom (ACPW -- Civilian Action for Prisoner Assistance) was formed, the principal task of which was the collection of food, medicine and clothing, and then getting them into the camp through their camp contacts. These same contacts also served for passing messages back and forth. In May of 1943 a committee was formed in Cracow named Pomoc Wiezniom Obozow Koncentracyjnych (PWOK -- Aid for Prisoners of Concentration Camps), the aims of which were similar to those of ACPW. The PWOK, despite the plural in its name, worked exclusively in behalf of the prisoners of Auschwitz. [18]
Having established the existence of clandestine organizations both within and outside the camp, we now have only to see how contact was established between them.
2.3 Contacts between the Camp and the Outside
Contacts between the interior of the camp andthe outside were facilitated by the location of Auschwitz. As the author Walter Laqueur acknowledges, Auschwitz did not lie in a wilderness, but in a densely industrialized and very populous area, near such important cities as Beuthen (Bytom), Gleiwitz (Gliwice), Hindenburg (Zabrze) and Kattowitz (Katowice). Auschwitz, moreover, was a virtual "archipelago, " with about 40 administratively dependent subcamps. [18]
Besides the peculiar situation of Auschwitz, contacts were facilitated by the fact that many of the prisoners worked outside the camp together with members of the civilian population, and also because many civilian laborers worked within the camp. [19]
Specifically, with regard to the civilian workers, it suffices to say that there were hundreds of them and that there were as many Germans as Poles. These workers arrived at the camp in the morning and left in the evening after finishing their day's work. [20] They were employed because of the great amount of work to be done in the camp and the fact that there were hardly enough specialized workers among the prisoners. And civilians and prisoners worked together as often as not. [21]
Due to the growing number of prisoners and the work done outside the camp, the Germans found it impossible, despite their measures of vigilance and control (barbed wire fencing, watchtowers, police dogs, patrols, etc.), to prevent contact between the prisoners and the local population, which was exclusively Polish. Segments of the population formed part of the resistance organizations. In particular, the prisoner Kommandos working in the neighborhood of the camp frequently conversed with the Polish civilians. Upon occasion the civilians hid food, medicine and packages in previously arranged locations for the prisoners to pick up. The SS guards in charge of these Kommandos often looked the other way or else allowed themselves to be bought off in exchange for a good meal. [22]
As far as that goes, the possibilities for contacts were innumerable and extended to all the camps, subcamps and installations linked with the Auschwitz prison complex: such as the Rajsko subcamp, the fish nurseries of Harmeze, the camp for free workers, and the big industrial complex set up for the fabrication of synthetic rubber. [23]
Such contacts, above all those relating to the exchange of letters and packages, soon acquired a regular character. A clandestine organization in the camp would quickly set up a permanent connection enabling it to pass information regularly by letter to a resistance group in Cracow. Some 350 of these letters have been preserved in that city, "a fraction ofa much more significant total." [24] The exchange of parcels between the camp and the outside grew to such an extent that, for example, a group of prisoners took it upon themselves to secretly make overcoats for AK partisan units operating in the vicinity of the camp. The packages were delivered by prisoners who worked in the agricultural fields or at nearby subcamps. [25]
Furthermore, the existence in Auschwitz of a clandestine radio transmitter has been confirmed. It was secretly installed in the cellar of block 20 in the spring of 1942. By means of contacts and couriers the leadership of the Silesia district of the AK succeeded in finding out the wavelength on which it was transmitting. The transmitter was in operation over a period of seven months, sending information about living conditions in the camp, in spite of which the Germans never managed to discover it. It stopped sending in the fall of 1942. [26]
There were even German personnel in the camp who collaborated with the resistance, such as Maria Stromberger, a nurse who carried messages from the camp to the heads of the AK in Cracow and Silesia and in turn brought in illegal correspondence, medicine, arms and explosives. Along with her, a group of SS guards offered to help the prisoners by acting as couriers. [27]
As the result of all that, there existed even in the first year of the camp's life a permanent, even though fragile, liaison between the camp and the intelligence section of the Cracow district of the secret army; by the end of 1941 a special cell had been set up at AK headquarters in Cracow for liaison with the Auschwitz camp. [28]
Clandestine contacts between Auschwitz and the outside were already so frequent and well organized by 1942 that Pilecki, founder of one of the resistance groups within the camp, was in "constant relationship" not only with the headquarters of the AK in Warsaw but also with the commandants of the districts of Cracow and Silesia. [29]
Moreover, the information secretly got out of Auschwitz was not limited solely to messages and reports prepared by the resistance. On occasion it included even entire volumes of official German documentation, such as, for example, two volumes of the "Bunker book" (Bunkerbuch) in which were noted all the admissions and discharges taking place in the camp prisons. These documents were smuggled out at the beginning of 1944. [30]
The ways by which information was passed were not always strictly clandestine. On numerous occasions messages left Auschwitz by much simpler means: carried by prisoners released by the Germans. Thus, to cite only a few cases connected with the resistance group founded by Pilecki, a first report went out by that means as early as November of 1940; in February and March of 1941, two others were sent; and at the end of 1941 another prisoner, Surmacki, was released unexpectedly and took with him to Warsaw a message from Pilecki himself. [31]
An unusually large number of prisoners was released during 1942: there were 952 releases during the first half of that year and 36 in the following six months. There was a number of releases in 1943 as well, and at the beginning of 1944 a considerable number of Jewish women were released, thanks to the intervention of a German industrialist. [32]
Another means by which information was passed to the outside was provided by the escapees. Sometimes the only purpose of the escape was to send messages out of the camp. An example of this kind of escape is that of Pilecki himself. This Polish officer decided to flee in order to persuade the heads of the AK to accept his plan for an uprising in Auschwitz and incidentally to provide information about the general situation in the camp. Pilecki escaped on 27 April 1943. Four months later, on 25 August, he reached Warsaw, where he contacted the officer who handled Auschwitz at AK headquarters. [33] Two other members of the Pilecki group had escaped previously with the identical objective of passing information to the headquarters of the AK. [34]
One may conclude from what has been stated above that because of its geographical situation and its special characteristics as a work camp open to civilian workers, Auschwitz was not the most adequate place for keeping secrets. If to that we add the efficiency with which the resistance groups worked, operating radio transmitters, enlisting the complicity of German guards, organizing escapes and utilizing released prisoners for their purposes, we should have to conclude that, for the Polish resistance, the Auschwitz camp was practically transparent. Accordingly, if there had been any massive extermination of Jews in Auschwitz, it would without doubt very shortly have been known in detail in the resistance headquarters in Warsaw.
2.4 Communications between Poland and London
All known sources indicate that the clandestine communications between Poland and London were on a regular basis and the information transmitted abundant. General Bor-Komorowski, the commandant of the AK, has pointed out that the secret reports:
were regularly dispatched by radio to London and in the years 1942-4 numbered 300 per month. They contained details concerning every aspect of the war. Apart from radio transmission, the essential facts of our Intelligence material were microfilmed and sent every month to London by courier. [35]
The information moreover went from the one place to the other with relative rapidity. The couriers traveled to London via Sweden or across western Europe and took several weeks, sometimes as much as two months, to arrive. Short messages, on the other hand, could be sent daily by radio to London. The Polish resistance had about a hundred radio transmitters at its disposal. [36]
Courier liaison with London was at first from 1941 until the end of July of 1942 maintained through several members of the Swedish colony in Warsaw who, when returning to Sweden, carried messages from both the AK and the Delegatura. The periodical reports on the situation within Poland (Sprawozdanie sytuacyjne z Kraju ) published by the PGE were based principally on material carried by the Swedes. [37]
Beginning with the second half of 1942, maintenance of communications was taken over by the Polish couriers. The most famous of these was Jan Karski (Kozielewski). Karski lived clandestinely in Warsaw in 1941 and 1942, devoting himself to psychological warfare ("black propaganda") against the German occupiers. At the end of 1942 the leadership of the resistance ordered him to carry information to London. Karski left Poland secretly in October of 1942 and arrived in England the following month after traveling across Germany and France. In London he drafted a report which became famous. The Karski case was widely heralded in the Allied newspapers. Karski even made a propaganda tour of the United States, where he met with important figures, including President Roosevelt himself.
Jan Karski was very well informed.He had specialized in the study of the underground press. Cognizant of the great historical importance of the latter, he had put together probably "the richest collection of Polish underground material existent -- newspapers, pamphlets, and books." [38] Moreover, he had occupied a privileged observation post during his period of secret activities in Poland. Thanks to his job as liaison and to his frequent contact with the upper echelons of the resistance, both civilian and military, Karski "was able to survey the entire structure of the underground movement and to form a detailed picture of the situation as a whole in Poland." [39] For that reason the leaders of the Polish underground sent him to London.
Another especially well-informed courier was Jan Nowak (Zdzislaw Jezioranski). Nowak was selected in 1943 to travel secretly to England, carrying the maximum possible information. With this in view, Nowak met that summer with the head of the Biuro Informacji i Propagandy (BIP -- Bureau of Information and Propaganda) of the AK. The chief of the BIP was "in a sense minister of AK internal propaganda and policy. He controlled not only the military underground press, but also a widespread information network." [40] On order of this person, Nowak met also with the section heads of the BIP, among them the head of the "Jewish section," with all of whom he held "long and exhaustive" conversations over a period of one month. [41] In consequence, when he set off for London in the summer of 1943, Nowak had to be one of the persons best informed about what was going on in Poland.
Nowak arrived in London in December of 1943. Some months later, in mid-1944, he was ordered to return to Poland, where he arrived via parachute. He took part in the Warsaw uprising; after that was crushed, he managed to escape to London in January of 1945.
In short, if there had been a massive extermination of Jews in Auschwitz, the leadership of the resistance within Poland would not have failed to communicate it to their superiors in London, either by means of radio messages or by courier. Specifically, couriers such as Jan Karski and Jan Nowak men specially trained to carry the maximum possible information to London would certainly have communicated this terrible occurrence to the Polish authorities in exile.
2.5 Conclusion
It is impossible to accept that the PGE did not know what was taking place in Auschwitz. Apart from the obvious reasons, we must also take into account the level of capability the information and intelligence system of the Polish resistance had achieved. The AK had a most efficient intelligence system, which extended its tentacles even beyond Poland. It had sections assigned to researching the economic and military problems of the German forces in Poland and behind the Russian front, and others charged with obtaining information on the economic situation inside Germany, on ship movements in the ports of the Baltic and the North Sea, and on German morale. [42] For example, in the springof 1942 the leaders of the AK received detailed information on the number and position of the German divisions in the Ukraine and on the preparations the Germans were making to exploit the oil fields of the Caucasus. [43] The Poles also succeeded in obtaining top-quality information about some of the most highly guarded secrets of the Reich. Thus, in the spring of 1943, the AK received information that the Germans were carrying out experiments with mysterious weapons on Peenemünde, an island in the Baltic Sea. A few weeks later Polish agents had obtained detailed plans of the area of the experiments and had sent them to London. [44] Similarly, at the end of 1943 the intelligence service of the AK detected tests the Germans were making with the V-2 rocket in the area of Sandomierz (Poland), following which extensive reports on the secret new German weapon were sent to London. It so happens that the head of this secret investigation, Jerzy Chmielewski, had been under arrest in Auschwitz and had been released on bail in March of 1944. Chmielewski personally flew to London with the reports and several components of the V-2 rocket. [45]
The BIP of the AK, furthermore, from February of 1942 on had a Section for Jewish Affairs whose principal function was to collect information on the situation of the Jewish population. [46]
In sum, the intelligence system of the Polish resistancewas so well developed and so efficient that had there actually been a massive extermination of Jews in Auschwitz, it would have been known practically at once, in detail. In turn, detailed reports about the Auschwitz extermination would have reached London by courier in a relatively short time. Briefer reports would have been radioed immediately.
In addition, the massive annihilation of Jews in Auschwitz would have been so impossible to hide that, as author Jozef Garlinski has recognized, had there been no intelligence organization whatsoever, "the secret could still not have been kept." [47]
All the facts clearly indicate, therefore, that if a slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews had taken place in Auschwitz, the PGE would necessarily have known of it.
3. AUSCHWITZ AND THE EXTERMINATION OF JEWS IN THE POLISH FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW
3.0 Preliminary Considerations
The fact which forcibly stands out after examination of the PFR collection -- with the proviso that the issues of the fourth quarter of 1944 -- could not be examined is that up to the 1st of May of 1945 (No. 115), there is not the slightest revelation that Jews were exterminated in Auschwitz. Only in issue 115, published when the war was practically over and the Allied atrocity propaganda about the German concentration camps was in full swing, do we find the first reference to the extermination of Jews in Auschwitz: it concerns the testimonies of two women who had been detained in the camp (see appendix 1).
In short, the official organ in English of the Polish Ministry of Information -- its principal medium of information and propaganda abroad -- did not reveal until the spring of 1945 the slightest indication that there had been a gigantic massacre of Jews, a slaughter moreover that had allegedly gone on continuously over a period of three years, from the beginning of 1942 to the end of 1944.
It must also be emphasized that the Auschwitz camp is repeatedly mentioned in the PFR, although there is no intimation that it was a place where Jews were being exterminated; and at the same time, while the extermination of Jews is frequently cited, there is never an indication that it was being carried out in Auschwitz.
Let us look, then, at these two aspects of the question more thoroughly. [48]
3.1 Auschwitz Is Mentioned Repeatedly, but Without Reference to Jewish Extermination There
Following now in chronological order are all the references to Auschwitz that appeared in the PFR up to May of 1945:
Article "The Concentration Camp at Oswiecim" (no. 21, 1 June 1941, pp. 6-7).
The article points out that the telegrams that arrived from Auschwitz communicating the death of prisoners "first focused the attention of all Poland on this place of torture at the end of last year" (p. 6). It also indicates that the mortality rate was very high -- between 20 and 25 per cent -- due to ill treatment by the guards, to the exceptionally bad conditions, to the mass executions and to illness contracted because of the cold, overwork and nervous tension. Families were authorized to receive urns with the ashes of the deceased. The work conditions and food were horrible. The prisoners did not receive shoes until the 19th of September of 1940. There was only one towel for 20 persons. The work day started at 4:30 a.m. Two hundred prisoners had been released and had returned to Warsaw, although in a lamentable state of health, inasmuch as a "released prisoner is as a rule a sick man, tuberculous and with a weak heart, and in a state of nervous collapse" (p.7).
Let us emphasize that by the end of 1940 "the attention of all Poland" was centered on Auschwitz and that by the middle of 1941 the PGE already had detailed data regarding the interior of Auschwitz, though invested with the characteristic tone of atrocity propaganda.
Article "Oswiecim Concentration Camp" (no. 32, 15 November 1941, pp. 5-6).
According to the author of the article, the Auschwitz camp, "which is the largest in Poland, merits a detailed description' (p.5). Next, as in the previous article, the general situation of the camp is described. The barracks had chinks and lacked heating. The prisoners lacked their own towels, which spread infections. Moreover, many persons 'suffering from venereal diseases are deliberately sent to the camp" (p. 5). Work began at 5 a.m. and was exhausting. The prisoners had to work even when they were ill. The roll calls were terrible: they were the cause of frequent deaths. A system of collective responsibility had been imposed on the prisoners, so that punishments were frequent and were applied by means of a large repertory of tortures. The winter of 1940-1941 was distinguished by its high mortality rate, with figures running between 70 and 80 corpses per day (one day 156). The death rate went down in the spring and following summer to 30 persons a day. At the end of November of 1940 there were 8,000 Poles in Auschwitz, divided into three groups: political prisoners, criminals, and priests and Jews. Those in the last group were the worst treated "and no member of the group leaves the camp alive" (p. 6).
