Katyn Few Jewish Victims Jasiewicz

Lista Strat Ziemianstwa Polskiego 1939-1956, by Krzysztof Jasiewicz. 1995

Few Jews Murdered at Katyn. A Catalogue of the Polish Landed Gentry, With Data on Their Murderers

A LIST OF THE LOSSES OF POLISH LANDED PROPRIETORS 1939-1956, is the title of this Polish-language scholarly work. In the supplement volume, there are detailed summaries in German, French, English (pp. 133-138), and Russian. For background and collateral information, please read the Peczkis review, of author Krzysztof Jasiewicz’s Zaglada polskich Kresow: Ziemianstwo polskie na Kresach Polnocno-Wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej pod okupacja sowiecka 1939-1941 : studium z dziejow … (Historia najnowsza) (Polish Edition).

FEW JEWISH VICTIMS OF KATYN

This work challenges the contention that there were many Jewish victims of the Katyn Massacre. [Some have claimed that as many as 15% of the Polish officers murdered at Katyn were Jewish.]. The tabulation of the nationalities of officers held at Kozielsk camp (p. 33), based on archival information, indicates that 1.2% of them were Jewish. [However, some Jews were identified as Poles, and may not have been listed as Jews.]

THE POLISH LANDED GENTRY WAS LONG PERSECUTED BY POLAND’S ENEMIES

Depending on the definition of a landed proprietor, there were about 80,000-100,000 of them in pre-WII Poland. (p. 24). They were geographically distributed all over Poland (pp. 27-30), implicitly refuting the contention that their presence in the Kresy was some sort of anti-Ukrainian or anti-Byelorussian move, or some kind of attempt to enhance the Polish aspects of the Kresy.

Jasiewicz basis his work on information from surviving witnesses and relatives. This set of volumes (original and supplement) catalogues 3,719 (p. 25) murdered victims of the Polish landed gentry, by name, along with available data on such things as year of birth, service to Poland, year of death, circumstances of death, and perpetrators of this crime. A variety of other biographical information is included, whenever available, in the individual listings. The listing is in alphabetical order, as is the comprehensive index of the names in the supplement volume. Jasiewicz includes a table of the seldom-known pre-WWII occupations of the murdered landed gentry. (p.36). The most common known occupations were engineers, agriculturalists, and lawyers.

The tabulated data (p. 25; see also English-language description on page 134 of the supplement volume) is revealing. It shows that 40.57% of the victims perished at the hands of the Germans, 50.76% at the hands of the Soviets, and 3.05% at the hands of Poles. [However, most of these “Polish” caused killings were at the hands of the post-WII U. B. (Bezpieka), whose leadership was predominantly non-Polish (Jewish and, to a lesser extent, Russian and Ukrainian).]. Only about 3%, at most, of the total murdered Polish gentry lost their lives at the hands of the 1939-war Soviet-inspired “proletarian justice”, administered primarily by Byelorussians and, to a lesser extent, Ukrainians.

The foregoing data overturns some common suppositions about the identities of the murderers. It turns out that the Soviet Communists, animated as they were by class hatreds, were less significant as murderers of the Polish landed gentry in comparison with the Germans. It also refutes those who would dichotomize the conduct of Nazified and regular German formations. Of all the German-conducted murders of Polish landed gentry, not surprisingly, 27.9% were by the SS, and 31.3% were by the Gestapo, criminal police, and gendarmerie. Pointedly, however, fully 40.17% were by the Wehrmacht. (p. 25).

As for the Communist and Communist-inspired killers, the data is consistent with the following premise: In Communist takeovers, “pressure from the top” (killings directly done by the Communist government), is more significant than “pressure from the bottom” (“proletarian justice”–the earlier and concurrent Communist-agitated murders conducted by unorganized or loosely-organized peasant and working-class perpetrators.). In fact, of the Soviet-directed killings, over 87% were at the hands of the NKVD, nearly all of which occurred after the completion of the Soviet conquest of the Kresy.

Now consider the nationalities of those engaging in those murders that occurred while Poland was under impending and actual foreign rule. These were motivated by some assortment of Communist-inspired class hatreds (“proletarian justice”), nationalistic hatreds (e. g., by the OUN and later UPA), opportunistic common banditry, etc. The Byelorussians, unexpectedly, killed more Polish landed gentry than did the Ukrainians. [However, this may at least partly owe to the fact that the Byelorussian-majority areas of the Kresy had more Polish landed estates than did the Ukrainian-majority areas of the Kresy.]