Nazis Persecuted Jews AND Poles European Wide Lorentz

Walka o dobra kultury. Warszawa 1939-1945 t.I, by Stanisław Lorentz. 1970

Holocaust Uniquenss Myth (Only Jews Persecuted All Over Europe) Upended. The Polokaust: Detailed Focus on the Cultural Genocide of Poles. Afterwards, Poles Loot Poles, and Not Only Jews

THE FIGHT TO SAVE WARSAW S CULTURAL GOODS, 1939-1945 is the title of this 2-volume Polish-language anthology. Owing to its breadth, I focus my review almost entirely upon the 3-month period after the fall of the Soviet-betrayed Warsaw Uprising, during which time the Red Army continued stalling, giving plenty of time for the Germans in their soul-less madness to destroy Warsaw and her cultural treasures (RABIES TEUTONICA, as one author put it: v1, p. 217).

POLES, LIKE JEWS, WERE PERSECUTED ALL OVER EUROPE

One talking point for the supposed unprecedented nature of the Holocaust would have us believe that, whereas the Jews were persecuted by the Nazis regardless of where they found themselves in Europe, Poles outside of German-occupied Poland were left alone. Tell that to the Parisian Poles. The Germans sacked and burned the Polish library in Paris. (v2, p. 251).

THE DESTRUCTION OF WARSAW: GERMAN PERFIDY MATCHES SOVIET PERFIDY

The Polish-German capitulation agreement that ended the Soviet-betrayed Warsaw Uprising called for the safeguarding and evacuation of not only the population, but also the cultural treasures. (v1, p. 122, 225; v2, p. 12). The Germans broke the agreement allowing only a small fraction of the treasures to be evacuated before destroying Warsaw. The Poles made a herculean effort to evacuate and otherwise safeguard treasures from the Germans (for a summary, see v1, p. 97).

THE GERMANS SYSTEMATICALLY DESTROYED WARSAW’S CULTURAL TREASURES

The Germans burning of the Krasinski Library, probably in early October 1944, caused the loss of 300,000 irreplaceable items, which were converted into a thigh-deep layer of white ash. Some 88% of old handwritten manuscripts perished. (v1, pp. 219-220). The cellars, which contained the most valuable materials for safekeeping, had carefully been torched individually. In contrast, a nearby cellar room with empty boxes had been untouched by the Germans, as it contained no Polish cultural treasures. (v2, pp. 245-246). The German destroyers must have also seen, and removed, the sandbagging in front of a cellar nook, in which books had been stacked without spacing in the hope that any fire would not spread there for insufficiency of oxygen. The rows of book-shaped ashes disintegrated when touched. (v. 2, p. 293).

Of the Krasinski materials, 15 boxes of materials relocated earlier to the Zamoyski library survived. So did 30,000 lower-value old prints, in addition to a few Zaluski manuscripts, confiscated earlier by the Germans and returned to Poland after the war. As the Germans were torching the library, some Poles tossed a series of boxes out the windows, enabling the survival of 150 hand manuscripts. Jan Zachwatowicz recounts how he came across the rain-soaked and moldy items, which included the priceless pitiful remnant of incunabula (early European printing) from the Zaluski collection, and how he worked to evacuate and restore them. (v1, pp. 127-128). An additional set of boxes turned up later in the snow. (p. 230).

The Zamoyski Library was burned by the Germans. However, unlike the Krasinski Library, the collections in the cellars were not destroyed. (v2, p. 246).

The Germans torched Warsaw s Public library just two hours before the long-belated arrival of the Red Army in January 1945. (v1, p. 422, v2, pp. 29-30, 281). Of its 500,000 volumes, 317,000 perished in the flames. Of the remainder, 73,000 had been confiscated earlier by the Germans, and 14,000 had been evacuated to Pruszkow. Some 30,000 German-confiscated volumes later turned up in Liegnitz (now Legnica).( (v1, pp. 394-396). Polish librarians, in anticipation of German-set fires spreading to the library, had earlier walled-off some items in a hiding place in the library cellar. (v.1, p. 421). During such procedures, they smeared the new masonry with dirty plaster in order to make it look old. (v2, p. 19).

Warsaw s Polytechnic Library also fell victim to the incendiary depredations of the Germans, causing the loss of 90,000 volumes. The flames did not spread to one student reading room. (v2, p. 14).

The Germans also burned the various archives of Warsaw. About 1/5th of the ARCHIWUM GLOWNEGO AKT DAWNYCH survived because of the earlier evacuation of a part of its content to Sokolnicki Fort and the Jasna Gora Monastery, and the later recovery of some German-confiscated materials. (v1, p. 456).

As for the ARCHIWUM GLOWNY on Dluga Street, 7-8 fire-untouched packs of archival materials survived, after the Germans had burned the building, because the fire had failed to spread to one nook of the cellar, probably owing to a lack of windows whose breakage would have caused an influx of oxygen. (v1, p. 456).

As for the collection in the WARSZAWSKI ARSENAL, all that was left was a layer of either powdery or caked ash, in addition to the steel shelving that had become twisted into bizarre shapes by the heat. In one hiding place, the flames had not spread, but the archival materials were carbonized, falling apart when touched. (v1, p. 565). A few items did survive in the burned-out, partly-collapsed building, owing to the caprice of the movements of the flames and heat. (v1, p. 566).

Since the Germans were destroying all of Warsaw, private individuals who had hidden cultural treasures for safekeeping enjoyed limited success. One moldy part of the Zeromski collection was found in 1951, as the layers of ruins of the Stare Miasto were being removed. (v2, pp. 163-164).

THE OVERALL NAZI GERMAN CULTURAL GENOCIDE AGAINST POLES WAS VERY SYSTEMATIC

Poland s losses, just in terms of books, manuscripts, notes, maps, etc., took on staggering dimensions. Of 21 million such items, the Germans destroyed 14,584,000 of them. (v1, p. 240). Few people today realize that the Germans destroyed 2/3rds of Poland s paper cultural treasures alone!

POLES LOOT JEWS–A BIG DEAL. POLES LOOT POLES–IT IS NOTHING

Jan T. Gross and the media have made much of the fact that Poles looted Jewish belongings, even desecrating graves and places of mass murder of Jews. However, Poles also looted the surviving books in burned-out Polish libraries. (e. g., v2, p. 32, 110).