The most important thing to point out here is that at the end of 1941 the PFR was in a position to publish "a detailed description" of what was happening in Auschwitz.
Article "German Lawyers at Work" (no. 40, 15 March 1942, p. 8).
This concerns the text of a radio message from Stanislaw Stronski, Polish Minister of Information, which was broadcast by the BBC's Polish new service on 11 March 1942. Stronski points out that all "the German war criminals, from the degenerate Frank in the Polish Wawel to the degenerate overseers in Oswiecim concentration camp, are responsible for the fact that in a land in which their very existence is a crime, they are murdering a hundred for one."
Article "Pawiak Prison in Warsaw and Oswiecim Concentration Camp" (no. 47, 1 July 1942, pp. 2-3).
In this article it is said that besides the main camp built in the vicinity of Auschwitz, there was another nearby "in which the brutalities are so terrible that people die there quicker than they would have done in the main camp" (p. 2). The prisoners said this camp was "paradisiac" [paradiesisch = paradisiac/heavenly] "presumably because from it there is only one road, leading to Paradise" (p. 2).
The article here no doubt refers to the Birkenau camp, the construction of which had begun in October of 1941. [49]
The prisoners of both camps, the author of the article goes on to say, were annihilated in three ways: "by excessive labour, by torture, and by medical means" (p.2). The prisoners of camp "paradise" in particular had to do very hard work "chiefly in building a factory for artificial rubber production near by" (p.2).
In fact, in April of 1941 the Germans had begun constructing a large chemical complex of the I.G. Farben company designed for the manufacture of synthetic rubber and gasoline. The Auschwitz prisoners were used as laborers in the construction of this complex. [50]
The Germans, the writer of the article continues, made use of a "scientific" method for killing prisoners. It consisted in the administration of injections which slowly affected the internal organs, especially the heart. Moreover, it is "universally believed that the prisoners are used for large-scale experiments in testing out new drugs which the Germans are preparing for unknown ends" (p. 2). In the context of the experiments conducted on the prisoners, the use of poison gas with a homicidal purpose is described:
It is generally known that during the night of September 5th to 6th last year about a thousand people were driven down to the underground shelter in Oswiecim, among them seven hundred Bolshevik prisoners of war and three hundred Poles. As the shelter was too small to hold this large number, the living bodies were simply forced in, regardless of broken bones. When the shelter was full, gas was injected into it, and all the prisoners died during the night. All night the rest of the camp was kept awake by the groans and howls coming from the shelter. Next day other prisoners had to carry out the bodies, a task which took all day. One hand-cart on which the bodies were being removed broke down under the weight (p. 2).
Something paradoxical would seem to have been produced here: the PFR knew -- and published -- data on the incidental extermination of a thousand persons at a time when it was presumably completely unaware of the massive and regular extermination of hundreds of thousands of Jews throughout 1942, 1943 and 1944.
On the other hand, the thesis of the extermination of a thousand Russians and Poles in the underground shelter of Auschwitz and its later evolution in the "Exterminationist" doctrine has been completely discredited. [51]
The article also points out that a section for women had recently been formed in Oswiecim (p. 2). From that may be inferred that the article contained information on Auschwitz from at least as late as March of 1942, since the first transport of women arrived at the camp on the 26 March 1942. [52]
Finally, the article records that Oswiecim had the capacity for 15, 000 prisoners, "but as they die on a mass scale there is always room for new arrivals" (p. 3).
"Furor germanicus" (no. 47, 1 July 1942, p. 8).
This is the title of a talk by Stanislaw Stronski broadcast by the Polish news service of he BBC on 1 July 1942.
The furor germanicus is produced, according to Stronski, because the "Germans are raging, " and now that they "are satiating their age-old lust for domination, they are swimming in the blood of the defenceless and luxuriating in the torments of their victims." According to Stronski, the Polish government had at that time "a very clear picture of the methods of government, i.e., the German persecutions and barbarities in Poland during the first six months of this year" and that the "latest reports from Poland confirm the sombre news which has come in great detail during the last six months, and convey the incredible dimensions of the crimes." These reports had to be truly recent, since the introductory note to this issue indicated that it corresponded "to the latest possible date" and that for the most part it "relates to the situation at the beginning of June, less than a month ago" (p. 1).
The only reference to Auschwitz in Stronski's radio message is the following: "In addition to the torture camps for men, with Oswiecim as the chief, there are now torture camps for women, such as the one near Frstenburg (Mecklenburg) known as Ravensbrück."
So that in spite of this "very clear picture" of the situation in Poland and the recentness of the information, the PGE seemed not to know of the killing of Jews that was supposedly being carried out in Auschwitz from the beginning of 1942.
Press conference statement of the Polish Ministerof the Interior, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, on 9 July 1942 (no. 48, 15 July 1942, pp. 4-6).
In his extensive statement referring to the latest events that had occurred in Poland and in which he emphasizes that the furor teutonicus had reached "a murderous paroxysm" (p. 6), Mikolajczyk only mentions Auschwitz in passing: "In the concentration camp at Oswiecim itself the number of prisoners held has risen in the course of three months by 8, 000" (p.5).
In the article "Concentration Camps" (no. 48, 15 July 1942, p. 3), Auschwitz appears in an account of 23 concentration camps "where Poles are confined."
The article indicates that groups of prisoners are continually being sent to Oswiecim from all the prisons in Poland and specifically some hundreds of them in the months of March and April of 1942. There are notices of the demise of prisoners "who are unable to stand up to the rigours of the camp" and indication also that large groups of prisoners go to work every day on the construction of a synthetic gasoline plant in the immediate area. Lastly, precise information is given on deceased prisoners.
In another article, "Polish Youth in the War"(no. 56, 15 November 1942, p. 8), Auschwitz appears as one of the places where young Poles 12 to 18 years of age were interned.
The article "Children in Prisons and Concentration Camps" (no. 77, 1 October 1943, p. 5), reports:
Other reports from Poland say that children under the age of 12 sent with the transports to the camp at Oswiecim are not accepted by the camp authorities, but are killed on the spot, in special gas chambers installed for the purpose. This information first came to hand in December, 1942, and has since been repeated in several reports.
From the context we infer that this concerns Polish children. This is the only reference to gas chambers in Auschwitz prior to 1945.
3.2 The Extermination of Jews Is Mentioned Repeatedly, but with No Reference to Auschwitz
Following in chronological order are the references to the extermination of Jews that appeared in the PFR up to May of 1945:
The article "Pawiak Prison in Warsaw and Oswiecim Concentration Camp" (no. 47, 1 July 1942, p. 3) reports: "It is also well known in Poland that last year a party of Jews was taken off to the neighbourhood of Hamburg, where they were all gassed."
So the alleged fate of a party of Jews in Hamburg was "well known" in Poland, whereas the routine slaughter of Jews that was supposedly taking place in Auschwitz was not known -- or not revealed.
Article "Destruction of the Jewish Population" (no. 47, 1 July 1942, pp. 4-5).
According to the writer, the first manifestations of the new repressive measures against the Jews, in the form of mass shootings, took place in Nowy Sacz, Mielec, Tarnow and Warsaw. A little later the Lublin ghetto was obliterated. The German press said that the ghetto had been transferred to the locality of Majdan Tatarski, "but in fact almost the entire population was exterminated" (p. 4). A certain number of Jews from the ghetto were put into freight cars that were taken outside the city "and left on a siding for two weeks, until all inside had perished of starvation" (p. 5). However, most of the Lublin Jews were taken to Sobibor, "where they were all murdered with gas, machine-guns and even by being bayoneted" (p. 5). Detachments of Lithuanian auxiliary police (szaulis) had been brought to Poland to carry out thesemass exterminations. It is also noted that there was confirmation of the "complete extermination" of the Jews in the areas of the East. Cities such as Molodeczno and Baranowicze had been left completely judenfrei (free of Jews) (p. 5). Some thousands of Jewish children were murdered in Pinsk in the fall of 1941. In turn, in March of 1942, 12, 000 Jews were liquidated in Lwow, where wholesale crimes were still going on. In the cities of Southeast Poland, "Ruthenian [or Ukrainian-Ed.] organizations organize hunts after the Jews who are still hiding in numbers in the villages" (p.5).
On 8 July 1942 the Polish National Council, a sort of parliament-in-exile, in a resolution directed to the parliaments of the free nations, alerted them to the "newly revealed facts of the systematic destruction of the vital strength of the Polish Nation and the planned slaughter of practically the whole Jewish population" (no. 48, 15 July 1942, p. 3).
The following day, 9 July, a press conference took place in which several Polish dignitaries living in exile participated (no. 48, 15 July 1942. pp. 4-8). Mikolajczyk, the Minister of the Interior, said that the "wholesale extermination of the Jews" had begun (p. 4). He said there had been a number of killings of Jews in the Belzec and Trawniki camps, where "murders are also carried out by means of poison gas" (p. 6). He also cited killings of Jews in some twenty localities, with figures of the victims, depending on the location, of from 120 to 60, 000. The methods of extermination were by machine guns, hand grenades and poison gas (p. 6).
At the same press conference, Dr. Schwarzbart, a Jewish representative on the Polish National Council, mentioned killings in about thirty places, with figures of the victims, depending on the location, that varied between 300 and 50, 000 (pp. 7f.).
In short, between these two notables, some fifty places in Poland were mentioned where there allegedly were slaughters of Jews. Significantly, Auschwitz -- or Oswiecim in accordance with the Polish designation -- does not appear in any of these accounts.
Number 57 of the PFR, published on 1 December 1942, is a monograph devoted to the extermination of the Jews of Poland. A large part of its contents makes reference to the deportation of the Jews of Warsaw begun in the summer of 1942. In this connection it is stated that the Jews were deported in trains in which the floors of the freight cars were covered with quicklime and chlorine (p. 3). The deportees were taken to three execution camps: Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. "Here the trains were unloaded, the condemned were stripped naked and then killed, probably by poison gas or electrocution" (p. 3).
This issue also contains an "Extraordinary Report from the Jew-extermination Camp at Belzec" (p. 4). This report allegedly came from a German employed in the camp. It says that the place is overseen by Ukrainian guards. The deportees arrived in trains and no sooner had they arrived than they were taken out of the train, stripped, and ordered to take a bath. In reality they were taken to a big building "where there is an electrified plate, where the executions are carried out." Once electrocuted, the victims were taken by train out of the camp enclosure and thrown into a pit 30 meters deep. This pit had been dug out by Jews, who were also assassinated once they had finished their task. In their turn, the Ukrainian camp guards "are also to be executed when the job is finished."
Surprisingly, the PFR had managed to publish a report from the interior of Belzec camp thanks to the revelations of a German employee and in spite of security measures severe to the extreme of liquidating the Ukrainian guards periodically to avoid witnesses. Yet the PFR had not thus far published even a single indication that Jews were being murdered in Auschwitz, notwithstanding that this supposed slaughter had started at the beginning of 1942 and that there were very abundant sources of information about the camp.
But what is most important to make clear is that in an issue in the form of a monograph on the extermination of Jews in Poland and published a year after the supposed killings in Auschwitz began, the name of this concentration camp is not mentioned even a single time.
Issue no. 71 of the PFR, published on 1 July 1943, is also a monograph devoted to the extermination of the Jews of Poland. Its sole contents are the testimonies of two Jewish women who escaped from Poland in the fall of 1942. The first testimony is titled "Agony of the People Condemned to Death" (pp. 1-7) and narrates the vicissitudes of a Jewish woman and her family in various ghettos. The second report bears the title "What Happened in the Radom Ghetto" (pp. 7-8) and relates details of the life there.
Auschwitz is not mentioned in this issue either, and this notwithstanding that during the period in question what was happening there could not possibly have been concealed, since the Exterminationists maintain that from the summer of 1942 an annihilation on a large scale, due chiefly to the arrival of large convoys of Jews from Slovakia, France, Belgium and Holland, was being carried out there.
Finally, in January of 1944 a bare notice gives details of a revolt in which "Jews held in the death camp at Treblinka revolted in a desperate struggle against their murderers." The revolt had taken place at the beginning of August of 1943 (no. 84, 15 January 1944, p. 4).
4. CONCLUSION
4.0 Preliminary Considerations
I believe that throughout this study two facts have remained sufficiently clear:
that the PGE had sufficient sources of information available to it to know in detail what was going on in Auschwitz;
and that the PFR, the principal propaganda organ in English of the Ministry of the Interior of the PGE, made no mention that a slaughter of Jews was taking place in Auschwitz until practically the end of the war, in May of 1945. In sum, the PFR reported extensively on this concentration camp, but never to the effect that Jews were being annihilated there; and in the same fashion, it alluded frequently to the extermination of Jews but never said that it had taken place in Auschwitz.
The truth is that the PFR, which was able to know -- and no doubt did know -- what was occurring at Auschwitz, said absolutely nothing about the extermination of Jews that had supposedly been carried out in this camp during a period of more than three years, from 1942 to May of 1945.
The next step consists in asking oneself why the PFR failed to disclose anything about this massacre when, according to all the evidence, it must have known of it in detail.
In my opinion, there are three considerations which can be put forward to justify, or attempt to justify, the silence of the PFR:
4.1 The PGE Knew What Was Going on in Auschwitz, but Did Not Wish to Broadcast It and Thereby Relegate the Suffering of the Poles to a Matter of Secondary Importance
This argument has been advanced by the Israeli professor David Engel. According to Engel, the Poles had a powerful political reason for not centering the attention of the world on the extermination of Jews in Poland: widespread publicity about this event would have made the sufferings of the Poles seem minor in comparison, which could earn them less attention and sympathy from the international community. And so, Engel says, information about the "final solution" was filtered through to the West by the PGE only when such information could exacerbate hatred of the Nazi regime in general and at the same time not relegate the suffering of the Polish people to a lower plane.
In particular, and with respect to Auschwitz, the Polish authorities considered this camp a symbol of the tribulations of the Poles themselves, and thought that it might cease to be so if information about the massive annihilation of the Jews that had occurred there should be broadcast worldwide. [55]
This argument does not seem convincing, for various reasons. In the first place, news about the extermination of Jews in Poland did not occupy a secondary position either in the PFR or in the official documents of the PGE (see Appendix 2). On the contrary, the prominence given news relating to the extermination of Jews over other news in the PFR is quite apparent, especially in the second half of 1942 (see 3.2). In this connection, various official declarations of the PGE published in the PFR place more emphasis on the atrocities committed against the Jews than on those committed against the Poles themselves. Let us look at a few examples:
In a press conference held on 9 June 1942, Minister of the Interior Mikolajczyk, said: "Still worse is the situation of the Jews ... Hunger, death and sickness are exterminating the Jewish population systematically and continually" (no. 48, 15 July 1942, p. 6).
At the same press conference, Dr. Schwarzbart, member of the Polish National Council, pointed out that the organized killings of Jews "surpass the most horrible examples in the history of barbarism" (no. 48, 15 July 1942, p. 7).
Mikolajczyk, speaking in the name of the PGE, stated on 27 November 1942:
The persecutions of the Jewish minority now in progress in Poland, constitute however, a separate page of Polish martyrology.
Himmler's order that 1942 must be the year of liquidation of at least 50 per cent of Polish Jewry is being carried out with utter ruthlessness and a barbarity never before seen in world history (no. 57, 1 December 1942, P. 7).
Lastly, a resolution of the Polish National Council on 27 November 1942 calls attention to "the latest German crimes, unparalleled in the history of mankind, which have been carried out against the Polish nation, and particularly against the Jewish population of Poland" and accordingly condemns "the extermination of the Polish nation and other nations, an extermination the most appalling expression of which is provided by the mass murders of the Jews in Poland and in the rest of Europe which Hitler has subjected" (no. 57, 1 December 1942, p. 8).
So if the reports about atrocities committed against the Jews had become of primary concern, at least during the second half of 1942, it is not logical that the PFR should not even mention the name of Auschwitz, where, supposedly, more atrocities against the Jews were being committed. Furthermore, by the end of the second half of 1942 the Auschwitz camp had ceased to be a kind of symbol of the suffering of the Poles, at least insofar as the PFR is concerned. In fact, from 1 July 1942 on there are scarcely any references to the existence of Auschwitz in the publication. Auschwitz during that time was not a symbol of anything. It practically disappeared from the pages of the PFR, submerged in fact by the avalanche of reports about the extermination of Jews.
If anything, the Poles had a strong political reason for putting a special emphasis on the propaganda about atrocities against the Jews. The Poles in exile, for reasons we shall immediately go into, longed for a rapprochement with world Jewry in order to obtain the support of this powerful international force.
After the Soviet aggression against Poland in September of 1939, the USSR annexed important portions of Polish territory. Since 1941, the PGE had based its strategy with respect to the USSR on the nonrecognition of the Soviet annexation of those territories by England and the United States. The Anglo-Soviet treaty of 1942, however, weakened this hope. As even Engel acknowledges:
In this situation the Poles were more in need of influential friends than ever before. In view of their belief in the crucial role played by Jewish organizations in the formation of British and American opinion, they had to continue to try to win the Jews to their side, no matter how much effort would be required to do so, and almost at any cost. Hence the latter half of 1942 was a period of intensified Polish overtures to Western and Palestinian Jewry. [56]
Consequently, if the PGE needed Jewish support at practically any price, it would not have been logical for it to suppress news reports about a slaughter of Jews in Auschwitz. On the other hand, the dissemination of this news in the context of the propaganda concerning atrocities against the Jewish population would no doubt have made it easier for the PGE to approach the Jewish international circles whose support it so eagerly sought.
Moreover, and on quite another plane, passing over Auschwitz in silence was counterproductive for the PGE's one-time idea of bombing this concentration camp. In fact, as early as January of 1941, the PGE requested of the British government that the RAF bomb Auschwitz. The proposal was rejected, but, as Engel also recognizes, there is no reason to suppose that the Poles had since that time abandoned the idea that the activities of the camp could be paralyzed by military action on the part of the West. He writes:
In this context, a serious Polish campaign to publicize the especially egregious fate of Auschwitz's Jewish prisoners might conceivably have aroused sufficient anger within Western public opinion to force the British government to reconsider its attitude [with regard to the bombing of Auschwitz]. [57]
In short, it is not true that the exterminationof the Jews was of secondary importance in the propaganda policy of the PGE, since in fact the PFR did give it extensive coverage. Nor is it true that the PGE considered Auschwitz a symbol of the suffering of the Poles that it must, in its propaganda, put before news of the extermination of the Jews. We have already seen, on the contrary, that from the second half of 1942 on the PFR practically forgot about Auschwitz in order to feature precisely the news reports of the extermination of Jews. Ultimately, the PGE had the greatest possible political interest in emphasizing the propaganda about atrocities against the Jews. Accordingly, it would have been logical for the PGE to build up the role played by Auschwitz in these supposed atrocities.
In view of all the foregoing, we must conclude that this first reason alleged to justify the silence of the PFR is not valid. It would seem, therefore, that the reason for the silence of the PFR must be sought elsewhere.
4.2 The Secret Reports on the Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz Reached London Very Late, and Therefore Were Published at the End of the War
This is the explanation provided for the fact that the first news about the killings of Jews in Auschwitz appeared in the PFR on the 1st of May of 1945 (see Appendix 1). [58]
Simply put, this argument would mean that the reports on the annihilation of Jews in Auschwitz, which supposedly got under way at the beginning of 1942, did not reach London until three years later.
Examination of the available data, however, makes this notion easy to refute. Thus, for example, an article with detailed information about Auschwitz up to September of 1940 was published by the PFR in June of 1941 (no. 21, 1 June 1941, pp. 6f.). Engel has shown likewise that the first clandestine report about Auschwitz left Poland on 30 January 1941 and reached London on 18 March of the same year. [59] It has already been indicated previously (see 2.4) that communications between Poland and London flowed smoothly. They were instantaneous if the messages were transmitted by radio and generally took a few months if they were sent by courier. With regard to radio messages, there exists a radiogram sent from Poland by clandestine radio station "Wanda 5" on the 4 March 1943 which contains news about Auschwitz up to 15 December of 1942. [60] Another radiogram, sent by the clandestine radio station "Kazia" on 7 June 1943, contains news from inside Auschwitz up to April of the same year. [61] These offer conclusive evidence that reports concerning Auschwitz were known in London within the space of a few months.
Consequently this justification, to explain the silence of the PFR, can not be accepted either.
4.3 The PFR Did Not Report on the Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz Simply Because No Such Extermination Occurred
That, in the opinion of this writer, is the appropriate conclusion to be drawn from all the available facts. Let us briefly review these facts:
the PGE had the capability of knowing, through numerous channels of communication, what was going on inside Auschwitz; if a physical extermination of Jews had been systematically carried out in the camp, the PGE would doubtless have known of it in a very short space of time;
the PGE did not, until the end of the war, publishin the PFR, its principal propaganda organ in English, any information to the effect that a great slaughter of Jews had taken place in Auschwitz, and the silence of the PFR is shared by a most important official declaration of the PGE as well (see Appendix 2);
the PGE, and hence the PFR, had no motive for suppressing reports of atrocities committed against the Jews; on the contrary, this aspect constituted one of the central points of its propaganda.
The only explanation that would seem to fit, then, to justify the silence of the PFR is that a slaughter of Jews never took place in Auschwitz, at least none significant enough to be publicized.
This is the conclusion derived from the rigorous application of the historians' argument ex silentio. According to this, a given historical assumption is considered not to have happened when it is not cited by contemporaries, always supposing these two circumstances to be present:
the contemporary authors could know and had to know the fact in question; and
they ought to have reported it. [62]
Thus, for example, it is admitted that the Franks did not hold regular assemblies, because the principal chronicler of the period, Gregory of Tours, did not mention them and doubtless would have if they had existed. [63]
These two necessary conditions can be applied perfectly to our case:
the PFR could know and had to know that the Jews were being annihilated on a massive scale; and
it ought to have reported it, since the question of the extermination of the Jews constituted one of the central points of its propaganda.
And if it did not report it, it was because in all probability a massive extermination of Jews never took place. This, therefore, is the only satisfactory explanation for the silence of the Polish Fortnightly Review.
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Appendix 1: Issue 115 (1 May 1945) of the Polish Fortnightly Review
In this issue, for the first time, informationwas published concerning the extermination of Jews in Auschwitz. This revelation occurred more than three months after the arrival in Auschwitz of the Soviet troops, and at a time when the war was practically over (it ended officially in Europe on the 8th of May). At that time a tremendous worldwide propaganda campaign was being waged on the atrocities committed in the German concentration camps already occupied by the Allies (principally Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald); a few months earlier, in November of 1944, the War Refugee Board, an official U. S. organization charged with rescuing and assisting the victims of the war, had published three testimonies in which were described massive killings of Jews that had taken place in Auschwitz. [64]
Issue number 115 of the PFR, bearing the generic title "Polish Women in German Concentration Camps, " is devoted exclusively to Auschwitz. It contains two testimonies of women prisoners, an account of women "gassed" and a brief report on medical experiments.
1. First testimony: "An Eyewitness's Account of the Women's Camp at Oswiecim-Brzezinka (Birkenau). Autumn, 1943, to Spring, 1944" (pp. 1-6).
The introductory note indicates without embellishment that this is the testimony of a woman, an eyewitness, who gives an account of things that happened in the second half of 1943 and the beginning of 1944. It indicates also that the document reached London "by devious routes" (p. 1).
A brief examination of the text in question permits the conclusion that it is without value as a historical source and is nothing but a propaganda production.
In the first place, no details whatsoever are provided as to its provenance. Who wrote it, when and where it was written, or through what agency it reached London is not revealed. If the war was practically at an end, what danger could the author be supposed to incur by revealing her name and personal details? Nor is there any indication as to whether this person was liberated from Auschwitz, whether she escaped, or whether she sent her report clandestinely while still a prisoner. The omission of these details as to the origin of the document, without evident reason, makes it more than suspect. Furthermore, the writer also fails to mention any dates, such as the date of her arrival at the camp; or what duties she discharged while at the camp.
With regard to her description of life in the camp, the witness relates happenings that are very hard to believe. For example, she says she was in the "Sauna" just at the time a special selection of women prisoners for the camp brothel took place, at which she also watched an interpretation of pornographic songs by a prisoner who was a former cabaret singer, and the execution of a Cossack dance by a Gypsy. Both women were completely naked (p. 4). She also managed to be present at an inspection in the hospital, during which a German doctor, who was stressing the importance of maintaining good hygienic conditions, carefully examined the walls for dust or cobwebs while appearing to be indifferent to the piles of corpses and the lack of medicines and water (p.4).
The witness also states that she saw the crematory furnaces, which never ceased operation, and from the chimneys of which continuously poured great clouds of smoke, and flames up to 10 meters high (p. 5). The incessant activity of the crematories was due to the annihilation of the Jews. Trains arrived every day from all over Europe. Ten percent of the passengers were interned in the camp; the rest went straight to the gas chamber (which is always referred to in the singular). She also claims to have seen the actual extermination in the gas chamber of 4, 000 Jewish children from the ghetto of Terezin (Theresienstadt). In fact, according to the witness, the gas did not kill but only stunned them, since it was expensive, and the Germans wished to be sparing with it. Consequently the victims woke up in the trucks transporting them from the gas chamber to the crematory and were flung into the fire alive (pp. 5f.).
The author of this testimony, no doubt conscious of the enormities she is relating, repeats several times that her information is strictly true, that she has seen it all personally. and that, besides, this is only a small part of the truth (pp. 2 and 6).
In short, the first document published by the PFR on the extermination of the Jews of Auschwitz is historically unacceptable.
2. Second testimony: "Report Made by a Girl Fifteen Years Old" (pp. 6-7).
The introductory note says that this is the testimony of a Polish girl regarding her stay in the Birkenau women's camp during the second half of 1943 and the beginning of 1944 (p. 1). Just as in the previous case, the facts as to the origin of the document are not stated. Judging from the language and the style in which it is written, it does not seem to be the work of a fifteen-year-old girl.
With regard to the contents, the most important thing to note is that it contains not the slightest reference to the extermination of Jews. In only one passage is allusion made to the "gas chamber, " in which those selected at roll call because of their poor physical condition are going to end up. The rest of the document is surprisingly objective, given the circumstances and the time in which it was published. Because of its interest we reproduce it below. [pages from Polish Fortnightly Review numbered 53a and 53b]
3. Other information (p. 8).
Issue 115 also contains an account of women annihilated with poison gas at Birkenau in 1943, in which information is given month by month from February of 1943 to December of 1944. The victims are sorted into three groups: Poles, Jews and others. According to this information, the number of Polish and "other" women is much larger than that of the Jewish women.
Lastly, there is a brief report about medical experiments performed on women in block number 10 of Auschwitz.
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Appendix 2: An Official Document of the Polish Government-in-Exile: "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland" (Archives of the SPP, 2318)
This concerns an official document of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PGE published in London in December of 1942. It contains various official texts and declarations of the PGE put out between 27 November and 17 December of 1942.
The document claims to be bringing together the "most recent reports" received from Poland "during recent weeks" on the "new methods of mass slaughter applied during the last few months" (pp. 4-5).
The information about the exterminationof Jews contained in this document is represented as complete. At the outset, the document establishes a chronological account of the principal milestones in the extermination policy of the Germans. Thus, it notes that the first steps leading to the extermination phase were taken as early as October of 1940, when the Warsaw ghetto was established (p. 5). Later, beginning with the German-Soviet war, great massacres of Jews were carried out, especially in the eastern provinces. Around the middle of July of 1942, the word was given to commence the process of liquidation, "the horror of which surpasses anything known in the annals of history" (p. 6). Finally, at the end of July of 1942, the deportation of the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto to the extermination camps began (pp. 8-9).
The document enumerates the principal places where the killings were being carried out and describes the extermination methods. It says that the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto were directed toward the extermination camps of "Tremblinka [sic], Belzec and Sobibor, "employing freight cars whose floors were covered with quicklime and chlorine. Upon arrival at the camp the survivors from the freight cars were murdered by various means, "including poison gas and electrocution, " after which they were buried (pp. 8-9). In Chelm (Kulmhof) the Germans were also using poison gases (p. 6). In other places such as Wilno, Lwow, Rowne, Kowel, Tarnopol, Stanislawow, Stryj and Drohobycz, the method was shooting (p. 6).
The most important thing to note is that this official document, which claims to have exhaustive and very recent information on the extermination of Jews in Poland, does not once mention Auschwitz. It must be taken into account, moreover, that this text was published in December 1942, practically a year after the supposed extermination of Jews in Auschwitz had been initiated and six months after the "killings" took on a systematic character with the arrival of large convoys of Jews from France, Slovakia, Belgium and Holland.
The document further contains a report of great interest relative to the deportation to Poland of Jews of other countries. Specifically, it speaks of "the many thousands of Jews whom the German authorities have deported to Poland from Western and Central European countries and from the German Reich itself" (p. 4). These Jews brought from abroad had been concentrated in ghettos (p. 15). According to the thesis generally accepted today, a good part of these Jews were to end up at Auschwitz. For example, it is stated that up to 1 December 1942, 45 convoys of Jews arrived at this concentration camp from France, 17 from Belgium, 27 from Holland and 19 from Slovakia. Specifically, all the Jews of France and Belgium who were deported to Poland in 1942 supposedly ended their journey in Auschwitz. So that, estimating half a thousand persons per convoy, around 100,000 Jews from these countries would have arrived at Auschwitz in 1942. Of this number, the partisans of the Exterminationist thesis affirm, only a small part were considered fit for work and interned in the camp, and the rest sent without further ado to the gas chambers.
But if the PGE knew that the Jews of Western countries were being deported to Poland, they would doubtless have to know that a good part of them were going to end up at Auschwitz. The silence of the PGE is therefore very significant and suggests a very different hypothesis: that many of the Jews deported to Poland from France, Belgium, Holland and Slovakia during 1942 never reached Auschwitz. The fact that in the document we are discussing it is indicated that these Jews were concentrated in ghettos reinforces this hypothesis.
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Notes
Engel, D., In the Shadow of Auschwitz, pp. 192, 172.
Duraczynski, E., Polish Government in Exile, pp. 1177-1178.
Garlinski, J., Poland, SOE and the Allies, pp. 21-29, 90.
Duraczynski, E., Delagatura, pp. 356f.
Duraczynski, E., Armia Krajowa, pp.88f.
Jarosz, B., Le mouvement de ..., pp. 145-147, 150.
Jarosz, B., Le mouvement de ..., pp. 158.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 97f.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 123.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 110.
Jarosz, B., Le mouvement de ..., p. 110.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, p. 175.
Poles of German origin who had chosen to hold Germannationality after 1939.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, p. 205.
Jarosz, B., Le mouvement de ..., p. 151.
No. 84, 15 January 1944, p. 5.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, p. 253.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 46, 153.
Laqueur, W., The Terrible Secret, pp.22f.
Laqueur, W., The Terrible Secret, pp.24.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 43
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 43-45.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 155ff.
Langbein, H., Hommes et femmes à Auschwitz, p. 252.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, p. 126.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 100f.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 206-208.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, p. 46.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 102, 143.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, p. 230.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 54f, 112.
Laqueur, W., The Terrible Secret, p.169.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 167-173.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, pp. 101-103.
Bor-Komorowski, T., The Secret Army, p. 150.
Laqueur, W., The Terrible Secret, pp.103, 107.
Laqueur, W., The Terrible Secret, pp.103f.
Karski, J., Story of a Secret State, p. 217.
Karski, J., Story of a Secret State, p. 253.
Nowak, J., Courier from Warsaw, pp.164f.
Nowak, J., Courier from Warsaw, pp.166, 172-174.
Bor-Komorowski, T., The Secret Army, p. 150.
Bor-Komorowski, T., The Secret Army, pp. 122f.
Bor-Komorowski, T., The Secret Army, p. 151.
Garlinski, J., Poland, SOE and the Allies, pp. 150-154.
Duraczynski, E., Armia Krajowa, p.89.
Garlinski, J., Fighting Auschwitz, p. 89.
All of the quotations which follow, unless otherwiseindicated, are from the PFR, with the issue, date and corresponding page numbers given in parentheses following each quotation.
Czech, D., Kalendarium der Ereignisse im ..., p. 159.
Czech, D., Kalendarium der Ereignisse im ..., p. 86.
See in this respect the work of Mattogno, C., The First Gassing at Auschwitz.
Czech, D., Kalendarium der Ereignisse im . . , p. 189.
Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz, notes in his memoirs that the extermination for Jews in this camp had begun "probably" in September of 1941 or in January of 1942 (Höss R., Kommandant in Auschwitz, pp. 159f.
Buszko, J., Auschwitz, pp. 114-115.
Engel, D., In the Shadow of Auschwitz, pp. 177, 201-203.
Engel, D., In the Shadow of Auschwitz, p. 147.
Engel, D., In the Shadow of Auschwitz, p. 209.
Or in the fall of 1944, should the issues of that period -- which I have not been able to find -- have information on the matter.
Engel, D., In the Shadow of Auschwitz, p. 305.
The text of the English translation of this message, made in London, is dated 31 March 1943. (Archives of the SPP, 3.16).
The text of the English translation of this message, made in London, is dated 10 June 1943. (Archives of the SPP, 3.16).
Garcia Villadas, Z., Metodolog'a cr'tica históricas, p. 319.
Langlois, Ch.V. and Seignobos, Ch., Introduccióna los estudios históricos, p. 190.
These testimonies are known as the "Protocols of Auschwitz." A critical study of them may be seen in my work, Los 'Protocolos de Auschwitz': ?una fuente histórica? (Alicante: Garc'a Hispán, 1990).
Czech, D., Kalendarium der Ereignisse im ..., pp. 189-347.
Klarsfeld, S., Le Mémorial de la déportation de juifs de France, p. 13 by my numbering. Klarsfeld, S. and Steinberg, M., Mémorialde la déportation des juifs de Belgigue, p. 22 by my numbering.
Duraczynski, E., Polish Government-in-Exile, pp. 1177-1178.66.
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Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 282-319.
Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski
Born Sept. 3, 1921
Lwów, Poland
in Dec 1939 left Warsaw. Dec 30, 1939 arrested by Ukrainians serving the Gestapo in Dukla, then transferred to Barwinek, Krosno, Jaslo, Tarnów, Oswiecim, arrived in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen on Aug. 10, 1940.
April 19, 1945 started on the Death March of Brandenburg from Sachsenhausen; escaped gunfire of SS-guards and arrived to Schwerin and freedom on May 2, 1945.
September 1945 arrived in Brussels, Belgium; obtained admission as a regular student at the Catholic University: Institute Superieur de Commerce, St. Ignace in Antwerp.
in 1954 graduated in Civil Engineering at the top of his class. Was invited to join honorary societies: Tau Beta Pi (general engineering honorary society), Phi Kappa Phi (academic honorary society equivalent to Phi Beta Kappa), Pi Mu (mechanical engineering honorary society), and Chi Epsilon (civil engineering honorary society). Taught descriptive geometry at the University of Tennessee;
in 1955 graduated with M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering.
in 1955 started working for Shell Oil Company in New Orleans. After one year of managerial training was assigned to design of marine structures for drilling and production of petroleum.
in 1960 started working for Texaco Research and Development in Houston, Texas as a Project Engineer. Authored total of 50 American and foreign patents on marine structures for the petroleum industry;
wrote an article: The Rise and Fall of the Polish Commonwealth - A Quest for a Representative Government in Central and Eastern Europe in the 14th to 18th Centuries. Started to work on a Tabular History of Poland.
in 1972 moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. During the following years worked as Consulting Engineer for Texaco, also taught in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University as Adjunct Professor in the College of Civil Engineering teaching courses on marine structures of the petroleum industry. Designed and supervised the construction of a hill top home for his family, also bought 500 acre ranch (near Thomas Jefferson National Forest) where he restored 200 years old mill house on a mountain stream.
in 1978 prepared Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. The dictionary included a Tabular History of Poland, Polish Language, People, and Culture as well as Pogonowski's phonetic symbols for phonetic transcriptions in English and Polish at each dictionary entry; the phonetic explanations were illustrated with cross-sections of speech (organs used to pronounce the sounds unfamiliar to the users). It was the first dictionary with phonetic transcription at each Polish entry for use by English speakers
in 1981 prepared Practical Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc.
in 1983 prepared Concise Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. Wrote an analysis of Michael Ch ci ski's Poland, Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism. Also selected crucial quotations from Norman Davies' God's Playground - A History of Poland on the subject of the Polish indigenous democratic process.
in 1985 prepared Polish-English Standard Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. Also prepared a revised and expanded edition of the Concise Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics, also published by Hippocrene Books Inc.
in 1987 prepared Poland: A Historical Atlas on Polish History and Prehistory including 200 maps and graphs as well as Chronology of Poland's Constitutional and Political Development, and the Evolution of Polish Identity - The Milestones. An introductory chapter was entitled Poland the Middle Ground. Aloysius A. Mazewski President of Polish-American Congress wrote an introduction. The Atlas was published by Hippocrene Books Inc. and later by Dorset Press of the Barnes and Noble Co. Inc. which sends some 30 million catalogues to American homes including color reproduction of book covers. Thus, many Americans were exposed to the cover of Pogonowski's Atlas showing the range of borders of Poland during the history - many found out for the firsttime that Poland was an important power in the past. Total of about 30,000 atlases were printed so far.
In 1988 the publication of Poland: A Historical Atlas resulted in a number of invitations extended by several Polonian organizations to Iwo Pogonowski to present Television Programs on Polish History. Pogonowski responded and produced over two year period 220 half-hour video programs in his studio at home (and at his own expense.) These programs formed a serial entitled: Poland, A History of One Thousand Years. Total of over 1000 broadcasts of these programs were transmitted by cable television in Chicago, Detroit-Hamtramck, Cleveland, and Blacksburg.
in 1990-1991 translated from the Russian the Catechism of a Revolutionary of 1869 in which crime has been treated as a normal part of the revolutionary program. Started preparation of the Killing the Best and the Brightest: A Chronology of the USSR-German Attempt to Behead the Polish Nation showing how the USSR became a prototype of modern totalitarian state, how this prototype was adapted in Germany by the Nazis.
in 1991 prepared Polish Phrasebook, Polish Conversations for Americans including picture code for gender and familiarity, published by Hippocrene Books Inc.
in 1991 prepared English Conversations for Poles with Concise Dictionary published by Hippocrene Books Inc. By then a total of over 100,000 Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionaries written by Pogonowski were sold in the United States and abroad.
in 1992 prepared a Dictionary of Polish, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish Terms used in Contacts between Poles and Jews. It was prepared for the history of Jews in Poland as well as 115 maps and graphs and 172 illustrations, paintings, drawings, and documents, etc. of Jewish life in Poland. This material was accompanied by proper annotations.
in 1993 prepared Jews in Poland, Rise of the Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel, published by Hippocrene Books Inc. in 3000 copies. Foreword was written by Richard Pipes, professor of history at Harvard University, and Pogonowski's school mate in the Keczmar school in Warsaw. Part I included: a Synopsis of 1000 Year History of Jews in Poland; the 1264 Statute of Jewish Liberties in Poland in Latin and English translation; Jewish Autonomy in Poland 1264-1795; German Annihilation of the Jews. In appendixes are documents and illustrations. An Atlas is in the Part III. It is divided as follows: Early Jewish Settlements 966-1264; The Crucial 500 Years, 1264-1795; Competition (between Poles and Jews) Under Foreign Rule, 1795-1918; The Last Blossoming of Jewish Culture in Poland, 1918-1939; German Genocide of the Jews, 1940-1944; Jewish Escape from Europe 1945-1947 - The End of European (Polish) Phase of Jewish History (when most of world's Jewry lived in Europe). Pogonowski began to write a new book starting with the Chronology of the Martyrdom of Polish Intelligentsia during World War II and the Stalinist Terror; the book in preparation was entitled Killing the Best and the Brightest.
in 1995 prepared Dictionary of Polish Business, Legal and Associated Terms for use with the new edition of the Practical Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionary and later to be published as a separate book.
in 1996 Pogonowski's Poland: A Historical Atlas; was translated into Polish; some 130 of the original 200 maps printed in color; the Chronology of Poland was also translated into Polish. The Atlas was published by Wydawnictwo Suszczy ski I Baran in Kraków in 3000 copies; additional publications are expected. Prepared Polish-English, Eglish-Polish Compact Dictionary with complete phonetics, published by Hippocrene Books Inc.
in 1997 finished preparation of the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary with complete phonetics including over 200,000 entries, in three volumes on total of 4000 pages; it is published by Hippocrene Books Inc; the Polish title is: Uniwesalny S ownik Polsko-Angielski. Besides years of work Pogonowski spent over $50,000 on computers, computer services, typing, and proof reading in order to make the 4000 page dictionary camera ready; assisted in the preparation of second edition of Jews in Poland, Rise of the Jews from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel published in fall of 1997. Prepared computer programs for English-Polish Dictionary to serve as a companion to the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary printed by the end of May 1997.
in 1998 Pogonowski organized preparation of CD ROM for the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary, Practical English-Polish Dictionary, Polish Phrasebook for Tourists and Travelers to Poland, all published earlier by Iwo C. Pogonowski. The Phrasebook includes 280 minutes of bilingual audio read by actors. Started preparation for a new edition of Poland: A Historical Atlas. New Appendices are being prepared on such subjects as: Polish contribution to Allied's wartime intelligence: the breaking of the Enigma Codes, Pune Munde rocket production; Poland's contribution to the international law since 1415; Poland's early development of rocket technology such as Polish Rocketry Handbook published in 1650 in which Poles introduced for the first time into the world's literature concepts of multiple warheads, multistage rockets, new controls in rocket flight, etc. Poland's Chronology is being enlarged to reflect the mechanisms of subjugation of Polish people by the Soviet terror apparatus. Continued preparation of the Killing the Best and the Brightest: A Chronology of the USSR-German Attempt to Behead the Polish Nation, including the 1992 revelations from Soviet archives as well as the current research in Poland. Continued preparation of two-volume English Polish Dictionary, a companion to the Unabridged Polish-English Dictionary published in 1997. Reviewed Upiorna Dekada by J. T. Gross.
in 1999 Pogonowski continued writing Poland - An Illustrated History and preparing for it 21 maps and diagrams and 89 illustrations.
in 2000 Pogonowski prepared, in a camera ready form, Poland - An Illustrated History; it was published by Hippocrene Books Inc. NY 2000 and recommended by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under President Carter, as "An important contribution to the better understanding of Polish history, which demonstrates in a vivid fashion the historical vicissitudes of that major European nation."
The Pogrom of Kielce
On 4th of July of 2006 the catholic people of Kielce in central Poland were again intimidated by the alliance of Jews, liberals and postcommunist. They were humiliated because of the unvailling of a monument which falsely accused their ancestors of having acted as an “infuriated mob” and commited hideous crimes on the same day sixty years on some 40 Jewish victims. Ten years ago on the same day on the 50th anniversary of the “pogrom of Kielce,” the town had to listen in presence of a postcommunistr prime minister Cimoszewicz, to verbal abuse by Elie Wisely, the resident clown of the Holocaust Industry, as Norman Finkelstein appropriately nicknamed him.
Now another supporter of the Holocaust Industry, named Jan Tomasz Gross , published a book “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz” (Random House), which is a part of the offensive by the Jewish World Congress to make Poland pay 65 billion dollars in damages to the Jews through JWC. The tactics of JWC were stated by Izrael Singer in Buenos Aires in Argentina on April 19, 1996 according to Reuter (14.50.17 PDT). Thus according to a false mitolgy the Poles are accused of being partners of German Nazis in the killing of Jews.
Gross, the Polish-born American academic who’s books were never reviewed by the scientific community became successful when he joined the Hocaust Industry and made the Jedwabne massacre a notoriety in Poland and abroad with his book earlier book “Neighbors.” He then recycled a Nazi propaganda scheme and now he recycled a Soviet scheme designed to justify Soviet postwar pacification of Poland in the book “Fear.”
In both his books, Gross, more a sociologist than historian, attributes guilt for the crime not only to the perpetrators, but the Polish nation generally. Gross falsely claims that "it was widespread collusion in the Nazi-driven plunder, spoliation, and eventual murder of the Jews that generated Polish anti-Semitism after the war."
Gross claims that Poles feared the return of Jews from Nazi camps, hiding or exile, and wanted to eliminate them because they had witnessed “Polish betrayal of Jews” and could expose the "pure, unregenerate evil" that according to Gross separates the Poloes from civilization. The Jewis reviewers then exhort Poland to face up to its history and come to terms with its past and pay $65 billion damages to Jews. Gross offers little historical data to support his theory on the source of postwar anti-Semitism in Poland. Gross ignores a recent scholarly work on the same subject, “After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II,” by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz (East European Monographs, 2003). Gross neglected to mention Poland's dire state in 1946. The brutal Soviet pacification of Poland at a cost of 25,000 to 50,000 lives and deportation in excess of 100,000, while at thet time the Jewish losses are estimated at 800 to 1500, some victims of common criminals and some killed as Soviet collaborators.
Some Jewish reviewers of “Fear” assert that simply observing the genocide of the Jews made one guilty of "passive complicity." Wartime destruction of the Polish nation is not mentioned by Gross.
In Reality “Pogrom of Kielce” of 4th of July, 1946 was one of some 16 pogroms staged by the NKVD in the satellite states in 1945-47 as a result of Stalin’s decision do use Zionists in establishing the state of Israel after the Second World War, which would serve as a “bone of contention in the oil rich Middle East. Thanks to the Soviet support for the Zionists 711,000 Jews crossed the Iron Courting, in 1945-1947 supposedly in order to emigrate to Palestine. Given a chance ,vast majority of Jews preferred to go to the United States or stay in France, and only 232,000 Jewish refugees actually arrived to Palestine to be armed by the Soviets with Czech weapons for the conquest of Arab land. Zionists alone organized pogroms in the Arab states and caused exit of 547,000 Jews from Bagdad, Damscus, etc. in 1950-1951. In sum some 1,250,000 Jews were brutally chased from coutries of their residence in Soviet satellite states and from Arab countries. Some 779,000 Jews actually arrived in Palestine.
In actual well-documented fact, Polish gentiles helped Jewish people in Poland extensively during World War II. This assistance included the hiding of tens of thousands of Jewish people in the homes of Polish gentiles, which put the gentiles' entire families at risk of death. Several thousand Polish Christians, including men, women, and children, were burned alive or otherwise summarily executed for the crime of hiding or assisting Jews. In no other country during the war were people subjected to death in this way for providing assistance to Jewish people. Three million Polish Christian deaths during the occupation constitute a part of the Polish aspect of the Holocaust.
An exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., falsely presents events that occurred in Kielce, Poland, in 1946 as part of the Holocaust. It refers to the clearly Soviet-staged violence in Kielce as a "Polish pogrom." To many visitors of the Holocaust Museum, the exhibit by its very inclusion seems to suggest that after the end of World War II, a liberated Polish populace chose to continue Hitler’s work of exterminating Jewish people. The suggestions of a Polish-led extension of the Holocaust are patently false. The Kielce Pogrom had nothing to do with the Nazi German-engineered Holocaust. It had everything to do with the Soviet-engineered strangulation of the Polish nation.
Like all effective myths, those related to World War II have some elements of truth underlying them. In conjunction with the construction of these myths, though, actual facts and events have been distorted or misrepresented, and certainly the contexts within which they occurred have been falsely stated. Sadly, the distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods are sometimes purposely and systematically advanced by those who feel a need to humiliate the Polish nation and members of the Polish ethnic group from around the world. On the flip side of the coin bearing the image of anti-Semitism is the image of anti-Polonism. The coin of anti-Semitism cannot be melted down and destroyed without also melting down and destroying anti-Polonism.
I will state up front that I have a vested interest in the truth about World War II and its aftermath being clearly illuminated. I am a veteran of 64 months of imprisonment in Gestapo prisons, concentration camps, and death marches. My own ordeal, and the suffering and death of many of my Polish and Jewish friends and prison-mates, not to mention the sacrifices made by the young men who fought and died as soldiers, will have been rendered meaningless if the hatred of Jewish people by the Nazi leadership is simply replaced by hatred of Polish people by Jewish people, or vice versa. Those who even today perpetuate myths and misconceptions about animosities associated with World War II and its aftermath are not merely bearing false witness—they are willing accomplices to the spirit of hatred of World War II.
I have seen, first hand, the disgusting, murderous results of ethnic hatred. I have devoted the latter part of my life to writing about the long-term coexistence of Polish Jews and gentiles within Poland, and am committed to trying to help diffuse animosities stemming from World War II. In this spirit of friendship and respect, I wrote and had published earlier this decade a documentary history entitled Jews in Poland: The Rise of Jews as a Nation From Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel. If World War II presented any lessons to the people of the world, it showed what can eventually happen if ethnic animosities are allowed to fester and grow.
I will take the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Kielce Pogrom to discuss this event in detail and use it as a basis for discussion of the larger geopolitical situation. This study deals primarily with the results of Soviet-institutionalized hatred and the Soviet crime of provoking situations purposely designed to sour Polish-Jewish relations and was used make Poland a Soviet satellite state.
For this study, the book Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism by Michael Checinski (New York: Karz-Cohl Publishing, 1982) is an important source of information for the Cold War period. I will use Checinski's book as a resource to help illuminate the events and situations in the aftermath of World War II that relate to Polish-Jewish relations. Checinski's book details the relations between Poles and Jews in the postwar "People's" Republic of Poland and the damage done to these relations under the conditions created by the Soviets. Checinski was an insider of the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. As a Jew who survived the Łódź Ghetto, Checinski (Chciński) was naturally very sensitive to Soviet policies which fomented and used anti-Semitic excesses in the satellite empire to serve Soviet purposes of the time. Checinski's book shows Soviet methods used to bring the destruction of law and morality to Poland and other satellite states. I also draw heavily on material from a book by Krystyna Kersten, Polacy Żydzi-komunizm: anatomia półprawd 1939–68 [Poles, Jews, Communism: The Anatomy of Half-Truths 1939–68] (Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1992) and also from Pogrom Żydów w Kielcach 4 lipca 1946 [Pogrom of Jews in Kielce, July 4, 1946] by Bożena Szaynok, (Warszawa: Bellona, 1992). Along the way, I will include some necessary background information relating to World War II.
The Kielce Pogrom in a Nutshell
A "pogrom", a Russian word that translates to "devastation," is defined as "an organized massacre, especially of Jews in Russia, such as 1881, 1903, and 1905." (The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, 1989.) Anti-Jewish violence in Russia was usually started with a false accusation that a ritual murder had been perpetrated on Christian children by local Jews. Violence directed against the Jews that occurred on July 4, 1946, in the town of Kielce, referred to as the Kielce Pogrom, is aptly named for several reasons. For one, it was indeed organized. And as it will be explained in detail, it was organized by the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus in Poland, a captured country which was under Soviet occupation at the time. This pogrom, although not on Russian soil, was arranged by a totalitarian leadership centered in Russia and it was started with the same technique of planting a false accusation that a ritual murder had been perpetrated on Christian children. And as even the common dictionary definition shows, this is not the first time Russians have instigated this type of activity.
In the Kielce Pogrom, an uprising occurred over the span of eight hours that resulted first in the death of 41 Polish citizens: 39 Jews, and two gentiles and then I ashow trial and execution of nine Poles, who were not present at the site of the pobrom. It was a horrible crime, and regrettably, there was some complicity among a very small number of gentile Poles in this inexcusable violence. Some of these Polish criminals, as will be pointed out, were tried and convicted for their crimes. The reports, however, of the involvement of a mob of 15,000 cheering Polish citizens are completely untrue. Also, the idea that the uprising was of a spontaneous nature is also untrue. As it will be shown in this study, this event was carefully provoked and staged by the Soviet occupiers at that time. This event was staged to achieve specific political purposes dictated by Moscow's global strategy including Europe and the Middle East.
The Soviet-Nazi Partnership
Why would Soviets want to stage an uprising that would embarrass Poland? After all, didn't both Poland and the Soviets fight alongside of Britain and the other allies in World War II? Didn't Hitler's German army invade both Poland and the Soviet Union, and isn't "the enemy of my enemy my friend?"
There is general public awareness that the United States and the Soviet Union were World War II partners in the Allied fight against Nazi Germany. Many fewer, however, are aware of the nearly two-year Nazi-Soviet partnership embodied in the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which was signed on September 28, 1939. It divided all of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and contained secret provisions for the mutual extermination of potential Polish opponents of both Germany and the USSR. Both Germany and the USSR agreed to control their respective parts of Poland. This meant taking all necessary measures to contain and prevent the emergence of any potential Polish actions toward either Germany or the USSR, and then communicating with each other on the progress made toward the goals of the treaty. The treaty lasted until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Soviet hostility toward Poland and the desire of the USSR to control as much Polish territory as it could continued beyond the German invasion of Poland.
The Soviets implemented their part of the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty by executing 21,857 members of the Polish leadership community including a number of Jewish people. Katyn contained the graves of 4,443 such men and became a symbol of the mass execution of members of the upper echelon of Polish society in the Spring of 1940. At the same time Nazi Germany ran a parallel operation with the code name Aktion AB (Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion, which translates to “extraordinary pacification”), culminating in the execution of about 20,000 Polish professionals.
Because of the German-Soviet Treaty to divide Poland among themselves, the Eastern half of Poland was under Soviet, not German, rule from September, 1939 to mid-1941. During that time, there were many Jewish people who collaborated with the Soviet terror apparatus against the conquered Polish state. Among the many eyewitnesses to those events is the famed Polish courier Jan Karski, who was made an honorary citizen of Israel for his efforts to warn an unresponsive West about the fate of Poland and Polish Jewry. In February 1940, Karski reported: "Jews are denouncing Poles to the secret police and are directing the work of the communist militia from behind the scenes... Unfortunately, one must say that these incidents are very frequent." (Report to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London.)
Hundreds of published accounts, including Jewish ones, confirm that Jews were involved in the roundups of Polish soldiers and officials (e.g., at Rożyszcze, Kowel, and Brześć), the jailing and executions of Poles (e.g., at Lwów, Tarnopol and Czortków), and in policing the deportation of Poles, by cattle car, to the Gulag (e.g., from Gwoździec and Jedwabne). By the time the Germans attacked their erstwhile Soviet ally in mid-1941, over one million Poles had been deported to distant and probable death from towns like Brańsk. All of this occurred before the Jewish Holocaust got underway. Naturally, these events had a significant impact on Polish attitudes, though that was not the only factor influencing them. Conditions in Brańsk under Soviet occupation were detailed in a recent study by Zbigniew Romaniuk, titled "21 miesięy władzy sowieckiej w Brańsku", in Ziemia Brańka, volume 6 (1995)—it does not make pleasant reading.
German Occupation of Poland and Control of Jews
By mid-1941, Nazi Germany gained control of all of Poland and the Nazis continued the establishment of Jewish ghettos that they had started in 1939. German Nazis formed the Jewish ghettos by evicting hundreds of thousands of gentiles from their homes and then crowding many more Jewish families there than the space could reasonably accommodate. There were no Jewish ghettos in Poland before Germany started creating them in 1939. It is ironic that some people not well acquainted with the history of the ghettos have mistakenly thought that the ghettos were formed by a bigoted Polish population who spitefully wanted to segregate the Jewish population to selected areas. Instead, the real truth is that Polish people were unwillingly removed from their homes by the German Nazis to form the ghettos, and then the Polish people illegally aided the Jews by bringing them substantial amounts of food and other supplies.
The Polish Armed Resistance reported that 500,000 Jews were crowded into the Warsaw Ghetto: 600 people per acre. Hunger, and unspeakably poor hygienic and sanitary conditions resulted in the spreading of tuberculosis and other contagious diseases. The Polish Underground reported: "The isolated ghetto is restricted to internal trade, consisting of people's private property, clothing, and household goods which are sold at low prices for extremely expensive food.... There is no heating fuel in the ghetto.... The health and sanitary conditions are beyond description—there is a monstrous hunger and poverty.... Overcrowded streets are full of aimless, pale, and starving people.... People die in the streets.... An orphanage is being overcrowded with daily arrivals of newborn babies.... The plunder of once-affluent Jews continues...as well as the treatment of Jews in an exceptionally brutal manner..."
Each ghetto had its own Jewish Council (Judenrat) which oversaw day-to-day affairs and a Jewish police force which carried out German-Nazi orders to supply laborers and, as pointed out by Jewish historians such as Isaiah Trunk and Hannah Arendt, to round up Jews for deportation to death camps. Thus, relatively few German soldiers were needed for such "Aktions," or official actions by the German government against the Jewish people. Nor did their success involve any type of cooperation from Polish gentiles. Because the system set up by the German Nazis did not rely on Polish police, even the opportunity for the Polish police to aid the roundup of the Jews was marginal or non-existent, as pointed out by Raul Hilberg, the foremost Holocaust historian, in his important work, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 (New York: Aaron Asher/Harper Collins, 1992). Conditions in the Brańsk ghetto have been described in Isaiah Trunk's Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 380, 502; in Brainsk: Book of Memories (New York: Shoulson Press, 1948); and in a recent study by Zbigniew Romaniuk, titled "Bra_sk i okolice w latach 1939–1953: reminiscencje zdarzń", in Ziemia Brańka, volume 6 (1995), pp. 3-32. Brańsk also had its corrupt Judenrat and ghetto police, and the liquidation of the ghetto was carried out by German SS divisions and non-Polish auxiliaries (Ukrainians and Lithuanians). A death penalty was imposed on any Pole who dared to assist a Jew (though many did in fact do so notwithstanding.)
Polish gentiles certainly were not the masterminds who formed the ghettos nor collaborators with the Germans in the brutal treatment of the Jews. To the contrary, Polish gentiles sabotaged German plans for the starvation of ghetto inmates. The Polish gentiles made illegal deliveries of food to the ghettos— including about 25 tons of flour per day in Warsaw alone. Many Poles were shot by the German soldiers for making such deliveries. When the daily food ration in Warsaw fell to 184 calories for a Jew, 669 for a Polish gentile, and 2,613 for a German, 80 percent of the food consumed in the ghetto was smuggled in by Polish gentiles. The supply of raw materials into the ghetto was forty times greater than that officially permitted, according to the records of the Jewish Council of the Warsaw Ghetto. (Pogonowski, Jews in Poland, pp. 106–107.)
After Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union and especially after the defeat at Moscow, Hitler verbally ordered the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," namely the extermination of eleven million European Jews. To work out and communicate the details of implementing the "Final Solution," the Wannsee Conference was held in Berlin on January 20, 1942. At the conference the Polish leadership community was replaced by Jews as the main target of the Nazi extermination. Then, the leaders of the German civil service established the specific means by which the genocide was to be conducted. As a direct result of the conference, the Nazi government announced an invitation for bids from German industry to purchase equipment for an industrial process to exterminate eleven million European Jews. According to plans developed at the conference, terrorized Jewish personnel were to be used in the extermination process. Also, the plans further directed that the extermination camps were to be isolated from the Polish population for maximum secrecy. For this reason, the camp guards were recruited from Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Despite German terror and German attempts to keep Poles in the dark about the Germans' actions, radio broadcasts made by the Polish resistance regularly informed the West of German atrocities in Poland. (Pogonowski, Jews in Poland, pp. 110, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125).
Massive deportations from the Warsaw ghetto in the Summer of 1942 (to the Treblinka death camp) were not carried out with the assistance of any Polish agency. Indeed, in German-occupied Poland, there was not even a vestige of a Polish government at that time. Instead, the deportations were organized by the Jewish police in coordination with the Judenrat and the occupying German forces. Horrifying descriptions of this Aktion are found in the diaries of Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, and elsewhere. These sad events are only a part, but a significant part, of the eventual roundup and execution by the Germans of a large proportion of Poland's Jews in what later came to be referred to as the Holocaust.
On April 19, 1943, a Jewish uprising began in the Warsaw Ghetto as Germans started the final liquidation of the Jews there. The massacre ended on May 8, 1943. Professor Marian Fuks later wrote: "It is absolutely certain fact that without help and even active participation of the Polish resistance movement it would have not been possible at all to bring about the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto." (Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce/Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland, January-March 1989, p. 44.) Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the revolt, shares this view: "We didn't get adequate help from the Poles, but without their help we couldn't have started the uprising.... You have to remember that the Poles themselves were short of arms. The guilty party is Nazism, fascism—not the Poles." (The Canadian Jewish News, November 9, 1989.)
It should go without saying that the German-Nazi occupation and brutal control of Poland was not welcomed by the Polish people. Unfortunately, neither could the Polish people find solace in the eventual Soviet re-entry into Poland and their consequent program of brutal control. Upon Soviet re-entry into Poland in 1944, the Soviet terror apparatus was systematically liquidating the remnants of the Polish Home Army and any perceived Polish opponents of a Soviet takeover and control of Poland. It is an undeniable fact that many Jews, usually communist functionaries, were collaborating with the Soviets in denouncing, jailing, and executing Poles. (See for example, Wanda Lisowska's 1946 account on conditions in Ejszyszki, another town in Eastern Poland featured in Shtetl, found in Zeszyty Historyczne, no. 36 (1976), and reproduced at page 29 of this book.)1 Poles suspected of having either collaborated with the Germans or of being anti-Semitic could be, and were, executed with impunity. For example, in Drohiczyn, not far from Brańsk, nine Polish gentiles were murdered by local Jews because they were falsely suspected of killing a Jew, a crime in fact perpetrated by the Soviets [Archiwum Polski Podziemnej: Dokumenty i materia_y, 1939–1956 (Warszawa, April 1994), volume 2, p. 80.]
Tens of thousands of Polish gentiles were executed in repressions that affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Polish gentiles. The foregoing are not invented facts: both Simon Wiesenthal (see below) and Stanisław Krajewski, vice-chairperson of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews, among others, have publicly admitted their shame on this account. Under these types of wartime circumstances, where Jews were successfully encouraged to betray Polish gentiles to the Soviet authorities, animosities toward Jews in the general population were not a matter of anti-Semitism, but simply a matter of survival. Active Jewish collaboration and popular support for Soviet forces invading Poland occurred from the beginning of the War. In the book Poles, Jews, Socialists: The Failure of an Ideal, edited by Antony Polonsky et al. (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996)—Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, volume 9, Dov Levin writes: "The Red Army entered Vilna [Wilno, Poland] early on the morning of Tuesday, 19 September 1939, to an enthusiastic welcome by Vilna's Jewish residents, in sharp contrast to the Polish population's reserve and even hostility. Particular ardor was displayed by leftist groups and their youthful members, who converged on the Red Army tank columns bearing sincere greetings and flowers."
Despite these enormous obstacles, and the fact that Polish gentiles also were undergoing their own Holocaust which consumed several million victims, hundreds of thousands of Polish Christians risked their lives to help Jews. In Warsaw alone, before the uprising of 1944 which resulted in its total destruction, some 15,000 Jews were being sheltered. Emanuel Ringelblum estimated that as many as 60,000 out of the city's 900,000 Christian residents were involved in the rescue efforts. Assistance has been documented at more than 600 Catholic churches, monasteries, convents, and church-run orphanages throughout Poland. Poles form the largest group recognized by Yad Vashem as "Righteous Gentiles," as many as 40 percent of all those recognized. Yad Vashem is an official Israeli institution devoted to honoring those who saved Jews from the Holocaust.
Just as there were some Jewish collaborators during World War II, small numbers of Polish gentiles also collaborated with the Germans. There is no justification or excuse for their actions, and neither was this conduct condoned or tolerated. With the active support of Polish public opinion, the Polish Underground passed and carried out many death sentences against anyone found collaborating with the Nazis. It is regrettably true that collaborators, whether with the Nazis or the Soviets, whether Polish Christians or Jews, were an effective force to contend with. But at the same time, they were tiny, marginal and unrepresentative groups in their respective communities.
Simon Wiesenthal has advocated the following wise and balanced assessment of that tragic period which consumed millions of Jewish and Polish lives: "Then the war came. It is at times like these that the lower elements in society surface—the blackmailers who would betray Jews... On the other hand, the 30,000 or 40,000 Jews who survived, survived thanks to the help of the Poles. This I know." During the five years of German occupation many of the efforts to shelter Jews ended tragically for the Jewish victims and their Christian friends. Most instances of sporadic assistance are seldom remembered and taken into account.
What do the leading Holocaust historians have to say about alleged Polish complicity in the Holocaust? Yisrael Gutman, director of research at the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem and editor in chief of The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990), has stated authoritatively: "All accusations against the Poles that they were responsible for the 'Final Solution' are not even worth mentioning. Secondly, there is no validity at all in the contention that Polish attitudes were the reason for the siting of the death camps in Poland." And again: "I want to be unequivocal about this. When it is said that Poles supposedly took part in the extermination of the Jews on the side of the Germans, that is not true. It has no foundation in fact. There was no such thing as Poles taking part in the extermination of the Jewish population." Professor Gutman stated that the percentage of Poles who collaborated with the Germans was "infinitesimally small." Richard Pipes, of Harvard University, wrote in the introduction to Pogonowski's book, Jews in Poland, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: "It must never be mistakenly believed that the Holocaust was perpetrated by the Poles. Nor must it be ignored that three million Poles perished at German hands." Szymon Datner, longtime director of Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute, has been equally blunt: "Poles are not responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust."
Events Following World War II
Only Soviet-trained intelligence agents were trusted by the Soviet government among Polish prewar Communists. Among those "the Jews...were...considered less susceptible to the lures of Polish nationalism, to which even impeccable Polish communists were not thought immune." (Checinski, op. cit., p. 71.) During 1945, the Soviets recruited to the Office of State Security a very large number of Jews. Mostly Jews, including Holocaust survivors, were assigned to carry out the Soviet policy of de-Nazification in the former German territories which Poland was to annex on the basis of the Potsdam Agreement in compensation for her Eastern Provinces lost to the Soviet Union in 1939.
After the War, over 1,200 former Nazi camps were used to hold German nationals, 99 percent of whom were noncombatants. Under the guise of de-Nazification, members of the pro-Western Polish resistance and their families were processed together with the Germans. In a brief period of time between 60,000 and 80,000 people died in the de-Nazification camps. Starvation diets, typhoid fever, and mistreatment caused the high death rate. Torture was commonplace. Jewish officers of the UB (Urzad Bezpieczeństwa—Office of State Security), including those who themselves survived unimaginable suffering at German hands, were now used by the Soviets to inflict the same on others. Again, to quote Simon Wiesenthal, "I always say that I know what kind of role Jewish communists played in Poland after the war. And just as I, as a Jew, do not want to shoulder responsibility for the Jewish communists, I cannot blame 36 million Poles for those thousands of blackmailers."
Polish gentiles bore the brunt of the killing force unleashed by the Soviets while they established their totalitarian hold on Poland and the Polish people. Checinski cites a study based on party and security archives that estimates 80,000 to 200,000 Polish gentiles were killed by the Soviets during their takeover, while approximately 1,600 Jews were killed at the same time. (Checinski, op. cit., p. 64.)
John Sack, a former CBS News bureau chief in Spain and a journalist for 48 years, spent seven years doing research and conducting interviews in Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States to document the story of Jewish actions taken directly after the end of World War II in response to the wartime atrocities. On November 21, 1993, the CBS program 60 Minutes presented an interview with Mr. Sack and footage of interviews with the survivors who testified to torture and killings in those camps. A Polish woman, Dr. Dorota Boreczek, former inmate of the Świętochowice camp, testified that she was arrested (at age 14) and tortured together with her mother. Her father, a member of the Polish Home Army, was executed. [See John Sack, An Eye For An Eye (New York: Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1993), pp. 163–165.]
The Sovietization of Poland
It is important to remember that the end of World War II did not mean the liberation of the Polish people or of Poland, in any sense of the word. After World War II, Poland did not have self-determination. Its government, police, and military were under the complete and absolute control of the Soviet Union. Poland was forcibly made to be a communist state that was not formally a part of the Soviet Union, but a "satellite state" that was tightly ruled as part of the Soviet empire. Several months before the July 1946 events took place in Kielce, Winston Churchill eloquently articulated the realities for the Soviet Union's satellite states. On March 5, 1946, Churchill made his famous "Sinews of Peace" speech in which he popularized the term "Iron Curtain" originally coined by a Yugoslav writer:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in...the Soviet sphere.... I do not believe that...Russia desires war [but] the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and their doctrines.... There is nothing they admire so much as strength and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness."
The Soviet strategists who were in control of Poland saw significant advantage in fostering an animosity between Jewish and gentile Poles. This animosity was used as a tool to aid in the subjugation of Poland early in its capture into the Soviet empire in 1944. After World War II, Soviet machinations in this regard succeeded in converting the image of Jewish victims of German-Nazi genocide into the image of Jewish oppressors. (Kersten, op. cit., p. 130.) This was purposely done to put the Polish gentile population between "a rock and a hard place." Polish gentiles were left with two options: either don't respond to the Soviet oppression, or respond to the Soviet oppression and thus appear to be anti-Semitic.
Although the image of Jews as oppressors was spread beyond Poland, this phenomenon was very noticeable in Poland, where there was a steady flow of news and often well-substantiated (if sometimes exaggerated) rumors of executions of anti-communist Poles by Jewish executioners serving in the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. Kersten describes this unfortunate development when Soviet policies created the conditions that Jews played the main role in the subjugation of Poland and other satellite countries to the communist system. At the same time, the communist propaganda machine equated opposition to the "socialist" regimes with anti-Semitism. So, if a Polish person opposed the socialist Sovietization of Poland, that person was branded as an anti-Semite. This smoke screen was used successfully to obscure the reality of the Soviet subjugation of Poland by the Soviet Union.
The Soviet terror apparatus in Poland included the so-called Polish military counterintelligence. It was initially integrated with the Soviet Smersh (Death to Spies) organization directed against German spying and subversion. However, when the front crossed the prewar Polish territory, Smersh was used increasingly against the significant Polish resistance to Soviet domination. In November 1944, the Polish section of Smersh became renamed Informacja, in which many Jews like Col. Chęciński served for 10 years. Informacja remained under the close supervision of Smersh and was at first headed by Soviet Maj. Pyotr Kozhushko. Soviet officers assigned to the Polish army were considered vulnerable to Polish influence and were under close surveillance by a special Informacja department. Informacja was clearly a Soviet-led force, with Jewish officers disloyal to Poland.
At the time of the most intensive terror, between 1944 and 1955, Smersh used its Informacja branch to have agents pose as members of the military prosecutor's office. They used this apparatus to conduct political trials in military courts in Poland. Tortured witnesses were "prepared" for these trials and later were secretly executed "to remove any trace of the provocation." (Checinski, op. cit., p. 57.) In that period, of the 120 officers serving in Informacja, only about 18 were Polish-born. Most of these 18 were Polish Jews and the rest were Soviet citizens, many of them Jews.
The Soviets were creative in inventing their own opportunities to manufacture conflict between Polish Jews and gentiles. For example, it was Soviet policy in Poland to change Yiddish names of Jews into Slavic-Polish names. This practice was resented by both Jewish and gentile Poles. An American journalist, Samuel Loeb Shneiderman, who visited Warsaw in 1946, wrote in his book Between Fear and Hope (New York: Arco, 1947) that under the cover of Polish names Jews were continuing their ethnic identity and must have felt like their ancestors forced into conversion to Christianity during their persecution in Spain. (Kersten, op. cit., pp. 77, 108.) The name-changing became widespread. It served to deprive the Jews of their cultural heritage in order to form a "progressive Jewish nation," to use Stalin's expression.
Checinski describes how Stalin ordered the NKVD to prepare a civilian network of police terror and repression, called the UB, to work in parallel with the Informacja in Poland. The "Polish intelligentsia boycotted the security service, which was treated with universal contempt as an instrument of foreign domination." (Checinski, op. cit., p. 61.) Thus, the NKVD, despite its deep-rooted anti-Semitism, "could not do without Jews. Jewish officials were often placed in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for all of the regime's crimes." (Checinski, op. cit., p. 62.) The Soviet strategy of using people with striking Semitic features as the most visible executioners of Soviet policy in Poland was also aimed at presenting understandable anti-communist feelings within Poland as anti-Semitism. In 1945, the upper echelons of the terror apparatus were staffed with Jews. Many Jews in Poland were members of the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. A public proclamation, made at a convention of Jewish members of the ruling communist party (Polska Partia Robotnicza—PPR) on October 7–9, 1945, stated that in postwar Poland, conditions were created for the Jews to find an outlet for their political, social, and national ambitions. Needless to say, neither Poles nor Jews trusted this official statement. The Zionists openly advocated a massive emigration to Palestine (Kersten, op. cit., p. 80), which for the purpose of creating conflict in the Middle East was also desired by the Soviet leadership.
Soviet Aims in the Middle East
In Soviet Cold War policy, the Middle East was very important because of its vital oil reserves. It is well known that after World War II the Soviets systematically used to their advantage the desire of Jews to fight for the establishment of the state of Israel. Bernard Lewis of Columbia University (Semites and Anti-Semites, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1986) as well as other Jewish historians state that, until the creation of the State of Israel, the only source of weapons for the Jews fighting for their independence was the Soviet Union and its Czechoslovak satellite. Early in 1996, Ezer Weizman, the President of Israel, officially thanked Prague for these weapons, while on a state visit to the Czech Republic. In 1946, the United States government was in possession of "a number of official and semi-official indications provided by the [Soviet-controlled] Warsaw government that it is encouraging the migration of [a major] part of its Jewish population." [George Lenczowski, The Middle East in World Affairs, Second Edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), p. 330.]
The Soviet postwar aim was to get rid of the British mandate in Palestine and play a more active role in the strategically vital Middle East while consolidating their grip on the newly acquired satellite empire. Toward this end the Soviets committed numerous acts of terror to pressure Jews to emigrate out of the satellite states to be able to join the struggle for Israel. However, once they were out of Soviet control, only about one third of Jewish emigrants were willing to go to Palestine. About two thirds preferred to remain in the West and go to the United States, France, or other Western countries. This high attrition rate from what the Soviets hoped would be a large Jewish exodus to the Middle East resulted in Soviet efforts to intensify Jewish emigration. They did it by staging pogroms in all of the satellite states in order to deliver the largest possible number of able-bodied men, many of them trained soldiers, to the Palestinian battlefield where the Jews were short of manpower.
The year 1946 was one of intensification of Soviet-sponsored anti-Jewish violence throughout the region. The Soviets staged several anti-Jewish riots in Poland, including the one in Kielce. In nearby Czechoslovakia, a two-day anti-Jewish riot was staged in Bratislava and simultaneously in Żilina. The Soviet-provoked riots at these localities occurred on August 2 and 3, 1946, during a convention of the Slovak association of former guerrillas controlled by the Soviets. Scores of Jews were injured and Jewish apartments were ransacked. In Żilina alone 15 Jews were severely wounded. So the occurrence of Soviet-provoked anti-Jewish riots was not unique to Poland. What was unique to Poland was the additional necessity felt by the Soviets to severely embarrass Poland, primarily because of the significant Polish resistance the Soviets encountered during and after the War. The Bratislava riot served its purpose to frighten the Czechoslovak Jews so that they would depart. Since Czechoslovakia was permeated with communist influences predating World War II, there was no significant Czech resistance to the communist takeover by the Soviets like there had been in Poland. Soviet news releases of the pogroms in Hungary followed a policy similar to that used in Czechoslovakia. There were four pogroms were staged in Budapest but they received relatively low or non-existent amounts of promotion in the Western press.
Actually the 1946 wave of anti-Jewish riots under Soviet occupation was preceded with an earlier similar wave in 1945 in all areas that the Soviets had occupied and converted into their satellite empire. The earliest was on May 2, 1945 in Košice, Czechoslovakia, which was followed on September 24, 1945 in Velké Topolany in eastern Czechoslovakia, where a riot was perpetrated by uniformed police and military under the Soviet control. It lasted 6 hours and wounded 49 Jews. The riot engulfed neighboring villages. Anti-Jewish riots followed in the Czechoslovakian towns of Chynorany, Krásno on the Nitra River, Nedanovce, etc. [Kersten, op. cit., pp. 134–135; see also Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust (London: Michael Joseph, 1982), p. 241.] No show trials were staged after all the pogroms in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. An exception was made of the riot of the July 4, 1946 in Kielce which was advertised as much as possible in the media because the Soviets wanted to accomplish more in Poland than simply to press Jews to emigrate. The Soviets wanted to present Polish people to the world as anti-Semites in order to strengthen the Soviet totalitarian hold on Poland without arousing pro-Polish sympathies in the West.
The Eruption of Violence in Kielce
The Kielce Pogrom was an event provoked by the Soviets in conjunction with their attempt to Sovietize Poland that started in 1944. They were successful, but not flawless, in making it look as if there was just a random uprising of Polish gentiles against Jewish citizens. Although the Soviets took pains to destroy much specific evidence relating to this event, they made a number of mistakes that clearly reveal that this was a staged event, one that could only be provoked and carried out by the Soviet authorities in charge. To this day, the Soviet Union (and now Russian) authorities have refused to release their official files containing information relating to these events, files that would corroborate other indications that this was a Soviet-provoked event.
Some of the Soviet mistakes in staging the Kielce Pogrom will be discussed. In particular: (1) Twelve of the victims were found to be killed by gunshot wounds, though the general Polish citizenry alleged to have randomly conducted the violence did not have guns, as was admitted in the show trial which followed. (2) Soviet authorities had firm control of the populace; there was no right of free assembly, including the formation of crowds in the streets, in Soviet-occupied Poland. (3) Soviet security leaders thwarted efforts by the local district attorney, who wanted to take actions to stop the violence and officers of Informacja stage managed the pogrom. (4) After the initial violence by soldiers of the “blocking company” was ended, it was re-ignited by secret police agents who apparently attempted to pose as steel mill workers. (5) Normally stern and brutal security police turned temporarily friendly as they spread false rumors of ritual killing of Christian children by Jews. (6) A selected group of people were permitted to cross a perimeter of sentries that surrounded riot area in Kielce; Catholic priests attempting to break up the violence were not allowed to pass. (7) A clumsy Soviet-style show trial was hastily held five days after the event that purported to show the complicity of the general Polish population in this event; the inconsistencies in the conduct of the trial itself provided ample evidence of the Soviet plot to institute the violence in Kielce.
The focal point of the Kielce Pogrom was a residential compound at 7 Planty Street. Most of the occupants were Jewish, and many were members of the communist party. Among the residents were members of an armed "kibbutz" composed mainly of people who had recently arrived from the Soviet Union. Some were former German prisoners, and others had escaped captivity by hiding in forests or in homes of Polish Christians. The kibbutz members were undergoing military training and thus had permission from the Soviet-led authorities to own and use firearms. This fact was well-known in Kielce, because the kibbutz members would occasionally parade through town with their firearms. The only other Jedwish residents who had permission to be armed worked for the Soviet terror apparatus in Kielce. Ordinary residents of Poland, people who did not work for the Soviet terror apparatus, were not allowed to be armed. There was a death penalty for the illegal possession of firearms.
On July 3, 1946, a cobbler and secret police informer, Walenty Błaszczyk, whose UB code name was "Przelot," reported to the local police that his eight-year-old son Henryk was missing. The boy had been given a ride out of town on July 1, 1946, and upon his return was abducted by Antoni Pasowski, a Jewish agent of the Office of State Security, the UB. Henryk was taught by Pasowski to say falsely that he was kidnapped and held at 7 Planty Street. Further, he was coached to say that he saw dead bodies of recently missing children at that location. (Kersten, op. cit., p. 129.) On the day of the 4th of July, the boy was released by Pasowski and returned home. He went with his father to the police station to cancel the missing child report and to tell the false story of his abduction, the story that was edited by Pasowski.
Next, the boy was manipulated by Pasowski to falsely identify a passing Jew as his abductor who, the boy was made to say, held him in the basement of the compound at 7 Planty Street. There was one critical problem with this completely false accusation: 7 Planty Street in actuality did not have a basement! Meanwhile, a crowd was permitted to gather and a rumor was planted about the attempt of "another" ritual murder of a Christian child in addition to the supposed murders of previously missing children. A small crowd was allowed to form in the streets. Later communist propaganda expanded the number to 15,000 people. A few people in the crowd were allowed to move toward the compound at 7 Planty Street. The staged riot in downtown Kielce was under tight control at all times by the Soviet-led police force.
At 10 a.m. on July 4, before the crowd members reached Planty Street, 15 to 20 police officers, including five or six officers of the Informacja arrived at the compound. The officers of the Informacja were men unknown in Kielce. Once there, they were in control of who could and could not approach, enter, or leave the compound in which Henryk Blaszczyk claimed to have been imprisoned. The uniformed police were ordered to enter the building but were met with automatic gunfire from the Jewish occupants. One officer and one patrolman were killed, and several uniformed men were wounded. After the gunfire from the compound, the security officers and policemen attacked and began shooting the trapped Jews and expelling them out of windows into the street. In Soviet-controlled Poland, of course, the uniformed military, the secret police, and the local police officers were Soviet-controlled forces, not independent Polish forces.
An interesting thing happened at about 11 a.m., one hour after the start of the riot. The local district attorney, Jan Wrzeszcz made a plea to those in charge of the security forces to allow Wrzeszcz to work with the local police force to put an immediate end to the violence. (Szaynok, op. cit., p. 37.) Those in charge of the security forces rejected his plea. The plea was made to NKVD supervisor Col. Nathan Shpilevoi a Jew and to Maj. Sobczyński-Spychaj, head of the local security forces. Shortly after the plea was received, telephone calls were made to key security leaders in Warsaw. The office log of Sobczyński-Spychaj contains notes of his telephone conversations with Stanisław Radkiewicz, who was the Minister of Public Security, and with Jakub Berman, a Jew who was at the time the main Soviet agent in the ruling Polish Politburo in charge of all security matters. Clearly, the Soviet agents wanted the provocation to continue, and wanted to thwart all efforts to stop the violence.
Despite the best efforts of the Soviet agents to keep the riot going, the violence stopped on its own before noon. The riot was restarted at noon when a hit squad of secret police agents disguised as workers arrived from a local steel mill. Many of them were hired shortly before the pogrom and of course, since they were not real steel mill workers, did not report to work after the 4th of July pogrom. They came to the site of the violence armed with pieces of scrap steel, which they were ordered to leave at the murder site as tangible evidence that steel workers were involved in the violence. Before departing the hit squad was addressed by Antoni Błaszczyk, an older brother of Henryk (who was used to provoke the riot). The departure of the storming party from work was organized by the personnel manager in the steel mill who at the same time served as the district head of the voluntary riot police, the "ORMO" and was an agent of the UB. [Krzysztof Kakoewski, Umarly cmentarz: Wstęp do studiów nad wyjasnieniem przyczyn i przebiegu morderstwa na Żyydach w Kielcach dnia 4 lipca 1946 roku (Warszawa: von borowiecky, 1996), pp. 96, 142–143.] The riot was allowed to spread in the form of sporadic killings and robberies. Shortly after 2 p.m. a train was attacked at a station, Piekarzowa, near Kielce. Several Jewish passengers were killed by secret police agents provocateurs who controlled the railroad personnel during the attack.
In the meantime, a crowd of onlookers was allowed to gather in the streets. The security men were repeatedly spreading a rumor that a "Jewish ritual murder of another Christian child" might be in progress. Police and military men spoke to the crowd in an unusually friendly fashion and abandoned their usual stern and authoritarian demeanor. (Szaynok, op. cit., p. 62.) The rumor that the Jews were murdering Polish Christian children was connected with earlier reports about missing children who were allegedly kidnapped to be used for blood transfusions and then murdered. These rumors were spread by agents provocateurs, who thus kept attracting people to the scene of the riot. After 6 p.m., the pogrom came to an end as security forces arrested 62 rioters. In all, throughout the city of Kielce and its outskirts, thirty-nine Jews and two gentiles were killed. Other deaths followed among the wounded.
Some of those wounded but not killed by the security officers were killed by the mob of the bogus steel workers. The question is, who was permitted to cross the perimeter of sentries around downtown Kielce at that time? Krzysztof Kąkolewski, an investigative reporter and writer, determined that it was a hit squad of secret police agents in civilian clothes. These people pretended to be a mob while in reality they were agents acting under strict orders. The few bystanders who joined the fake mob of disguised secret police agents were marked with chalk on their backs by two secret policewomen. Those marked bystanders were later put on trial along with others including uniformed men who were not a part of the UB operation. Secret police agents disguised as civilians were exempt from any charges in exchange for strict secrecy about their mission and were permitted to keep the items stolen from Jewish victims. Obviously, if they broke their silence, they would incriminate themselves in the murders and robberies of Jewish victims. (Kąkolewski, op. cit., pp. 92–94, 143–144, 149–150, 159.)
Some of the murders in the Kielce violence were committed by common criminals who robbed and murdered their victims as the riot was permitted to spread. However, many of the murders could only have been committed by members of the security forces. In particular, bullet wounds were discovered in twelve of the murdered Jewish victims. Bullets could originate only from the uniformed police, soldiers, and functionaries of the security forces as the mob members did not have any guns (as was admitted in the show trial).
Dr. Seweryn Kahane, the head of the local Jewish association, the "kibbutz," was murdered by an Informacja officer who shot him in the back of the skull. He was executed because he became an inconvenient witness to the provocation. A few days later, another inconvenient witness died under unexplained circumstances after he testified about the violence staged in Kielce. He was Albert Grynbaum, a Jewish officer in charge of a county office of the UB, who helped to organize the defense of the kibbutz and testified about the provocation.
Early in his book, Checinski identifies a highly-ranked Soviet intelligence agent, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Dyomin or Demin (Checinski, op. cit., pp. 25–26), who was assigned in 1946 to Kielce, a relatively unimportant town in central Poland. This apparently inconsequential location was hardly consistent with his rank and qualifications. From all indications, Dyomin's assignment was to bolster the Soviet pressure on the Jews to emigrate and at the same time to create a dramatic diversion to draw attention from the Soviet falsification of a crucial Polish election referendum, which was to "legitimize" the communist government in Poland.
Why was it necessary for the Soviets to draw attention away from the election? The Soviets considered the conquest and control of Poland to be one of the most important Soviet gains of World War II. The Yalta Accord made by the Allies was a cornerstone of the post-war Soviet empire, an accord that the Soviets liked very much because it gave them the biggest empire in Russian history. However, the Soviets were concerned that the United States could back out of the agreement at any time, since the Yalta Accord's status in the United States was only as an executive agreement and not as a Congressionally-ratified treaty. The Yalta Accord gave the Soviets a number of rights, including the right to control Poland and other so-called "satellite states" in the form of a Soviet "zone of influence" that was accepted and recognized by the Western Allies. The same Yalta Accord demanded that the Soviets guarantee free elections in Poland. The Soviets desired to illegally control the elections in Poland, confirm a previously-installed Soviet-controlled communist puppet regime, and thus solidify their political strangulation of Poland, while simultaneously not provoking the sympathy of the American public. The Dyomin assignment was therefore crucial: to engineer a series of situations in which the Poles could appear to be persecuting Jews, Nazi-style, so that a fed-up American public would welcome or ignore Soviet attempts to clamp down on Poland and stop the apparent persecution of Jews by the Polish gentile population. The Soviets realized they had an enormous amount to gain by prominently portraying Polish people as anti-Semitic to the American and West European public.
It is speculated by many, including American Ambassador to Poland at that time, Authur Bliss Lane, that the Soviets purposely chose the exact date of the United States Independence Day holiday to stage the provocation. This choice would serve to maximize press exposure and associated public attention on what otherwise would be a slow news day. Also, it was a day when people did not go to work and could react fully to the dramatic news of the bloody riot. Bliss Lane was among those aware that the 4th of July pogrom was staged to overshadow the Soviet election-tampering in Poland and to serve Soviet schemes in the Middle East. The American Ambassador also noted that its purpose was to discredit Polish opposition to Sovietization "especially among Jewish circles in the United States." Both communist and non-communist sources, in Ambassador Lane's words "admitted that it was not spontaneous, but a carefully organized plot." [Arthur Bliss Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1948), p. 249.] In spite of U.S. Embassy reports that were cognizant of the realities of the situation, the Soviet aims were achieved because American public opinion was swayed against the Polish people, which was the aim of the Soviets.
The Kielce riot was not the first time that the method of provocation used in Kielce was employed by the Soviets. A year earlier, in June 1945, Sobczyński-Spychaj was in charge of the UB in Rzeszów where the Soviets attempted to provoke violence by alleging that a ritual murder had been committed by the Jews. A police patrol falsely reported an arrest of a rabbi wearing a bloody apron and standing next to what was alleged to be the body of a girl hanging on a butcher's hook. The false story maintained that behind the rabbi, on the floor, were the dead bodies of 16 children. The provocation did not work because the few Jews in town were forewarned and left Rzeszów. Since the provocation didn't work and those who had bungled the scheme were potentially embarrassing witnesses, the members of the police patrol who reported the allegation against the rabbi were arrested and never seen again. (Kersten, op. cit., p. 110.) A year later, the same man in charge of the security force that attempted to provoke an incident in Rzeszów, SobczynskiSpychaj, was in the identical position of being in charge of the security office in Kielce in time for the occurrence of the Kielce riots. Sobczynski-Spychaj reported to the Soviet authority Dyomin during the time of the Kielce riots.
In Kielce, the agents who staged the violence on July 4 were paid to do so. According to the deposition of the widow of Col. Wiktor Kuznicki chief police,Kielce a man fitting the description of Dyomin delivered to Kuznicki's apartment the money (in foreign currency) for paying off the agents provocateurs needed for the eruption of violence in Kielce. Kuznicki died on December 26, 1946 under unexplained circumstances. He was most likely killed on NKVD orders as he became inconvenient because he knew too much about the Soviet provocation in Kielce. This style of eliminating inconvenient people was a familiar pattern in the Soviet terror apparatus. To make sure that the traces of Soviet provocation were eliminated the files of the Informacja attached to the 2nd Infantry Division in Kielce were recently destroyed by fire in November 1989 (it was near the end of communist rule in Poland.) (Szaynok, op. cit., p. 93.)
Some of the specifics of Dyomin's intelligence career are well-documented. Dyomin was the key Soviet agent in the 1946 Kielce provocation, and stayed in Kielce only long enough to accomplish his assigned task. He arrived three months before the outbreak of the riot. He stayed through the riot, interrogated witnesses of the riot, and then two weeks later he left Kielce. Later in his career, Dyomin was stationed in the Soviet Embassy in Tel Aviv in 1964–67 as a specialist in Jewish matters and in 1969 was assigned to the Soviet Embassy in West Germany. In the American literature he was described as a high-ranking officer of Soviet military intelligence, the G.R.U. [John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 385.]
Military Trials Following the Pogrom
The murders and other crimes committed by the non-Soviet participants during the pogrom were within the jurisdiction of the local civilian court. Instead, the Supreme Military Court, closely supervised by the Soviet Smersh, was selected to try civilians designated as perpetrators of the pogrom. The show trial was preceded by Soviet-style investigations, during which tortures were often used to extract confessions. The role of uniformed men and armed security agents who inflicted bullet wounds in Jewish victims was excluded from the investigations and the show trial of the rioters.
The show trial was conducted from July 9 to July 11, 1946. Though they acknowledged that an organized provocation had occurred (Checinski, op. cit., p. 23), the military court did not reveal who was responsible. Of the mob, 12 men were tried of which nine were sentenced to death. These included seven were described as onlookers who joined in the murders conducted by agents of the terror apparatus, and two as uniformed men who were not a part of the UB operation. Those who did most of the killing were never tried. The prosecutor, Kazimierz Golczewski, a Polish Jew known as an old NKVD hand, consistently violated all normal legal procedures during the trial. He did this with full approval of the three military judges, namely, Marian Barton, Stanisław Baraniak, and Antoni Łukasik. [Antoni Czubiński, Dzieje najnowsze Polski: Polska Ludowa (1944–1989) (Poznań: Wielkopolska Agencja Wydawnicza, 1992), p. 113.] At one point during the trial, Golczewski went as far as to threaten a defendant with additional bodily harm when the man was complaining about tortures inflicted upon him during the interrogation.
The entire show trial was a mockery of the law. It was a Soviet-style show trial conducted in Poland to fulfill political and propaganda purposes. The very conduct of the show trial was proof of the complete Soviet domination of life in Poland. It was absolutely impossible for anyone other than the Soviets to provoke and stage a pogrom in which security forces either directly participated in the riot or stood by and let the pogrom go on under their noses for eight hours. The sentries who were posted around the riot area did prevent Catholic priests Roman Zelek and Jan Danilewicz from reaching the places of the violence, because it was their intention to try to pacify the mob. [Kersten, op. cit., p. 128; also Stanislaw Meducki and Zenon Wrona, eds., Antyzydowskie wydarzenia kieleckie 4 lipca 1946 roku: Dokumenty i materialy (Kielce: Urzad Miasta Kielce and Kieleckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1992), volume 1, p. 94.] Because of Moscow's control over the Polish communist government, the global Soviet policies determined the events in Poland. This explains why a high-ranking intelligence officer like Dyomin, who was also a Jewish specialist, was sent to Kielce and stayed there only long enough to supervise the staging of the riots, then to interrogate witnesses, and then departed immediately as soon as his short assignment was completed.
The weaknesses of the show trial created a need to announce the arrest of the officers who "did not show enough resolve during the riot." Military and police officers associated with the pogrom were arrested and were given very light sentences by the Military Regional Court in Warsaw on December 16, 1946. (Kersten, op. cit., p. 128.) The most immediate instigator of the Kielce violence, Antoni Pasowski, a Jewish member of the Public Security Agency, was never tried. Henryk Blaszczyk was not asked to testify. Other less-advertised trials were held in Kielce on September 24, October 10, December 3, 1946 and March 1947. (Szaynok, op. cit., pp. 74–93.)
Maj. Sobczynski-Spychaj, the head of the Kielce State Security Forces, was promoted to head the regional Informacja soon after the Kielce event. This promotion was typical, for he was in the middle of a long career of being used by the Soviets to betray Poland. According to testimony of Józef Swiatlo (former NKVD and UB agent who defected to the West), Sobczynski-Spychaj was the Soviet agent who was parachuted to Poland during the war and brought with him instructions for the communist underground to collaborate with the Gestapo in betraying to the Germans the organization of the Polish Home Army controlled by the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. While in Poland, Sobczyński-Spychaj worked as radio-code operator for communication with Smersh under the command of Gen. Ivan Serov. Sobczyński-Spychaj was flown to the USSR in 1944 by a special NKVD plane. (Kersten, op. cit., pp. 96, 129.) Later in his career, in the Summer of 1950, he was appointed to head the passport office in Warsaw. As the head of the passport office Sobczyński-Spychaj persecuted Jewish applicants for passports. He was reported to have used foul language and threw a number of persons down the stairs. At the request of the Soviets, Sobczynski-Spychaj was promoted to the rank of colonel and was elevated to the head of personnel office of the Ministry of Defense. He was kept in sensitive posts as a useful agent of the NKVD. In June 1958 he earned his high school diploma. He died in 1988 in Warsaw. (Szaynok, op. cit., p. 92.)
Widespread awareness of the Soviet provocation of the riot caused protests against the death sentences. Demands were made for a full investigation into the affair. Catholic clergy, including then absent Bishop Kaczmarek of Kielce, the opposition parties as well as General Wladyslaw Anders and other leaders of Polish political emigration were named during the show trial as anti-communist conspirators behind the Kielce violence. The show trial could not substantiate any of these charges.
The hurriedly-organized show trial did not give any chance for the defense lawyers to prepare themselves. There was, however, plenty of effort made to bring a large crowd of Polish and foreign news correspondents. The communists counted on the ignorance of foreign reporters of Soviet show-trial techniques and they assumed that Polish newsmen would be too intimidated to report on the abuse of the law. It was clear that for the Soviets, anti-Semitism was a convenient political and propaganda tool used to disrupt Polish society. It also served to identify anyone smeared with anti-Semitism as a "fascist" guilty of collaboration with the Nazis during the war.
Disbelief, Pain, Shame
In Poland, the news of the details of murders in Kielce caused first disbelief, then pain and shame that a Polish mob could be capable of such horrible atrocities and brutal killing frenzy no matter whether the crimes were provoked by the Soviets or not. Throughout Poland meetings were held condemning the pogrom of Kielce as a horrible atrocity. Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the leader of the opposition Polish Peasants' Party, immediately condemned the pogrom. However, reports of his condemnation in the media were censored. The demand for a parliamentary investigation of the pogrom was rejected by the communist government. The Soviet-led government promised the formation of an investigative commission composed of all political parties. It never materialized.
Since one of the aims of the Soviets was to cause an exodus of Jews from Poland, the Soviet authorities took actions to make the exit from Poland as easy as possible. A few days after the funeral of the victims of violence staged by the Soviets in Kielce, Soviet General Gvidon Chervinsky, the chief of border guards, called his Jewish assistant, Michal Rudawski, and ordered him to establish two more "illegal" crossing points for Jews on the Czechoslovakian border. (Kakolewski, op. cit., p. 191.) These crossing points were supposedly illegal, but in reality they were purposely established by the Soviets and allowed free egress for Jews but not for anyone else. The new crossings were added to those existing already in Szczecin (Jewish code name Khyzar, or bristle in Hebrew, because Szczecin in Polish means bristle market) and in Kłodzko (Jewish code name Dorom). The southern crossings were to serve Jewish emigrants going through Austria to Palestine and the northern crossing at Szczecin served those Jews who travelled to West German displaced persons' camps and from there south through Austria or Italy to Palestine. As stated before, about two-thirds of the Jewish emigrants preferred to go to the United States, France, or other western country. As a result of Jewish emigration, by the end of 1946, there were 100,000 Jews left in Poland of the quarter of a million that were there at the beginning of the year. At the same time, over 200,000 Polish Jews were in West Germany and Austria waiting for further migration. The Anglo-American Commission promised admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine. In the West German D.P. camps, Jewish socialists advocated returning to Poland while Zionists insisted on immigration to Palestine. (Pogonowski, Jews in Poland, p. 349.)
A Polish documentary, The Witnesses [swiadkowie], illustrates the feelings of pain and shame inflicted on the Polish society by the Kielce Pogrom. Many realized that the Soviet provocation succeeded in damaging the good name of the Polish people by cynically staging the vicious pogrom and playing up the card of anti-Semitism. The Soviet occupation and policies conditioned a limited number of people in Kielce to respond to the provocation. Also, no one familiar with the Kielce Pogrom claimed that it was a spontaneous violence. (Kersten, op. cit., pp. 96, 130.) The Catholic Church clearly stated that the provocateurs and perpetrators of the murder in Kielce must be absolutely and without any reservations condemned in the light of God's and human laws and that all rumors about Jewish ritual murders are lies. (July 7, 1946, Bishop Teodor Kubina). Cardinal Hlond, the Catholic Primate of Poland, stated on July 11, 1946: "The Catholic Church always and everywhere condemns all murders. It also condemns those that take place in Poland regardless of who commits them and regardless of whether they are committed against Poles or Jews, whether in Kielce or elsewhere in the country. The way the unfortunate and deplorable events unfolded in Kielce demonstrates that they were not spurred by racism. Their basis was entirely different, and both painful and tragic. These events are a hideous calamity which fill me with sadness and sorrow." Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Prize laureate for Polish literature, called these tactics "socialist terrorism." Among victims of the Soviet or socialist terrorism were many Polish democratic leaders who were neither anti-Semitic nor reactionary.
Unfortunately, the Moscow files on the Kielce violence have never been opened. These perhaps contain the reports of NKVD/KGB Col. Nathan Shpilevoi and G.R.U. high ranking officer Mikhail Dyomin, who apparently was in charge of choosing the site and staging the provocation in Kielce. Thus, in the absence of direct evidence from Moscow, the Soviet provocation remains the most likely hypothesis, one that is corroborated by all of the available evidence. Clearly, the presence and activities of these two Soviet officers preclude any possibility that the violence in Kielce erupted spontaneously, and exactly on the 4th of July, American Independence Day, when many people have a day off and can pay more attention to the news than during work days, as was stated by the American Ambassador to Poland Bliss Lane.
Conclusion, the 4th of July “Pogrom of Kielce”
The tragic events known as the Pogrom of Kielce of 1946 are demonstrably a part of Soviet postwar global strategy. The Soviets ruthlessly exploited Jews for Soviet political purposes. The pogroms staged behind the lines of the Red Army were provoked or condoned in order to generate an exodus of Jews who otherwise would not emigrate. The migration of Jews to Palestine was needed by the Soviets to abolish the British mandate there and profit from Arab-Israeli conflict in order to interfere with oil supplies to the West. Meanwhile, a minority of the Jewish population was used by the Soviets to establish communist regimes in the satellite states, while some sixteen pogroms in satellite states resulted in exit of 711,000 Jews of whom 230,000 went to Palestine and fought there with weapons provided by the Soviets through Czechoslovakia. Struggle between Jews and Arabs for the possession of land was exploited by the Soviets against the USA in the strategic oil rich Middle East. In March 1947 Andrei Gromyko of Soviet Union moved in the United Nations to recognize Jewish state in a part of Palestine. In 1950-51 Zionist pogroms and provocations in Arab countries brought additional 550,000 Jewish refugees to Israel (see: Naeim Giladi, “Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How The Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Iews” Dandelion Books Publiction, www.dandelionbooks.net ,2003)
The Pogrom of Kielce was ignited by the Soviet introduction of an organized provocation based on planting false reports of ritual murders, a method of provoking violence originally started by the czarist governments. As was detailed, a very similar provocation was staged a year earlier in Rzeszów by the same NKVD agents. The Pogrom of Kielce was timed for anti-Polish propaganda purposes to persuade the Western powers that Poland should remain a colony of the Soviets, rather than being allowed to return to freedom as did other Allied nations. For that reason it was singled out for extensive news coverage which was to convince Western politicians that "Polish anti-Semitism" could only be tamed by the Soviets and that allowing Poland to become free would cause another wave of anti-Semitism and murders of Jews.
The Kielce Pogrom, perhaps more than any other historical occurrence, has been used to falsely show evidence of Polish actions to exterminate Jews. This view, clearly put forward by a 1940's Soviet establishment keen to subjugate Poland, has been allowed to become the commonly accepted "conventional wisdom." In this case, the conventional wisdom is wrong: it does not square with the historical facts. Those who can examine the historical record but then choose to ignore it and purposely libel an entire nation and ethnic group are on the wrong side of history: they are using the methods of Hitler and Stalin.
It is sometimes said that throughout history people and their nations are inclined to gear up to fight the last war. So it may be with attempts at ethnic destruction. In the Information Age, new Holocausts may be possible not so much by gas chambers, the technology of genocide for World War II, but by printing presses and their modern-day electronic equivalents. Is hatred for a person simply because of his ethnicity more acceptable today, as long as the object of the hatred is a Pole rather than a Jew? And once it is decided that it is important to instill hatred against members of a given ethnic group, can there be any limit to the perpetration of lies, myths, and mischaracterizations to drive the hatred home? And once ethnic hatred is started and nurtured in a people, where will it end? The Holocaust itself unfortunately provides one answer, one such ending point.
Clear and reprehensible evidence of anti-Polonism can be seen by inclusion of the events at Kielce, horrible though they were, as a Polish continuation of Hitler's evil work of the Holocaust. This defamation of Polish people can be seen in downtown Washington, D.C., at the Holocaust Museum. This type of anti-Polonism can be read in occasional press accounts that slur the Polish people and sometimes can even be heard in informal discussions. Despite these open sores, it is not too far-fetched, I think, to imagine that Jews and Poles, two peoples who survived a twin Holocaust perpetrated by the same country, could develop a new relationship based on friendship and goodwill. It may well be time, fifty years after this tragic event took place, to put the Kielce Pogrom in its proper perspective as an event unconnected with the Holocaust and an event not conducted by a free and willing Polish population, a population that in actual fact abhorred this violence. The Soviet design to falsely discredit the Polish people through this staged event has amazingly outlived even the Soviet Union itself. The spirit of hatred of World War II and the associated Holocaust, and the habit of hate against Poles promoted by the former "evil empire" of the Soviet Union will still exist among the Holocaust profiteers of the Holocaust Industry.
This article discusses the early Polish signals intelligence (SIGINT) and code breaking efforts during the Russo-Polish War of 1919-1920. It emphasizes the factors that favorably influenced the Polish signals intelligence success and its role in victory during the battle at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920. The article also briefs the measures related to signals intelligence, which improved the operational security in the Polish Army during the war.
KEYWORDS: 1919-1920 Russo-Polish war, signals intelligence, code breaking, Cipher Office.
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On 11 November 1918 Poland regained its liberty after 123 years of Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian occupation. But between 1918 and 1921 it had to fight to establish its sovereignty. A dispute over borders with Russia, whose Communist government wanted to turn Europe Red, led to war.
While the history of the Russo-Polish war is well described [2, 3, 11, 12, 16, 18], the role played in it by signals intelligence is usually omitted.
This article discusses the early Polish signals intelligence and codebreaking efforts of the 1919-1920 war and emphasizes their role in Poland's victory during the crucial battle of Warsaw in August 1920. The first section gives an approach to the history of the war, the second is on creation of signals intelligence in Poland after World War, the following sections describe the work of signals intelligence particularly during the Battle of Warsaw, while the final one discusses operational security measures, which were drawn from analysis of the data collected from intercepted communications.
THE RUSSO-POLISH WAR OF 1919-1920. A BRIEF HISTORY
On 18 October 1918, Lenin gave orders to support the European revolutionary movements incited by the German communists. Since the Red revolution in Western Europe had failed, the communists in Russia hesitated. However in January 1919, the Red Army seized Byelorussia (White Russia) and Lithuania, the areas granted to Poland after the World War. The Red Army breached the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria on 3 March 1918.
In February 1919, the first clashes between the Russians and the Polish Army took place. The Poles were able to gain control over Lithuania and, by the end of summer, over Byelorussia, both of which were the parts of 'historic' Poland. The peace negotiations held in Moscow from October to December 1919 between Russia and Poland failed.
Polish divisions led by Lt.-Gen. Edward Rydz-Smigly seized Latvia in January 1920 and Kiev on 7 May. However, the Red Army struck back in late May and the Polish forces withdrew from Kiev. The rapid Russian offensive was stopped only in August at the outskirts of Warsaw during a decisive battle. The Red Army was defeated and the surviving units retreated via Prussia and Ukraine to Russia.
The armistice was signed on 12 October and six days later the fighting stopped. The war formally ended on 18 March 1921 when the Riga Peace Treaty was signed, which legitimized the Polish-Russian border. Russia was also obliged to pay compensations of 30 million rubles in gold for having exploited Poland during the 123-year occupation. But no Russian government ever paid anything of this. [3, 11, 12, 16, 18].
THE CIPHER OFFICE (BS) AND THE POLISH SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE
On 8 May 1919, a small Cipher Section of the Polish Army was formed by Lt. Józef Stanslicki. Several months later, it was renamed Cipher Office (Biuro Szyfrów, better known as 'BS'), which was subordinated to the General Staff's Second Bureau (Intelligence). The Cipher Office was to secure, by means of cryptography, Polish military and government communications and to solve intercepted foreign messages. The main targets of the Cipher Office were Russian and German coded communications [14, p. 20].
The Cipher Office staff at Warsaw HQ numbered only a few officers, including Lt. Jan Kowalewski, a brilliant technology institute graduate, who possessed command of several foreign languages. He was able to quickly solve the unsophisticated codes used by the Bolshevik forces. Kowalewski was ordered to form a radio intercept and deciphering unit within the Cipher Office in August 1919 [9, 20].
The Cipher Office supported tactical signals intelligence units, which monitored enemy's wireless telegraphy traffic, and located enemy transmitters by radio direction finding (DF). During the war, signals intelligence was incorporated into the Signals Corps (Sluzba Lacznosci) because shortages of radio receivers and other communications equipment required their playing a dual role. The intelligence gathered at the strategic level was directed to the second Bureau of the General Staff for analysis and dissemination [13, p. 219].
During the Battle of Warsaw, the Cipher Office at Warsaw HQ then numbered only five employees, who were overloaded with codebreaking work [14].
EARLY SUCCESSES OF THE POLISH SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE
The Polish signals intelligence successfully targeted Russian wireless communications from the second half of 1919. Without the support of noted scholars, including Waclaw Sierpinski, who in the same year was appointed professor of mathematics at Warsaw University, massive enemy messages exploitation would probably have not been possible
